Women are not just underrepresented in parliament, company boards and senior management – they are also missing from Australia’s international relations presence, an absence described as “detrimental to the national interest [which] hinders the achievement of our foreign policy objectives”.
Parliament’s intelligence committee, which is responsible for reviewing national security legislation, has never been helmed by a woman, and for almost half of its 21 years of existence, has sat with no women at all.
Australia’s intelligence community was particularly weighted in favour of men, with women representing just 9% of senior executives in the Office of National Assessments in 2016, and just 24% across the defence intelligence agencies.
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