Julia Gillard is right: Australia is a sexist land

What do you call an Australian man who respects women? A Canadian.

For hundreds, if not thousands, of expat Aussie women living it up overseas, the leading reason to stay away is simple. Aussie men.

Not necessarily individual men, mind you. I have plenty of wonderful, understanding, giving male friends of Australian extraction, but there is an inherent blokeyness to Australian culture that is bringing the country down.

Until both women and men rail against it – as Prime MinisterJulia Gillard so beautifully did this week – it will persist, mutate and grow like a fungus under the fingernails of Australian society: not entirely disabling, but certainly not attractive.

It’s hard to see when you’re close to it. As a woman working in Queensland newsrooms, covering police cases, court trials, State politics and more, I couldn’t tell why I was always ill at ease.

It didn’t stop me from succeeding, but it did stop me from wanting to play ball (particularly the 4pm male-dominated cricket matches across my desk as I worked to hit deadline, producing more copy than the better-paid men sporting it up around me). The few women in leadership roles were blokey too. It seemed they had to be.

This disquiet also stretched into my personal life. I dated the typical Aussie menu of surfers, doctors, musicians and whatnot, and when it came to the crunch, it usually became clear that these fun and caring men had no idea how to support a partner in ways other than financial.

So I ditched it all and booked a flight to Canada intending to stay for a year. Within weeks of starting work at a national newspaper, though, I knew my return flight would go unused.

Men are fun and caring here, too, but they have a distinct differentiator: They respect women. Not because they are told to, not because of a strident women’s rights lobby, but because respect of other people is the default position. 

Things aren’t perfect in Canada, for sure. Gender divides still remain and equality is a goal, not a reality. (And Canadians could learn a thing or two from us Aussies about open friendliness and deadpan sarcasm, but hey, you can’t win ‘em all.)

But with policies like shared parental leave, gay marriage and more, all people are treated equally whether they are male, female, gay, straight, immigrants or no.

And just as importantly, the speech Ms. Gillard made this week would never have come about in Canada: Any politician making the kind of comments quoted as coming from Mr. Abbott would have been turfed out of politics straight away.

Whenever I bump into a fellow female expat, we chat about careers, partners, life opportunity, and laugh about the madness of choosing a Canuck winter over Aussie beaches.

Then there is a pause, and a little conspiratorially, one of us will then say something along the lines of: “And then there’s the men.”

The young Aussie making lattes at the café down the street from me is qualified in marketing, but said she’d rather be in Canada making coffee than “fetching water” for the men in the industry back home. She hopes to break into the Canadian marketing ranks soon.

My super-successful friend in television keeps being lured back to Canada with promotions because they love her work so much. Here, she’s in charge of a major national television program. When she briefly moved back to Australia (between promotions), she was picking up day-work as a TV reporter.

The tirade, which made headlines here in Canada and has won Ms. Gillard countless fans among those who’d likely never heard of her before, was the telling of a bitter truth.

Australia is a boys’ club, and until both women and men start demanding equal respect, change will not come.

The fact that the Australian media is treating this speech as theatre instead of asking “Does she have a point?” is perhaps one of the most disappointing aspects of this whole episode.

Contrary to what the Australian media is reporting, this speech doesn’t send a bad message around the world. It serves as a clarion for the people of Australia to stop putting up with sexism and misogyny in all its forms.

It’s time for the women and men of Australia to step up, and stop accepting the treatment that has for so long been dished out. Until they do, nothing will change.

And after that, the country can tackle the other bastion of Australian misogyny – in which Ms. Gillard is as bad as the rest – and legalize gay marriage.