Now that the dust has settled on the 2025 federal election, what does it mean for the representation of women in Australian parliaments?

In short, there has been a significant improvement at the national level.

When we last wrote on this topic, the Australian Senate was majority female but only 40% of House of Representatives MPs were women.

The share of women MPs increased to 46% at the 2025 election, making the Commonwealth Parliament as a whole almost perfectly representative: 112 federal parliamentarians are women and 114 are men.

Figure 1: Commonwealth Parliament gender representation after the 2025 federal election

This improved diversity is a consequence of which candidates political parties put forward. Election expert Ben Raue calculated that 54% of Labor candidates were women, as were 48% of Greens candidates (a further 2% were non-binary). Only 36% of independent candidates are women, but those with the best prospects of winning were mostly women.

Unfortunately, the distribution of women candidates was very skewed. Only 31% of Coalition candidates were women, and the numbers were even worse for minor right-wing parties like One Nation, Libertarian and Trumpet of Patriots.

Progress towards gender representation targets

This was meant to be the year that both the Labor and Liberal parties had 50% female representation across Australia’s nine parliaments (one national, six state and two territory parliaments). The parties set that target in 2015, and Labor achieved it in 2022.

There are now modestly more women than men in Labor party rooms (218 vs 195), and Labor women outnumber Coalition women more than two-to-one.

Figure 2: Female parliamentarians by party across all nine Australian parliaments

Commentary from at least one senior Liberal would lead you to think that the party is doing well on gender diversity.

The man administering the NSW Liberals, Alan Stockdale, said Liberal women are “sufficiently assertive now”, and “we should be giving some thought to whether we need to protect men’s involvement”. He has since these comments were “light-hearted but poorly chosen” and his comments were firmly rejected by federal and state Liberal leaders, including federal Opposition Leader Sussan Ley and NSW Opposition Leader Mark Speakman.

In fact, women are outnumbered by men two to one in party rooms: just 33% of Liberal parliamentarians are women. The number of Liberal women would have to double overnight for the party to meet its 2025 target.

And while Ley is the Liberal Party’s first female leader at the federal level, the overall number of Liberal women has not increased significantly for a decade. As shown in Figure 3 below, there were 79 Liberal women in Australian parliaments in 2015 and 86 to 2025.

The reason the proportion of women has improved over that time is because there are 104 fewer Liberal men than there were a decade ago.

Figure 3: Liberal and LNP women in Australia’s parliaments

Source: 2015, 2017 and 2019 figures from Cater and Flint (2020) Gender & politics 2020: The path towards real diversity; 2021 figures calculated by Bill Browne; 2023, 2024 and 2025 figures from Politics and Public Administration Section (2025) Gender composition of Australian parliaments by party, and updated through to 11 June 2025 by the authors.

Note: All Liberal National MPs in the Queensland Parliament were counted towards the total for Liberal MPs.

Perhaps acknowledging that the 2025 gender parity target was out of reach, in 2022 the Liberal Party’s post-election review (archive link) suggested a new target: 50% women in the federal parliament in three elections or by 2032. The party’s performance over the last 10 years suggests it is not even on track to do that.

Across all parliaments, only 34% of Liberal parliamentarians are women and in none of Australia’s nine parliaments do women make up half or more of the Liberal party room.

Figure 4: Gender of Liberal parliamentarians, by parliament

It is no secret what works to improve gender representation. Labor brought in a pre-selection quota for women in 1994 (to be fully realised by 2002), followed by seat quotas in 2012.

But it is not all about quotas. Margaret Fitzherbert, Liberal parliamentarian and author of Liberal women, also attributes Labor’s success in women’s representation to (a) having highly visible champions of women in parliaments; (b) the Emily’s List group which gives financial and political support to pro-choice candidates; and (c) the party’s rank-and-file culture.

What is a mystery is why the Liberals let Labor establish itself as the major party that represents women.

The Liberal Party used to lead on women’s representation. Eight of the first 10 (archive link) female federal MPs and senators were Liberals. The Liberal Party (and its predecessor, the United Australia Party) had a greater share of women in the party room than Labor did for the 30 years from when the first women were elected in 1943 to 1974. Gough Whitlam’s “It’s time” win in 1972 included 93 male MPs and senators – and not a single woman. While things soon improved (it was not possible for them to get worse), it would be another three decades before the Labor Party was consistently more gender-representative than the Liberals at the federal level.

Nor were early Liberals opposed to quotas. As former Liberal senator Judith Troeth notes, “from 1944 the Liberal Party had reserved 50 per cent of the Victorian Division’s executive positions for women”. The argument that quotas do not allow women to be selected on “merit” is facile: Coalition Cabinets always have a quota for National MPs.

The lack of women’s representation will be noted. Already, women are much more likely to vote for left-wing parties than men are, a trend underway since the 1990s. The same thing is happening around the world, with the Washington Post fretting that political polarisation will reduce marriage rates among young people.

If women aren’t represented in the Opposition, political polarisation and disaffection can only increase. Women make up just over half of the Australian population and would reasonably expect to see that reflected in our democratically elected parliaments.