What do we want? A gender lens on the budget! When do we want it? Now! I concede that this is not a particularly sexy feminist rallying cry, but it is the feminist rallying cry we need right now. Hear me out, and then go make your sign, T-shirt, mug, social media hashtag – whatever floats your boat. But get on it, before it’s too late. A lot is at stake.

Debate about recent and upcoming changes to superannuation, including the early release scheme and the proposed rise to the superannuation guarantee, has been running hot for a few months now. Likewise, the fact that women have been disproportionately hit by the pandemic has also been the subject of much commentary. But an issue related to both those current debates that hasn’t gotten anywhere near as much attention as it should is women’s economic security.

Dr Nisha Khot, a Melbourne-based OB-GYN and the mother of two children, ages 12 and 18, says it crept up on her. When the pandemic first arrived on Australian shores in March, she thought to herself, “Our kids are older, we’ll be okay.” Then it slowly dawned on her that everything wasn’t going to be okay. As an essential worker, she struggled to keep up with the demands of her job, especially as many of her colleagues fell victim to the virus or they, likewise, struggled to meet the demands of

Over the last few years on Equal Pay Day, the day that traditionally marks the additional days women must work from the end of the previous financial year to earn the same as men did the previous year, the Coalition government has sought to, rather awkwardly, “celebrate” Australia’s miniscule progress towards closing the gender pay gap.

In June, Chris Wallace, an associate professor at the University of Canberra’s 50/50 by 2030 Foundation, wrote a piece for The Conversation in which she claimed that Morrison’s decision to end free child care and single out the overwhelmingly female child-care workforce for the early end of Job Keeper “should have women storming for preselection across Australia’s political spectrum”.

At the start of the year, I was commissioned by this masthead to write a piece looking ahead to the key issues likely to be on the "gender agenda" in 2020. I dutifully asked some of the smartest, most dogged gender equality advocates I know, including Australian Sex Discrimination Commissioner Kate Jenkins and the national feminist icon Anne Summers, for their predictions.

I live in Melbourne, so it’s been back to lockdown (and home-schooling my two primary-school-aged children). And as I’ve had a bit of time on my hands – in keeping with my tendency to forensically examine the Government’s track-record on all things gender equality — I decided to take a close look at what the Hon. Marise Payne, Australia’s Minister for Women, has had to say about the well-documented, disproportionate social and economic impact of COVID-19 on women.

Women of Australia, I know you’re all super busy with, among other things, remote learning, sorting out the additional unpaid care and domestic work associated with COVID-19, and making home-made face masks. But I need to interrupt your COVID day with an urgent request: we also need to “school” our nation’s Treasurer, Josh Frydenberg. It has recently come to my attention that he doesn’t know where babies come from. It’s time to have “the talk”.

The Coalition Government’s response to the economic fallout of COVID-19 – namely its focus on a “blokecovery” to what is, by all accounts, a “she-cession” — has led some to speculate that the prioritisation of men and male-dominated industries in stimulus measures will not only prove bad economic and social policy, as numerous economists have already warned, but bad politics. Women voters might punish the Coalition at the next Federal election.

Since the revelations about former High Court justice Dyson Heydon’s alleged serial sexual predation broke in The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age on Monday, there’s been much talk about what next for the reckoning we need on sexual harassment in Australian workplaces. What happened to Australia’s original #MeToo movement, which arrived on these shores shortly after the Harvey Weinstein allegations broke in the New York Times and the hashtag went viral, including here in Australia?

As the pandemic continues to wreak havoc on our collective health and the health of the economy, plunging Australia into its first recession in 29 years (something economists have more aptly called a “she-cession” due to the over-representation of women amongst job losses), experts are now warning of a “pandemic motherhood penalty” that could have long lasting consequences for mothers.

As we all well know, US President Donald Trump took a not so leisurely Monday morning stroll from the White House across Lafayette Square to St. John’s Church, which was damaged by fire the night before. Trump held up a Bible for a photo op that has since been described as a “defining moment” of his presidency.

It’s official. We have a “she-cession” on our hands, but the Coalition Government is planning a “blokey”, construction led recovery whilst throwing the female-dominated early childhood education sector, and the working mums who depend on them, under the bus. Yes, Prime Minister, we do need a shovel all right, but not for the purposes I suspect you had in mind.

Are men shit? In the words of Australia’s first female prime minister, Julia Gillard, “Shit men don’t explain everything or nothing.” Okay, maybe she didn’t say that, but I like to think she would have — if asked.

As an observer, campaigner and writer on all things “domestic democracy” (or lack thereof), I have long predicted that the so-called “chore wars”, the endless battle within heterosexual couples with children about who does the unpaid domestic and care work, were about to go nuclear, culminating in a “new reckoning” on the home-front.

Men, we need to talk. It’s time to start putting your home schooling, vacuuming and, generally speaking, unpaid domestic childcare and labour where your mouth is. Or, more specifically, where social scientists have long suggested your “attitudes” are.

If someone now fancies making an “Undervalued AF” T-shirt, go for it, writes Kristine Ziwica. Because it's about time female-dominated work is fairly recognized.

Have women finally won the so-called battle of the sexes? Some are certainly calling it. Kristine Ziwica's reluctant to embrace biologically deterministic theories about the sexes, particularly when it comes to leadership.

First there was the $17.6 billion federal stimulus package. Then the $66 billion coronavirus “rescue package”. And, finally, the $130 billion support package, including a $1,500 fortnightly JobKeeper payment to help keep employees in work. A succession of eye watering sums of money have featured in the public discourse in recent weeks.

In a remarkable turn of events, yesterday Education Minister Dan Tehan urged the parents of Australia to send their little comrades to kindy. Well, not quite. But he did announce that all childcare – yes, essentially all — would be free from Sunday night onwards for the next three months, with the strong possibility that the new arrangements would remain in place for as long as six months. “These are extraordinary times,” the Minister told the ABC’s Patricia Karvelas in an interview shortly a