From the Matildas to some of the most important appointments in the country, Australian women are beginning to receive the acknowledgement and opportunities at the top of their fields that unquestionably until now have been denied.

It’s not that the Matildas have suddenly formed a new team. Sam Kerr, one of the best footballers in the world, has been playing with them for 14 years. And the core of this team which has done so well in the World Cup is largely the same as for many years.

But only now is Australia fully realising how lucky we are to have this extraordinary sporting phenomenon.

“The media started taking notice of the Matildas pretty late,” says veteran ABC sports journalist Tracey Holmes.

At the moment, our sportsmen are very good, but our sportswomen are brilliant. Australia’s women’s netball team, the Diamonds, has just become world champions. Australia’s women’s cricket team, like the men, have retained the Ashes. Australia’s women’s swimming squad puts fear into its competitors, with Ariarne Titmus, Kaylee McKeown, Mollie O’Callaghan, Emma McKeon, Shayna Jack and Jenna Forrester leading the way.

There’s been a lag in the public and sporting bodies acknowledging the successes and supporting women’s sides at all levels.

The role of the media, too, in all this needs to be examined — the lack of support for women’s sport for so long. For years, the Australian media has pumped up the far-less-successful Socceroos and virtually ignored women’s cricket and soccer.

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It doesn’t add up

The television rights for this World Cup tell the story. According to The Australian Financial Review, Optus paid $13 million for access to all 64 World Cup matches. Optus sold the Matildas matches to Seven Media for an estimated $5 million.

Seven and Optus have paid peanuts and received gold.

Contrast that with payments for AFL rights. Last year, the AFL did a new seven-year deal with Foxtel and Seven for $4.5 billion — or $643 million per year. Given there are 24 regular home-and-away rounds each year, this means the AFL was paid on average $26 million per weekend, or five times more than Seven paid for all Matildas games.

On any reading, this is absurd and unfair. But in 2023, it’s still men who still make these sorts of corporate and network decisions.

Watch that change now that the Matildas are pulling TV audiences of more than 4 million. Their success takes us from the “right” thing to do to a commercially smart thing to do.

If the Matildas were a stock, institutions would be flocking to buy into them. And whoever secures the rights to the next women’s World Cup will look nostalgically at the $13 million that Optus reportedly paid.

Former Matildas captain Carol Vinson represented Australia between 1988 and 1991, when the players, she said, had to sew their own badges onto their tracksuits.

She told ABC News’ World Today program that back then, when the Matildas played in Australia, it was usually in front of 1,000 to 2,000 people — a far cry from the 75,000 she joined in Sydney to watch the team.

“How good is that,” she said of the crowd.

The Matildas broke — then twice equalled — the record for the largest audience at a soccer game in Australia, male or female, with sold-out crowds. 

Indeed, how good is that? But what’s significant is that it’s the sponsors and media who are now finally giving the Matildas real acknowledgement.

Women are rising up elsewhere

While the Matildas were building themselves into one of the best brands in the country, something less discussed, but hugely consequential, has been happening in the power corridors of Canberra and Sydney.

Women have been appointed to two of the most powerful positions in the country.

Michele Bullock has been appointed as governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia — along with the treasurer, our most important economic position. Bullock will now oversee the monthly decision on interest rates, which affects millions of Australian individuals and businesses.

And Kerri Hartland has been appointed as director-general of the Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS), one of the country’s most important intelligence positions. Until recently, the heads of the RBA and ASIS were regarded (by men) as the domains of men.

Columnist and author Niki Savva, who has been observing federal politics for decades, says credit for these vital appointments needs to go to the Albanese Government.

“They have given obviously talented, capable women the opportunity to show what they can do,” she says.

“They deserve to be commended for promoting women to these positions. Not all that long ago, Tony Abbott had one woman in his cabinet. That was his deputy Julie Bishop, who was entitled to choose her portfolio and became foreign minister, and he resisted the pleas of his colleagues, including Julie, to appoint more.”

(Labor’s Chris Bowen quipped at the time that there were more women in Afghanistan’s cabinet, while Julie Bishop later said that when Abbott appointed himself as minister for women “it was clear that we have some way to go” in terms of gender equality. It was a 19-strong cabinet.)

Savva adds that Bullock and Hartland are “eminently well qualified to take on these jobs”. “Fair-minded people will judge them on their performance, as they do every occupant of high office,” she says. 

This means that women now oversee Australia’s foreign policy: Hartland at ASIS, and the secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Jan Adams, led by Foreign Minister Penny Wong.

Women are also leading Australia’s defence against the intensifying cyber-attacks being waged against both the government and businesses. They include Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil, Rachel Noble, the director-general of the Australian Signals Directorate, and Abigail Bradshaw, the head of the Australian Cyber Security Centre.

“When I went into journalism there were so few women in politics, and political reporting, that it just wasn’t funny. Everywhere you looked, in the public service, in the parliament, and in journalism, men were in control,” Savva says. 

“A lot of them, not all, jealously guarded their territory, refusing to cede power. It has changed a lot, undoubtedly for the better, but there is still a way to go, particularly when you consider the pathetically low number of women MPs in the federal Liberal Party.

“The independents who ran in the Liberal heartland seats campaigned on three issues: climate, integrity and gender. Senior Liberals derided them and underestimated them. Once upon a time, they would have killed to recruit them.” 

A masculinist ethos

Professor Christine Wallace, from the University of Canberra, says the Hartland and Bullock appointments show what happens when merit across the whole population, not half of it, is considered for institutional leadership positions.

The high proportion of women among the candidates contending for the RBA governor’s job underlined how overdue this normalisation of the candidate pool under consideration really was.

“Australia’s been governed by Coalition LNP governments for 20 of the past 27 years and their masculinist bias created a myopic view that men had leadership chops and others didn’t,” Professor Wallace says.

“That masculinist view gave way to a normalised view of merit with the change of government in 2022, with the result that men don’t have the inside running they enjoyed previously.

“The securitisation of Australian politics under the Howard government in the wake of the September 11 attacks intensified this. The militaristic tone that permeated Australian public life as a result reinforced the Coalition’s already masculinist ethos and skewed leadership appointments by gender for a generation.”

Wallace makes the point that by ending the narrowness of recruitment pools that organisations remove the danger of narrowly based decisions.

“They [women] bring all the benefits any good leader would bring and simultaneously save their institutions from the risky disbenefits of narrowness and myopia that systematically making appointments from only half the population brings.”

What about another female PM?

While Australia has had one female prime minister – Julia Gillard – this growing number of women in senior roles increases the chances of another.

Are the two women now leading the nation’s foreign policy and cyber defence bureaucracies – Penny Wong and Clare O’Neil – potential prime ministers?

Says Niki Savva: “If Penny Wong was in the lower house, she would dead-set be Labor leader and probably prime minister. Her performance has been faultless – a point readily conceded by her admiring male colleagues. Clare is impressive, and so far is doing very well in a demanding portfolio. She definitely has leadership potential in spades, but she has a way to go. One of the problems with Julia Gillard when she agreed to knock off Kevin Rudd was that she had only been a minister for a couple of years. She should have waited and got a bit more experience in the art of governing.”

Having women in these senior positions, says Savva, will change culture, if the women are “brave enough” to take it on.

Is there still a way to go? “Well, we haven’t had a female treasurer or female head of Treasury yet so I look forward to that. Also another female prime minister would be good,” Savva says.

On the public service appointments, Wallace says ASIS’s appointment of Kerry Hartland puts a focus on other agencies.

“ASIO has a number of problems, perhaps most importantly not being restored to its normal home, the Attorney-General’s Department, in the administrative arrangements which followed the change of government. That needs fixing.

“Now that she’s experienced it first-hand, Albanese government cabinet minister Clare O’Neil could well rethink what is widely acknowledged as the failed Coalition experiment of the Department of Home Affairs, and revert to its earlier, better performing Department of Immigration structure – and send ASIO back to A-Gs in the process. That would be a convenient juncture to review ASIO’s leadership … a blokey ASIO can’t provide optimal intelligence services to Australia.”

Professor Wallace says progress towards equality for women in Australia’s public institutions was “grim” under the Coalition government but “encouraging now Labor in government is opening the merit pool under consideration for the big appointments to everyone, not just men.”

Compared with comparable countries, she says, Australia has been performing “badly” over the past quarter-century but has been catching up since the change of government. She rated the performance of the Albanese government on gender equality at 80 per cent compared with the coalition government at 30 per cent.

Despite the key appointments at the RBA and ASIS, how long does Professor Wallace think it will be before agencies such as these have a critical mass of women throughout their ranks?

“Critical mass is important,” she says. “The longer a government is in power that ensures everyone is considered on a merit basis, not just men, the faster the critical mass will be achieved.”

It will only be when this critical mass is reached that this exciting time we’re witnessing will go from one that is long-overdue to one that is sustainable.