The Liberal Party’s declining support among women is not a temporary setback. It reflects deep social change, rising educational attainment among women, and a growing disconnect between modern professional women and the party’s current values and positioning.

In the wake of last week’s federal Liberal party spill and the demise of the first woman Liberal party leader, Sussan Ley, there is renewed focus on the defining values of the Liberal party, especially as they are perceived by, and affect, Australian women. Ley was undermined in the party room from the beginning of her leadership in a way that draws attention to – and arguably accelerates – a loss of support for the Liberal party among women voters.

The negative trend of the Liberal party losing the women’s vote has been freshly documented. The definitive academic study of the May 2025 federal election by academic researchers at the ANU, Griffith University and the University of Sydney (the fourteenth such publication since 1987 in the highly detailed analytic series called the ( Australian Election Study) was publicly released in November last year. It confirms that a principal factor driving the decline in electoral support for the Liberal party is its failing position among women voters, a trend that has been evident over the last decade.

Not only has the Liberal party progressively lost women voters (and the younger generation, more generally, but that’s another story), it has also notably failed to attract some highly capable women as candidates – a trend that is evident in the rise of the Teal independents.

The essential point I would make about the Liberal party and women voters is underpinned by the change in our society involving the tertiary education of Australians, generally, and women in particular. In 1944 when the Liberal party was founded, detailed figures were not officially kept, but it is estimated in academic studies that a low, single-digit percentage of Australians were university graduates at the level of holding a bachelor’s degree or above, and that the gender proportions of graduates were considered to be 80 per cent men and only 20 per cent women. Women were more likely to graduate in arts, education and nursing, while men dominated law, medicine and engineering.

By comparison, in the last census in 2023, of almost 18 million Australians eligible to vote, 5.5 million of them held a university degree (that is more than 30 per cent of registered voters); and in that year, women constituted approximately 60 per cent of bachelor’s degree graduates from Australian universities. This proportion reflects a continuing pattern in higher education attainment.

Among Australians aged 25 to 34, 51.6 per cent of women hold at least a bachelor’s degree, compared to only 38.4 per cent of men. In other words, steadily since the 1940s the gender proportions have flipped. And the proportions holding the prestige degrees of law and medicine have flipped, as well – in the nation’s university faculties, women graduating in law now outnumber men in the ratio of 60/40, and in medicine it is 53/47.

So, there has been a massive growth in the number of young, well-educated Australian women, and the Liberal party has politically ignored young women – at its cost. Young Australian women are typically highly educated, they’re professional in their outlook and they’re savvy.

Here’s how that has played out: at the 2019 election: 45 per cent of men gave their first preference to the Liberal party; only 35 per cent of women did so. The gender gap narrowed in the 2022 federal election when studies suggest 38 per cent of men gave their first preference to the Liberal party, but only 32 per cent of women voted for the Liberals. The 2025 Australian Election Study shows the gender gap in support of the Liberal party has widened back up to a 9 per cent difference between men and women. As the study concludes, there is a modern gender gap in voting, whereby women broadly are more likely to vote for parties on the left and men broadly for parties on the right.

The Teal independents are a further lesson for the Liberal party at present, as they frequently have origins as former Liberal voters – yet they evidently did not wish to join and represent the Liberal party, and often entered federal Parliament winning traditional Liberal seats, as did pioneer NSW Teal independent, Zali Steggall. Consider the distinguished family political heritage of Teal parliamentarians like Allegra Spender MP (daughter of the late federal Liberal MP John Spender, who served from 1980 to 1990, and granddaughter of Sir Percy Spender, Cabinet minister in the Liberal government of Robert Menzies); and Kate Chaney MP, (granddaughter of Liberal party MP in the Menzies government, Fred Chaney Sr, and niece of Fred Chaney, Liberal party Senator for WA).

And note the political views of other Teals: Zoe Daniel, a self-described swinging voter who predominantly had voted Liberal in previous years before her election to the Victorian seat of Goldstein, which she first won as an independent in 2022 (but lost in 2025). They are moderate, centrist Liberal women in their 40s and 50s who would be natural fits for the Liberal party as it once was: that is, socially liberal and fiscally conservative. But, of course, the Liberal party has flipped its 1940s origins and become socially conservative and fiscally neo-liberal.

It is clear that the Liberal party has a major ‘women support issue’ to fix, and it doesn’t seem to understand that. And it’s not merely about representation in the Parliament, problematic as that currently seems. It is about understanding what Australian women think, and what they value on issues like climate change, political integrity, and gender equality.