Isabella Vacaflores and Dr Elise Stephenson, Journal of Women, Politics & Policy, May 2025

Drawing on a dataset of 1,047 private members’ bills from 1995 to 2022, this study reveals:

• Female MPs are punching above their weight—proposing more private members’ bills than their proportional representation would suggest.
• These bills often focus on ‘feminised’ policy areas like families, welfare, education, and the environment—issues that directly impact women and communities.
• Even when addressing topics like climate or migration, women’s language is more human-centred and rights-focused, compared to the more technocratic tone of male MPs.
• Independent female MPs are especially active—sponsoring 77% of all private members’ bills among independents—suggesting that independence may offer a vital platform for underrepresented voices.
• Within major parties, women are also leading the charge: 70% of Labor’s and 82% of the Liberal Party’s private members’ bills were introduced by women.
• This research does indicate that more women in parliament does equal more attention to legislation impacting women. But, there’s still more to do, with our research finding that men less frequently venture into feminised areas of policy than women venture into masculinised issues.

Abstract

Female legislators are typically assumed to act for other women when policymaking. Contemporary literature challenges this, and a need to “tow the party line” complicates the process of attributing acts of substantive representation vis-à-vis policy to any individual political actor. Using 1,047 private member’s bills tabled in the Australian federal parliament (1995–2022), we address this limitation by employing a quantitative text analysis approach. We find gendered differences in the propensity to propose such bills across parties and over time. Further, our analysis reveals that substantive gender differences in legislation extend beyond linguistic variations to distinct thematic concerns. These findings underscore the role of gender but also other biographical and contextual factors in shaping legislative priorities, contributing to ongoing debates about the substantive representation of women in policymaking.

– Isabella Vacaflores and Dr Elise Stephenson