If the hysterical media reaction to the alleged sexual assault of a few strippers by a handful of Sydney Swans players hadn’t confirmed it, one of the main themes being pushed by Australia’s progressive establishment is that of a country that is uniquely hostile to women.
Indeed, it is no exaggeration to note that there is now a near-daily report of a purported instance of misogyny, sexual assault or outright violence inflicted on an Aussie woman. Earlier this month in the Nine press, for instance, there was this article warning that Australian schools are deep in “crisis due to rampant misogyny and sexism”, with females “punched, slapped [and] groped” and “sexualised and treated as possessions”. This comes alongside an earlier ABC piece which warns that local women are now suffering from “medical misogyny”, and another ABC piece that warns of a wave of “tech-facilitated violence against women” and “toxic masculinity”.
So bad is our supposed anti-woman animus, many famous figures are going to extreme lengths to fix it. Prominent lawyer and asylum-seeker advocate Kon Karapanagiotidis, for instance, has announced he will walk “50 kilometres in a single day” next month as part of an effort to raise money to help “end violence against women and children”.
Such sentiment flows all the way to the top of Australian society. Leading Labor MP Andrew Leigh has just announced that his party is funding 448 new homes “for women and children fleeing family and domestic violence”. While in the universities and corporate sector, employees are now urged to engage in such activities as the “16 days of activism against gender-based violence” or to “wear it purple” in support of lesbians and other LGBT people. La Trobe University, meanwhile, is holding a conference on this matter next month and treating it as a “global-security issue”.
Almost all of this is blatantly biased and out of step with reality.
Out in the real world – and not the one of the fever dreams of leftists – Australian women are extremely well placed. Aussie women rank in the global top ten in terms of life expectancy and outlive Aussie men by four years. Our femicide rate is one of the lowest on the planet at 0.53 fatalities per 100,000 women – lower than Sweden or Denmark and miles better than the 8.2 seen in places like Jamaica. Our domestic violence rate is essentially the same as other comparable Western countries, and is lower than both the global and OECD average and that of our Anglosphere cousins in The US, The UK and Canada, according to 2023 data.
Indeed, as confirmed in Georgetown’s latest Women, Peace and Security Index, Australia is not some kind of anti-female hellhole, but the 11th best place on the planet to be a woman.
You could argue that there has never been a better time to be an Aussie woman. This is not mere opinion either. According to the federal government’s own figures, Australia recorded its “highest ever global ranking for gender equality” last year, with the country rising 11 places in the global rankings to come in at 13th out of 148 nations.
Much of this is due to increased female representation across politics and the economy. As federal Labor again announced, Australia now has the “highest ever proportion of women in the government – with 56% of Labor representatives women”, as well as “the first ever majority-women Cabinet in Australian history”.
It doesn’t end there. We also have a female Governor-General, and we have of course had a female Prime Minister in Julia Gillard, a female leader of the Liberal Party in Sussan Ley, and any number of female state Premiers. States such as Victoria have also just had a majority female parliament and majority female cabinet. Many major Australian companies and organisations, from the Business Council of Australia through to the ACTU, have also been run by women.
Indeed, women now dominate many spheres of Australian society. In our high schools, girls have higher completion rates than boys and tend to do better academically. This is repeated at university, with a report showing that females now make up almost two-thirds of domestic students starting at Australian universities. A development which means that Aussie women are now more likely to complete university and more likely to hold a bachelor degree or above than Aussie men.
All this then flows into the job market and the professions. To take law as an example, most law graduates in Australia are now women, meaning the majority – or around 58% – of our lawyers are female. Or as the Law Society of New South Wales has noted, since 2011 the number of female solicitors in Australia “has increased by 67%, while the number of male solicitors has increased by only 26%”, with gender-ratios in some parts of the government legal sector over two-thirds female.
This trend of female dominance has also been seen overseas. As Helen Andrews wrote in a viral essay last year, what America and the wider West are now experiencing is an unprecedented social shift towards women that she has called The Great Feminisation.
As Andrews illustrates, much of American society has become thoroughly feminised. Law schools, for instance, are now majority female, as are American law-firm associates, as were 63% of the judges appointed by former President Joe Biden. The American medical sector is much the same, with the country’s medical schools majority female, and fields such as psychology now awarding 75% of their PhDs to women.
This feminisation is seen right across the American economy. As Andrews notes, women became a majority of the country’s college-educated workforce in 2019, and have been a majority of America’s college instructors since 2023. Women also now form the majority in key cultural organs like the New York Times, and whilst not yet the majority of America’s managers, “they might be soon”, with women making up 46% of the total.
A more accurate description of reality across the West might be one of increasing male oppression and growing female dominance. In fact, there is a strong case to be made that the actual demographic suffering most across Australia and the West is men – especially those who are conservative, working-class, and White – having long been purged from much of the workforce and wider society via gender-equity and DEI initiatives. A development which is confirmed above, and is directly related to such social phenomena as our enfeebled fertility rate and overall social fracture.
Yet there are obviously many women in Australia and the West who have been hounded, harassed and treated poorly. These are women like Pauline Hanson and women’s rights advocate Sall Grover – who have both recently received death threats – and others like conservative billionaire Gina Rinehart. There are also female groups like aboriginal women, who despite being around 2% of the country’s population make up around 30% of our domestic violence deaths.
What all these women have in common, of course, is that they upset the dominant progressive dogma. These ladies do not fulfil their appointed role in the reigning left-leaning narrative as victims of “right-coded” groups like private schoolboys, conservative Christian sects, or the global patriarchy, and are ignored accordingly.
This is egregious, yet as the Swans saga has shown us, this utterly cynical and partisan narrative from the country’s cultural left is unlikely to be abandoned any time soon – look forward to more stories about the “manosphere”, more demonisation of men at every opportunity, and a complete blackout on uncomfortable truths about aboriginal and migrant violence.
Header image: Former Liberal leader Sussan Ley strides into parliament in a pink pantsuit (Facebook).
