The Australian Government must invest in programs to address community attitudes and bias that prevent women’s full economic participation across a lifetime.

Immediate actions

7.1. Implement and resource the National Strategy to Achieve Gender Equality, ensuring community attitudes and biases are addressed, through evidence-based practice, at both a whole-of-population, community and industry level. Build a comprehensive research agenda to inform normative change and measure progress.

7.2. Work with the e-Safety Commissioner to design initiatives to address how online experiences shape attitudes towards gender equality and support women and men’s equal place in society, with a particular focus on young people’s experiences online.

7.3. Demonstrate international leadership through participation in regional and multilateral fora to counter anti-gender equality sentiment globally and use Australia’s position to advocate for the safety, health and economic outcomes of women and girls globally.

7.4. Resource critical women’s advocacy work, such as the National Women’s Alliances or similar models, to provide a consultative mechanism to elevate the voices of diverse women and girls around the country. These advocacy groups should also provide advice on policy priorities to improve women’s economic equality and life outcomes, including by working with the National Women’s Economic Equality Advisory Body (recommendation 1.4).

7.5. The proposed (recommendation 1.4) National Women’s Economic Equality Advisory body to meet annually with other women’s advisory committees and councils, such as those appointed to oversee the National Women’s Health Strategy 2020-2030 and the National Plan to End Violence against Women and Children 2022–32.

Supporting information

Harmful gender attitudes and behaviours are as resistant to change as they are pervasive and largely invisible. They are considered normal and are held in place by a web of behaviours, beliefs and institutions.

Gendered attitudes drive violence against women by reinforcing rigid gender roles that normalise men’s control and condone their disrespect against women, while undermining women’s independence and autonomy.^[164]

People from under-represented groups in Australia face additional complexities with gender norms, as they are often expressed in parallel with racism, homophobia, heteronormativity, transphobia and ableism.

Abandoning Australia’s prescriptive gender norms would, on average, boost GDP by at least $128 billion annually and create 461,000 jobs each year for the next 50 years. ^[165]

Women’s inequality impacts men too

Gender norms do not just impact women; the persistence of gendered attitudes and behaviours deeming women as ‘caregivers’ and men as ‘breadwinners’, along with existing social structures, make it difficult for fathers to be more involved at home and harmful gender norms also contribute to increased health risks for men and boys.

The Gender and Behavioural Insights (GABI) program in the UK was set up to answer the question of ‘What works to improve gender equality and close the gender pay gap?’.

GABI ran field trials and lab studies with several partners to understand how to successfully encourage men to take more parental care. The research suggested men mistakenly believe that their colleagues disapprove of them taking parental leave. Through this, GABI found that an increase in team awareness and support of parental leave increased the amount intended to be taken in the future by men to 50-62 per cent.^[166]

Tackling gender biases

In Australia, data collected in the nationally representative Household, Labour and Income Dynamics in Australia Survey (HILDA), and UNDP’s 2023 Gender Social Norms Index, shows that one in three Australians hold at least one harmful gender bias. ^[167]

In recent years there has been significant backlash against women’s rights.^[168] This backlash is highly visible online. All over the world, women in politics and journalism experience relentless volumes of online abuse, threats and gendered disinformation campaigns on social media. ^[169] This type of backlash can be due to the vested interest in upholding discriminatory attitudes and behaviours that maintain inequalities in access to resources and power.

Gendered attitudes drive violence against women by reinforcing rigid gender roles that normalise men's control and condone their disrespect against women, while undermining women's independence and autonomy. ^[164]

Australia’s National Strategy to Achieve Gender Equality must be grounded in a comprehensive understanding of gendered attitudes and behaviours that exist. Harmful gendered attitudes and behaviours result in many inequalities between women, men and non-binary people in Australia and are at the root of discrimination and gender-based violence. ^[170]

Without significant improvements on these behaviours, we will not see significant improvement on a number of measures of gender equality in Australia.

The Stop it at the Start campaign is an example of an effort that has been highly effective at raising awareness of the need to change norms and behaviours relating to violence, with recent evaluation research suggesting that ‘68 per cent of influencers recalled the campaign, with 73 per cent of those people taking action as a result’. ^[171]

To maintain connection between women in Australia and the Government, advocacy organisations such as the National Women’s Alliances are critical. Community-based advocacy maintains progress and participation in the women’s movement in Australia and uses widespread networks to provide advice to the Government on the lived experience of women in Australia.

A new advisory board or similar could facilitate cross-collaboration with the advocacy sector and provide opportunities for commissioning explicit policy advice on emerging issues or priorities to inform Government policy development.