The recent election of Sussan Ley as the first female federal Liberal Party leader represents a historic moment that “sent a signal” to Australian women.
But substantive change in the Liberal Party will require more than symbolic leadership. The Liberal Party used to lead on women’s representation: eight of the first 10 female federal MPs and senators were Liberals; for its first 50-plus years, it was the Liberals that championed female enfranchisement and it was the party the majority of women voted for, until 2001, when the party started losing their votes.
In 2019, the Liberal Party attracted the lowest proportion of women’s votes since 1987.
At the 2022 federal election, the Liberal Party achieved its worst result with women in 30 years, both in terms of primary vote and for parliamentary representation. The Coalition is still fielding more than twice as many male candidates as female ones, with most women contesting precarious, ‘glass cliff’ seats. The ‘glass cliff’ phenomenon refers to women and other minoritised groups being more likely to be appointed to leadership positions that are risky or precarious.
The 2025 election saw the Liberal Party’s representation among women remain very low in the House of Representatives – no improvement from 2022 levels.
The Liberal Party continues to significantly lag behind other parties in both fielding women candidates and successfully electing them to parliament. After the May federal election, Australia’s federal parliament has reached gender parity, but this is not thanks to Liberal women.
The Liberal Party’s struggle with women extends far beyond electoral outcomes to fundamental questions of representation within the party itself. In 2015, the party set a target of 50% female representation by 2025, but this remains well out of reach, with women making up fewer than one in three Coalition parliamentarians.
The party’s response to these failures has been to adjust its targets rather than address underlying issues. Acknowledging that the 2025 target was out of reach, in 2022 the party’s post-election review suggested a new target: 50% women in the federal parliament in three elections or by 2032. I would say that even this extended timeline appears optimistic without fundamental structural reforms.
Recent comments by a party elder reported in the media along the lines of women are now “sufficiently assertive” in the Liberal Party and that it is probably time to start giving blokes a leg up exemplify the deep-seated attitudes that continue to undermine the party’s (half-hearted) efforts to address its “women problem”. Many professional women party members who have quietly battled misogyny and bias their entire working lives saw this as just one more in a long list of gaffes and deliberate insults and sighed a sort of “here we go again”.
In an environment where women constitute a majority of voters and expect genuine equality and representation, the party’s continued resistance to fundamental reform represents a path toward political irrelevance. In other words, without dramatically improving the “women vote”, the Liberals will struggle to win an election.
For further discussion on this topic, head to Bite-sized politics (around 15 minutes easy listening) on Spotify.
Nicole Lawder is a former Member for Brindabella in the ACT Legislative Assembly, including Deputy Opposition Leader 2016-2020. She is now researching at ANU.
