Why I changed my mind about need for quotas: Liberals’ ‘woman problem’ calls for compromise
Liberals face an existential choice: adapt – and bring in more women into positions of power – or perish as a political force.
Like many people of a classical liberal persuasion, I have long believed quotas are antithetical to liberal values. The concept of mandating representation based on immutable characteristics rather than individual merit has always struck me as fundamentally illiberal, even regressive.
Yet today I find myself in the uncomfortable position of advocating for female quotas in the Liberal Party of Australia – not because my principles have changed but because political reality demands it.
The “woman problem” in the Liberal Party is not new. For decades the party has struggled to attract and retain female representatives, with the situation deteriorating rather than improving in recent years. At the 2022 federal election the number of Liberal women in the House of Representatives fell to just nine out of 42 MPs.
Many traditional liberals believe any solution that does not preserve the sacrosanct values of individualism and merit would be a non-starter. I was firmly in this camp – until I began examining the data on the growing gender divide in political orientations.
Data published by Britain’s Financial Times shows that among Generation Z (which takes in voting age up to 28), in nations as diverse as South Korea, the US, Germany and Britain, most women have become “hyper-progressive” in a relatively short time frame.
John Burn-Murdoch, who compiled this research, wrote: “In the US, Gallup data shows that after decades where the sexes were each spread roughly equally across liberal and conservative world views, women aged 18 to 30 are now 30 percentage points more progressive than their male contemporaries. That gap took just six years to open up (2018-24).”
The trend has continued, with the polarisation becoming even more pronounced. In the 2024 US election, Republican Donald Trump won young men by 14 points, while Democrat Kamala Harris won young women by 18 points – a 32-point gender gap among young voters.
In Australia, the trend is not yet as stark as in the US but it’s still significant. Vote Compass data compiled by the ABC shows that of Generation Z, 67 per cent of women identified as being on the left, compared with 52 per cent of women of older generations. By contrast, 50 per cent of men under 29 describe themselves as being on the left, compared with 40 per cent of men from older generations.
More concerning for the Liberal Party is that an increasing number of young women are shifting their votes to the Greens – the most economically illiterate and illiberal party on the political spectrum. This migration of young female voters towards Marxist-inspired views is occurring not only among university-educated women in inner-city electorates but also across demographic and geographic boundaries.
While support for the Greens dipped this year, this drop in support is unlikely to have come from young people, let alone young women. In the 2022 election, 26 per cent of Gen Z and 18 per cent of millennials voted for the Greens. In his analysis of this year’s election results,
RedBridge pollster Kos Samaras explains: “Young Australians, especially Generation Z, haven’t turned away from the Coalition; they were never there in the first place. The party has failed to build any meaningful political relationship with this cohort, which now represents the largest and fastest-growing voting bloc.”
The implications of this are profound. If the Liberal Party cannot bring more women into the fold – by whatever means are available – its future as a viable political party will soon be over. This is not alarmism; it is arithmetic.
So why is this happening? The gender gap in political orientation cannot be explained by a single variable and we should be cautious to avoid simplifying the issue. Nevertheless, we can still speculate about what is driving this divergence.
Today, the average Australian teenager spends about four hours a day on their devices, with about a third spending more than five hours a day on their devices. Social media platforms serve young women a constant stream of content framing social issues through a lens of crisis, trauma and systemic oppression.
Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has documented how young girls in particular have been hit by a tidal wave of mental illness since 2010, across Anglosphere countries including Australia, and that phones and social media are the main culprit.
Universities also have become incubators of this shift. Young women, who now outnumber men in higher education, are particularly exposed to Marxist-inspired critical theory through gender studies, sociology and other humanities departments.
The philosophical orientation that dominates these institutions rejects empiricism in favour of a postmodern view of the world and teaches young people that the world is divided between the “oppressors” and the “oppressed”.
There are also biological factors at play. In an article for Quillette, evolutionary psychologist David Geary explains that women’s social relationships are fundamentally different from men’s in ways that may make them more susceptible to certain ideologies.
While men form larger, more open groups focused on competition, women create more intimate, exclusive social networks built on emotional support and sensitivity to inequality.
Geary writes: “The intensity and sensitivity to perceived inequalities in their relationships make adolescent girls’ and young women’s friendships more fragile than those of boys and men and result in a heightened fear of social rejection and exclusion from the group.”
This biological reality creates a powerful incentive for young women to align with group beliefs to maintain social cohesion – even when those beliefs may be questionable or extreme.
When applied to our modern context, this biological predisposition towards social cohesion and fear of exclusion makes young women particularly vulnerable to ideological contagion, especially on social media where group membership can be tied to holding the “correct” political views. Geary notes that social contagions are about 2½ times likelier to spread in girls’ than boys’ groups, suggesting the rapid change in young women’s political outlook we’re witnessing may be partially driven by these evolutionary adaptations colliding with modern information environments.
As primary caregivers throughout evolutionary history, women have developed a heightened sensitivity to potential threats. Today, these same protective instincts are being weaponised against us in an information ecosystem designed for addiction, not wellbeing. Tech companies have built empires by exploiting our threat detection systems – every alarming headline, crisis-framed post and outrage-inducing video triggers the same evolutionary circuits that once kept our children safe.
Adding to this is the fragmentation of our information ecosystem. Our culture has been splintered into thousands of tiny subcultures thanks to the advent of internet and social media. Those who watch the opinion shows of Sky News in the evenings live in an entirely different culture from the teenage girl who watches an algorithmically determined TikTok feed from inside the privacy of her bedroom.
This fragmentation means the Liberal Party is not facing just a marketing problem – it’s facing a legitimacy crisis. The party cannot reach young women through traditional channels because those channels no longer penetrate the information bubbles where young women reside. Leaders in the Liberal Party may believe they need to lead rather than follow polls or respond to the demands of the general public. There is, of course, much truth in this. But the problem is that we no longer share a common culture or information environment. What once worked as political communication no longer does.
Given these trends, the Liberal Party faces an existential choice: adapt or perish. The party cannot simply wait for societal trends to reverse themselves. The forces driving young women leftward are structural and accelerating, not cyclic.
Some will argue that the Liberal Party should focus on winning back young women through policy rather than quotas. But this misunderstands the nature of the problem. The party cannot develop policies that appeal to young women without having young women in positions of power in the party. And it cannot attract young women to join the party without demonstrating that it values female representation.
Charlotte Mortlock, the founder of Hilma’s Network, an organisation that supports and fundraises for female Liberal candidates explained to me that: “No one likes quotas. No one ‘wants’ quotas, least of all women who would far prefer their value and merit be recognised without intervention. But it’s about whether you’re pragmatic enough to accept that if it was going to naturally fix itself it would have happened already. We’ve been calling for better female representation since the 90s. We can’t keep lying to ourselves that this time it will be different. We need a mechanism.”
Advocates such as Mortlock understand that quotas are not the ideal solution. They do represent a departure from pure meritocratic principles. But Mortlock also understands that quotas are a pragmatic response to an existential threat. The choice for the party is not between quotas and purity – it’s between quotas and irrelevance.
Importantly, quotas should be seen as a temporary bridge, not a permanent fixture. Their purpose is to break the cycle of under-representation and create a pipeline of female talent within the party. Once this pipeline is established, quotas should be phased out.
While the case for quotas begins with electoral mathematics, it does not end there. A Liberal Party with greater female representation would be better equipped to develop policies that address the genuine concerns of female voters without abandoning liberal principles.
Currently, the progressive left has a near-monopoly on women’s issues, framing them through a lens of group identity and systemic oppression. A classical liberal perspective on women’s issues – one that emphasises individual agency, choice and equal opportunity – is largely absent from the political landscape. This absence is not bad only for the Liberal Party; it’s also bad for Australian women.
The gender gap in political orientation is not a temporary blip or a marketing problem. It represents a fundamental shift in how young women and men view the world and their place in it. For the Liberal Party to remain viable in the long term, it must find ways to bring more women into its ranks at all levels.
Female quotas are not a perfect solution but they are a necessary one. Sometimes, pragmatism must override ideological purity. This is such a time. The paradox is that to preserve liberalism in Australia, the Liberal Party must temporarily compromise on one of its principles.
The alternative is to maintain ideological purity while ceding political power entirely to the progressive left – a Pyrrhic victory if ever there were one.
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