The right’s woman problem is bigger than ‘single young females’ and they know it

As a one-time “promiscuously” educated young woman who is now an “older and wiser”, married, home-owning mother of two, I suddenly find myself of great interest to the Liberal Party, in particular the head of its aligned think tank, the Menzies Research Centre. The Australian columnist Nick Cater and I aren’t known to each other, but I nonetheless feel uniquely qualified to respond to his notion that “single young females” are the biggest threat to parties on the right and that the promised land lies with women who have reached my stage of life.

It would be easy to pick some of the low-hanging fruit from Cater’s intellectually confused analysis of the Liberal Party’s well-known “woman problem” and mock it — which many have.

Whether it was Cater’s preoccupation with and deeply offensive demonisation of single mothers (hello, the 1980s “welfare queen” is back), or his suggestion that young women think of the welfare state as some kind of sugar daddy, or his downright weird use of sexualised language to characterise the growing trend of women seeking higher education (we must, he says, “address the promiscuous access to higher education”), it was hard to know where to begin. 

Cater, as some commented on social media, had said “the quiet parts out loud”. What’s more, as Rachel Withers wrote, “it’s rare to see the underlying misogyny of family values politics on such blatant display”. Indeed. All this is true.

But for me, the most interesting thing about Cater’s column was not the things he said, but what he left unsaid, specifically the aspects of the Liberal Party’s woman problem he chose to ignore or wholly misrepresent — and what that says about the party’s prospects of learning from its recent electoral wipeout and its ability to rebuild.

I would argue that, contrary to Cater’s assertion, the biggest danger to parties on the right are not single young females but old, white, misguided male dinosaurs like Cater and the self-serving and/or silent women of the right who enable them. Both are unwilling or unable to engage with the changing demographics of modern Australia and women’s current lived reality. 

It’s not just single young women who pose a threat to parties of the right. The Liberal Party has a much broader “woman problem” widely recognised as a growing threat to its electoral fortunes for years. Cater should know that. The Menzies Research Centre has published three — that’s right, three — reports entitled Gender and Politics, and all were co-authored by him. They all mapped out in no uncertain terms the size of the growing so-called “gender gap” in women’s voting habits — and what that could potentially mean for the Liberal Party. 

According to the first report in 2015, “Since 2001, the Liberals’ support among women relative to men has waned”. The 2001 election was a turning point for women voters in federal politics, the report correctly highlighted. For the first time in the history of the Australian Electoral Survey, female voters favoured Labor over Liberal. And fewer women than men had voted Liberal in four of the five elections since 2001. 

The Liberal Party was facing a potential Waterloo with women voters at the next election, the report highlighted, hence the navel-gazing within the party.

That report was updated in 2017 and again in 2020. At no point was the issue exclusively one of “single young females” as opposed to the party’s broader problem with women. Thus, Cater’s recent claims are at odds with his own previous analysis; he should know better.

Next, let’s look at a specific example of the dangers of applying an antiquated worldview to the modern political landscape and of focusing exclusively on demonising one cohort of “young female” voters, while ignoring the concerns of others. 

My key takeaway from Cater’s column was that he believes the party of Menzies should seek to exclusively engage with “the coupled homeowner” and “older wiser women”, particularly married mums. That’s not entirely wrong, though I would remove the word “exclusively” from that advice. These women are, indeed, an important demographic of voters. I just don’t think Cater has his finger on the pulse of what they want to hear. 

It is indisputable that the pandemic disproportionately impacted women, in particular their ability to work and save. The impact was particularly pronounced for mothers, who disproportionately shouldered the burden of remote learning and the domestic load that resulted from prolonged lockdowns. This, rightly, led some to label the pandemic-related recession first a “she-cession” and later a “mum-cession”.

Put simply, the pandemic exposed the fragile foundations of many women’s economic security, particularly mothers. Even before the pandemic, the lifetime earnings gap for an average woman with children was $2 million dollars less than the average man with children. What’s more, women retired with one-third less superannuation than men, and women over the age of 55 comprised the fastest-growing portion of the homeless population. 

The rage at this was real. And while that rage may not have seemed as potentially revolutionary compared to the tens of thousands of women marching for Justice4Women, it was there. 

Yes, some women are “older and wiser”, but they are also poorer and — in alarmingly growing numbers — homeless. 

It follows that policies aimed at tackling the root causes of these problems — including more investment in early-years education and care, parental leave reform, and better pay and conditions for women in traditionally undervalued “feminised” caring professions — proved politically popular. They spoke to women’s actual lived experiences. 

So, I wish luck to Cater and those tempted to take his advice. They’ll need it. “Dangerous” young women are a figment of his imagination, while struggling, older women in danger of poverty and homelessness are very real.

What are the real factors influencing the vote of women in Australia? Let us know by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.