Gender equality in the Parliament of Victoria?

In 2025, the Australian sub-national Parliament of Victoria appears to have achieved gender equality with more than 50 percent of female members in both Houses and women holding key leadership roles. The parliament has also produced a raft of progressive gender-based legislation. By these measures, the Parliament of Victoria is delivering both descriptive and substantive representation of women. Yet despite these achievements, the parliament still lags in adopting a gender-sensitive approach to its operations. According to feminist institutionalists, gender-sensitive parliaments recognize that parliaments were established by and for men for the purpose of consolidating the exclusive power of the dominant male group and that simply achieving significant descriptive representation will not alter these underlying power imbalances. A gender-sensitive parliament, in contrast, values and prioritizes gender equality and reorients and transforms parliament’s institutional culture, processes and practices toward this objective. This chapter draws on interviews with 20 female former Victorian parliamentarians to understand some of the experiences of being women in the Victorian parliament over the last 50 years. We close by making some practical recommendations to bring the Parliament of Victoria and other comparable legislatures in line with the principles of gender-sensitive parliaments.