Women Who Changed the Game

Catherine Helen Spence

First woman to stand for election in Australia

In 1897, Catherine Helen Spence became the first woman to stand for election to a political assembly in Australia, and one of the first in the world, when she ran as a candidate for the Australasian Federal Convention in South Australia. She didn't win. She ran anyway, at 72 years old, knowing she wouldn't. She was campaigning for proportional representation and for women's visibility in public life, having already spent decades as a novelist, journalist and social reformer working on child welfare, education and poverty relief.

"I have been somewhat of a heretic in many things, and proud of it."

Rose Scott

The architect of NSW women's suffrage

Rose Scott was the driving force behind the campaign that won NSW women the right to vote in 1902, the same year Australia became one of the first countries in the world to grant women the federal vote. She was a fierce lobbyist, a salon host and a political strategist who built the Womanhood Suffrage League from scratch. But she didn't stop at the vote. She spent the next three decades fighting for equal pay, prison reform, and the legal status of women in family and employment law.

"The vote is only the beginning. What we do with it is the work."

Vida Goldstein

First woman in the British Empire to stand for a national parliament

Vida Goldstein ran for federal parliament five times between 1903 and 1917, before most women in the world had the vote at all. She didn't win. She ran five times anyway. She advised the British suffrage movement, corresponded with American activists, and was the first woman in the British Empire to stand for a national parliament. Her platform was radical for its time: equal pay, free education, anti-militarism. She built the Women's Political Association, organised mass rallies, and proved that a woman running for office was not a novelty but a political act.

"We ask not for favours but for justice, not for chivalry but for common humanity."

Edith Cowan

First woman elected to any Australian parliament

In 1921, Edith Cowan was elected to the Western Australian Legislative Assembly, the first woman elected to any Australian parliament. Her first act was to speak in parliament in defence of a bill she'd helped draft on the rights of children and women before the law. She was a social reformer who had spent decades building the infrastructure of women's welfare in WA: founding kindergartens, pushing for women's legal rights, advocating for mothers and children in poverty. She is now on the $50 note, which is fitting, given how hard she made it to exclude women from the conversation about money.

"There is no power on earth that can stop a woman who knows what she wants."

Dorothy Tangney & Enid Lyons

First women elected to federal parliament, both at once

In 1943, Dorothy Tangney became the first woman elected to the Australian Senate, and Enid Lyons the first woman elected to the House of Representatives, in the same election, in a country that had been running a federal parliament since 1901. It took 42 years. Enid Lyons had raised 12 children and run a household while managing the political career of her husband Joseph Lyons, the Prime Minister, without recognition or pay. She then won her own seat. Tangney served in the Senate for 25 years and was a consistent advocate for social welfare and women's economic rights.

Zelda D'Aprano

Chained herself to the doors for equal pay

When the Commonwealth Conciliation and Arbitration Commission handed down its equal pay decision in 1969 and then failed to apply it meaningfully, Zelda D'Aprano did something almost no one had done in Australia: she chained herself to the doors of the Commonwealth Building in Melbourne. A union organiser and lifelong activist, she'd been fighting the two-tier pay system that kept women earning 25 to 35 percent less than men for the same work. She chained herself three times across three weeks. She was arrested. She kept going. The attention helped accelerate the equal pay case. She later wrote that women's economic subordination was not accidental. It was maintained deliberately, and had to be fought deliberately.

"I was not prepared to be the passive recipient of decisions made about my life by others."

Elizabeth Reid

The world's first women's adviser to a national leader

When Gough Whitlam appointed Elizabeth Reid as his adviser on women's affairs in 1973, it was the first such role in the world at the national government level. Reid used the position to push hard on equal pay, childcare, women's health and domestic violence, issues the government had never formally addressed. She worked without precedent, without a model, and against significant institutional resistance. Her work laid the groundwork for the Office for Women and established that women's economic conditions were a matter of government policy, not personal circumstance.

Susan Ryan

Architect of the Sex Discrimination Act

As Australia's first female cabinet minister in a Labor government, Senator Susan Ryan was the driving force behind the Sex Discrimination Act 1984, the legislation that finally made it illegal to discriminate in financial services, employment and education on the basis of sex or marital status. Getting it through parliament was a multi-year fight against conservative resistance from both sides. The Act is why a woman today can open a bank account, apply for credit, or sign a lease without a man's permission. Ryan later returned as Australia's Age Discrimination Commissioner, still fighting structural exclusion in her 70s.

"The law alone doesn't change culture. But it changes what culture is allowed to do."

Marilyn Waring

Proved the economy was undervaluing women's work

New Zealand economist and politician Marilyn Waring, whose work has been foundational across Australia and the wider region, published Counting for Nothing in 1988, exposing how GDP accounting systematically excluded unpaid work: childcare, cooking, caregiving, community labour. Work performed almost entirely by women. She showed that the entire architecture of national economic measurement treated women's most significant economic contribution as invisible. Her work changed how economists, feminists and policymakers think about the value of labour and who gets counted in the economy.

"If you are not counted, you don't count."

Carmen Lawrence

First female Premier of an Australian state

Carmen Lawrence became Premier of Western Australia in 1990, the first woman to lead an Australian state government. She later became the first female federal minister for health and was a consistent voice for women's economic and political participation. Her significance wasn't only symbolic: she governed, made policy and managed budgets, demonstrating that the Premier's office did not require a particular gender to function.

Gail Kelly

First woman to lead a Big Four Australian bank

Gail Kelly became CEO of St.George Bank in 2002 and then CEO of Westpac in 2008, the first woman to lead one of Australia's Big Four banks, and at the time one of the largest companies in the country by market capitalisation. She led Westpac through the Global Financial Crisis without a single year of losses, while raising four children, including triplets. She has spoken extensively about the structural barriers women face in financial institutions, from inside the institution, which made her harder to dismiss.

"People remember how you made them feel, in banking, in leadership, in life."

Julia Gillard

First woman sworn in as Prime Minister of Australia

On 24 June 2010, Julia Gillard was sworn in as Australia's 27th Prime Minister, the first and, to date, only woman to hold the office. She governed for three years in a minority parliament, delivering the NDIS, a national curriculum, school funding reform and a carbon price. In 2012, she gave the misogyny speech in parliament, a 15-minute address on the experience of sexism in public life that has since been viewed hundreds of millions of times and is studied in universities worldwide. She was not perfect. She was Prime Minister. Both are true.

"I will not be lectured about sexism and misogyny by this man. I will not."