Half a century of equity reform has produced real gains and real backlash. The next leg of the work will be won — or lost — in kitchens, classrooms, and on the screens that now shape a generation of young men.
Mrs R Cawley and Mrs J Lloyd
The 2025 mini-series Goolagong tells the remarkable story of Australian Indigenous tennis player Evonne Goolagong, who won Wimbledon in 1980 after having a baby and pushing through injury. Among its many shocking scenes — depictions of racism, poverty, and predatory behaviour that document how social systems worked from the 1950s through to the early 1970s — one small detail stands out.
At the 1980 Wimbledon final, Goolagong played American Chris Evert. The camera pans to the scoreboard. Goolagong, by then married to Roger Cawley, is listed as R Cawley. Evert, married to Englishman John Lloyd, had progressively taken the name Chris Evert Lloyd. And yet the scoreboard lists her as J Lloyd. Two of the greatest tennis players of their era, both outperforming their husbands’ careers, rendered on the world’s most famous grass court as the initials and surnames of the men they had married. Mrs R Cawley. Mrs J Lloyd.
The scoreboard was not unusual for 1980. It was traditional, in precisely the sense the word is used to defend practices that cannot survive scrutiny. The comparative invisibility of women once they wed was the default across Western sport, business, and professional life.
The Numbers That Say How Far — And How Far Not
Times have shifted measurably. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, fewer than 50% of Australian women in their mid-twenties to thirties were in paid work in 1980. Domestic duties were their occupation. Today, participation among the same cohort sits at around 80%, and 9 in 10 Australians agree that gender equality is important (ABS, 2024). Notably, 6 in 10 Australians believe equality has been achieved or is close to it.
The belief and the evidence do not quite align. The gender pay gap in Australia has narrowed but remains at 11.5%. Only 33% of private sector boards include women. Approximately 22% of Australian women report having experienced sexual violence in their lifetime (WGEA, 2024; ABS Personal Safety Survey, 2023). The Scanlon Institute’s 2024 Mapping Social Cohesion survey found that 17% of Australians reported racial or religious discrimination in the previous twelve months — a figure that rose to 24% for those of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander background (Scanlon Institute, 2024).
COVID-19, like most crises, followed society’s fault lines. Rates of infection, death, and economic impact were felt more acutely by those at the margins. Migrant communities absorbed a disproportionate share of the cost. Despite being the majority users of many health and social services, women and migrants remain less likely to influence health and social policy — this despite the social determinants of health having risen to steady prominence in international research since the 1970s, and the WHO Commission on Social Determinants of Health being established in 2005 (CSDH, 2008). Equity has become rhetoric. Making it practice remains the work.
The Wife Drought: What we still haven’t fixed
The contradiction of widespread belief in equality alongside persistent structural inequality is one that Australian journalist and political commentator Annabel Crabb has examined with characteristic wit and rigour. Her 2014 book The Wife Drought: Why Women Need Wives, and Men Need Lives argues that the conversation about gender equality has focused almost exclusively on the wrong end of the problem.
Decades have been spent encouraging women to enter the workforce. Almost no attention has been paid to the barriers that prevent men from leaving it. Crabb’s central finding is deceptively simple: having a “wife” at home — a person managing the invisible labour of household and family — is a decisive career advantage. Around 75% of senior executive men have wives who do not work full time. The reverse is true for virtually no senior executive women. Working women, Crabb concludes, are in a state of sustained wife drought, and there is no sign of rain (Crabb, 2014).
Her call is not one of rage but of recalibration. The Wife Drought is a ceasefire proposal in the gender wars — an invitation to recognise that men, too, are trapped by rigid expectations. If workplaces were as accepting of men who take time out for family as they are of women, the assumption that raising children is women’s work would begin to dissolve. Until men are as common as women in playgroups and on school pick-up rosters, equity at the top of organisations will remain aspirational. The domestic revolution, Crabb argues, has been only half completed. It will stay that way until what we expect of men shifts as much as what we expect of women.
When Equity Feels Like Loss
Equity is framed, in most policy discourse, as enabling everyone to win. For many men and other groups holding historic power, the experience can be quite different. Equity can feel like the loss of the automatic standing they had become accustomed to — whether in the bedroom or the boardroom. Rising rates of social isolation make the advancement of other groups feel even more threatening. This can lead to overt hostility and a retreat into online communities of similar mind.
Leading Australian social psychologist Hugh Mackay AO, whose seventy-year career documenting Australian social change is captured most recently in The Kindness Revolution (2021) and The Way We Are (2024), calls for a return to what he terms the “Grand Human Project of building social harmony” (Mackay, 2021). His observation is direct: if harmony cannot be maintained across the gender spectrum, the entire process of social reform is in trouble, because the gender revolution has been positioned by so many as the leading edge of equality politics — the work that makes other equity work possible.
See What You Made Me Do: Coercive control as the true signature of abuse
Investigative journalist Jess Hill has documented in forensic detail what happens when the loss of automatic power curdles into something more dangerous. Her Stella Prize–winning book See What You Made Me Do: Power, Control and Domestic Abuse (2019) is a landmark Australian investigation that shifts the frame of the conversation entirely.
Rather than asking the habitual question — “why didn’t she leave?” — Hill insists on the far more useful one: why did he do it? Her research found that one in four Australian women has experienced violence from an intimate partner, and that Australian police are called to a domestic abuse incident every two minutes. Most consequentially, Hill argues that the worst abusive relationships often involve barely any physical violence at all. It is coercive control — the systematic stripping of autonomy and self-worth — that is most pervasive and most dangerous, and it follows a remarkably consistent script regardless of the perpetrator’s background or social status (Hill, 2019).
Through her advocacy, Hill was instrumental in New South Wales becoming the first Australian state to criminalise coercive control in 2024. She was subsequently appointed to the six-person expert panel formed following the nationwide 2024 protests to end violence against women. Her more recent work extends the frame to a broader pattern of global gender-based backlash, sketching a hierarchy that reaches from world leaders at the top, through organised anti-rights groups in the middle, down to social media influencers “on the factory floor” — a network whose coordinated effect is to stall or reverse progress on gender equality.
Professor Michael Flood at Queensland University of Technology, one of Australia’s foremost researchers on men, masculinities, and violence prevention, has made a parallel argument over two decades of work. Flood is lead author of Change the Story (2015, updated 2021), the national framework for the primary prevention of violence against women, and his work consistently emphasises that education campaigns encouraging respectful relationships, while necessary, are insufficient on their own. They have to contend with the competing forces young people now encounter on their screens (Flood, 2019; Our Watch et al., 2021).
The Manosphere: When social media becomes a radicalisation pipeline
Which brings the argument to one of the most urgent and underappreciated threats to the equity and kindness this piece is arguing for: the rise of what researchers call the manosphere — a loose but interconnected network of online communities and influencers promoting male supremacy, antifeminist ideology, and deeply regressive models of masculinity.
The manosphere is not new. It has existed on the fringes of the internet since at least the early 2000s, drawing from subgroups including Incels (involuntary celibates), Pick-Up Artists, Men Going Their Own Way, and Red Pillers. What is new is its reach. The viral rise of self-proclaimed misogynist Andrew Tate from 2022 onward marked a turning point. A poll by UK advocacy organisation Hope Not Hate in 2023 found that 80% of 16- and 17-year-old British boys had consumed Tate’s content — more than the proportion who could name their own Prime Minister (Hope Not Hate, 2023). A 2025 Movember Institute report found that nearly 7 in 10 young men actively seek out male influencers online who then shape their behaviours and attitudes, with 69% of these young men agreeing that women use feminism to “keep men down” and 67% believing women should “fulfil their traditional roles as wives and mothers” (Movember Institute, 2025).
What the Australian research is finding.
Australian researchers have been at the forefront of documenting the damage. Monash University’s Professor Steven Roberts and Dr Stephanie Wescott have published extensively on the presence of manosphere content in Australian schools, and on how Tate’s content — analysed across more than 2,200 posts — functions as a radicalisation pathway that mirrors the mechanics of religious and political extremism (Roberts & Wescott, 2025).
Crucially, their research found that around 89% of Tate’s longer-form content focuses not on women at all, but on a constrictive model of masculinity as aspiration — “self-improvement” framing that serves as a gateway to misogynistic ideology. What appears to be tips on fitness, stoicism, or financial ambition is subtly packaged with a worldview in which female empowerment is a direct threat to male identity and worth. Teachers across Australian schools are reporting the consequences: boys telling female classmates they wouldn’t “even” be worth assaulting; primary school students citing Tate to justify hurting girls; and a widespread rejection of institutional authority, evidence, and expertise as part of the same conspiratorial framework.
Engineered echo chambers
The algorithms of the platforms play a critical enabling role. Research tracking new TikTok accounts has shown a fourfold increase in the volume of misogynistic content served on their “For You” page within just five days of account creation (Regehr et al., 2024). Echo chambers of this kind are not accidental. They are engineered. The content circulating within them positions gender equality as a zero-sum game in which every gain by women is a loss for men.
The framing is not only factually wrong. It is socially catastrophic. As Jess Hill has argued, the manosphere represents the “factory floor” of a broader global gender backlash. The Netflix series Adolescence (2025), which sparked a UK parliamentary inquiry into the manosphere and online misogyny, dramatised for mainstream audiences what educators and researchers have been warning about for years: that radicalisation through social media is happening in ordinary families, in ordinary bedrooms, to boys who are otherwise loved and seemingly well-adjusted.
And the counter-signal.
The picture is not uniformly bleak. Research conducted with 117 young Australian men aged 16–21 found that many actively reject Tate’s egotism and his fixation on materialistic markers of worth. They recognise the inauthenticity and the exploitation. They are, as Movember’s research suggests, primed for more positive influences. The question is whether enough is being offered. Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s argument in The Anxious Generation (2024) is directly relevant here: Western societies have overprotected children in the real world and under-protected them online. The rebalancing is long overdue (Haidt, 2024).
Kindness As Counter-culture
Mutual respect — not mutual suspicion — is, in Hugh Mackay’s framing, the end game for everyone. Embracing a common life, a common purpose, and a common humanity is the point. Differences can be acknowledged and then subordinated to the higher calling of being one human community. That community will always be plagued by vulnerability. Humans always have been, and always will be, dependent on each other. It is how the species has survived. Compassion and empathy have given Homo sapiens an edge because they are the preconditions for working together.
Writing in New Scientist, Kate Ravilious has pointed to exactly this — friendliness — as the reason Homo sapiens outlived other human species (Ravilious, 2021). Not strength. Not intelligence alone. Friendliness. The capacity to cooperate with strangers.
In a competitive Western society that has made individuality the new norm, the instinct to connect has been crowded out by the instinct to separate. This has reduced the opportunity for the acts of kindness that have long fostered human interdependence and survival. Mackay’s working definition of kindness is worth stating plainly: “anything we do to show other people that we take them seriously” (Mackay, 2021). Kindness, on this account, is not affection. It is taking another person seriously. It is offered without restraint, without prejudice, and without discrimination. It is the foundation of social harmony.
Listening to others is an unqualified act of kindness, and it is also the route to greater understanding. Through understanding, shared goals can be established and harmony improved. Connection is built one act of listening at a time.
The Unfinished Domestic Revolution
Once it was unthinkable that women, different ethnicities, sexual orientations, and age groups would all be taken as seriously as the dominant working-age heterosexual male. Expecting the gender revolution to automatically transfer status to every other marginalised group was always a naïve project. Feminism did not do all of the work required. But it did create the conversations. The drive to dismantle the patriarchy — so that everyone could experience equal political, economic, personal, and social rights — has meant that many groups can now be taken seriously in public life. That is the ultimate act of kindness, in Mackay’s sense of the word.
It is unkind to ignore the needs of groups who are marginalised. It is also short-term thinking. Groups who make less use of health and social programs, or who are under-represented in decision-making and power circles, are not less important. Unmet needs spiral quickly into longer-term and significant costs that everyone pays. The social determinants of health literature has documented this pattern for half a century (CSDH, 2008).
And — as the manosphere demonstrates — it is also unkind, in the deepest sense, to abandon young men to online communities that profit from their confusion and isolation, packaging grievance as empowerment and division as identity. The antidote is not censorship. It is what Crabb has argued for: genuine conversation about what is expected of men as well as women, and the courage to change those expectations. It is what Hill demands: honest reckoning with the systems that enable harm rather than comfortable reassurance that progress is proceeding on schedule. It is what Flood has spent decades modelling: engaging men and boys as allies in prevention, not as problems to be managed. And it is what the data increasingly shows: young people, including young men, respond to authenticity, respect, and being taken seriously — which is, as Mackay reminds us, the definition of kindness.
From Conversation To Co-design: Doing the work at community level
Harnessing the power of conversation to equip others to participate in society as equals creates new social and economic opportunities. It can overcome the social isolation and fear that have become a quiet paralysis in many communities. It can restore vitality, connection, and contribution in ways that foster the mutuality and harmony that make societies more creative, more collaborative, and more productive than they otherwise are.
Structured co-design is where this instinct meets methodology. Australian practitioner Kelly Ann McKercher’s Beyond Sticky Notes: Co-design for Real sets out four foundational principles for the work: share power, prioritise relationships, use participatory means, and build capability (McKercher, 2020). McKercher is direct about what genuine co-design requires: there is no co-designing without co-deciding. The implication for equity work is consequential. If the people most affected by an inequity contribute to the insight but have no hand in the decision, the conversation has not shifted the power structure it is supposed to address.
For those wanting a structured approach, the Co.Design4All framework offers a practical 4D methodology — Discover, Design, Decide, Debrief — supported by over 100 tools across fourteen stages. Applied to equity and kindness work at community level, the 4D phases carry a particular weight:
— Discover surfaces whose voices have been historically excluded — and actively brings them into the room from the start, rather than at the end as a consultation afterthought.
— Design builds with the people most affected, not for them, and treats that distinction as the substantive test of the work.
— Decide commits the group to a shared path — which, in equity work, is the point at which historic power arrangements are actually renegotiated rather than simply discussed.
— Debrief closes the loop with structured reflection, including on whose voices shaped the outcome and whose did not.
Used well, structured co-design is one of the most practical counter-measures available to the algorithmic polarisation the manosphere depends on. Screens isolate. Rooms designed for conversation, connect.
Survival of the most adaptable
Rather than further investment in security or reactive social welfare, the more productive option is to invest in the time to connect — and to leverage the kindness that has been the quiet power of humanity for millennia. “Survival of the fittest” is a cultural misreading of Darwin’s central insight. The actual proposition is survival of the most adaptable, and adaptability depends on creativity, which depends in turn on the constant flow of new and interesting ideas generated in the heart of the very best conversations.
For many women, for those used to yarning around campfires, and — increasingly — for the young men looking for something better than what the algorithm is offering them, that could be an exciting project indeed.
The scoreboard can change. It has before. But only if enough people in enough rooms decide the old tradition is no longer acceptable — and then sit down, together, to design what replaces it.
References
- Australian Bureau of Statistics (2024). Labour force, Australia and Personal Safety Survey. Canberra: ABS.
- Co.Design4All (2025). The 4D Framework: Discover, Design, Decide, Debrief. Available at: https://codesign4all.com
- Commission on Social Determinants of Health [CSDH] (2008). Closing the Gap in a Generation. Geneva: World Health Organization.
- Crabb, A. (2014). The Wife Drought: Why Women Need Wives, and Men Need Lives. Sydney: Penguin Random House Australia.
- Flood, M. (2019). Engaging Men and Boys in Violence Prevention. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
- Haidt, J. (2024). The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. New York: Penguin Press.
- Hill, J. (2019). See What You Made Me Do: Power, Control and Domestic Abuse. Melbourne: Black Inc.
- Hope Not Hate (2023). Andrew Tate: Polling Report. London: Hope Not Hate.
- Mackay, H. (2021). The Kindness Revolution. Sydney: Allen & Unwin.
- Mackay, H. (2024). The Way We Are. Sydney: Allen & Unwin.
- McKercher, K. A. (2020). Beyond Sticky Notes: Co-design for Real — Mindsets, methods and movements. Sydney: Beyond Sticky Notes.
- Movember Institute (2025). Young Men, Male Influencers and Attitudes to Gender. Melbourne: Movember Institute of Men’s Health.
- Our Watch, ANROWS, & VicHealth (2021). Change the Story: A shared framework for the primary prevention of violence against women in Australia (2nd ed.). Melbourne: Our Watch.
- Over, H., Bunce, C., Konu, D., & Zendle, D. (2025). What do we need to know about the manosphere and young people’s mental health? Child and Adolescent Mental Health, 30, 272–274.
- Ravilious, K. (2021). Why friendliness made us the last surviving humans. New Scientist.
- Regehr, K., et al. (2024). Research on algorithmic amplification of misogynistic content on TikTok. University College London and University of Kent.
- Roberts, S., & Wescott, S. (2025). Beyond the clickbait: Analysing the masculinist ideology in Andrew Tate’s online written discourses. Cultural Sociology.
- Scanlon Institute (2024). Mapping Social Cohesion 2024. Melbourne: Scanlon Foundation Research Institute.
- Workplace Gender Equality Agency [WGEA] (2024). Australia’s gender pay gap statistics. Canberra: WGEA.
