It is incredibly frustrating that after years and years of campaigning for gender equality, the Order of Australia is as male-dominated as ever.

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As Governor-General Sam Mostyn puts it: "Every Australian regardless of their gender, social, cultural or economic background should be able to look at the honours list and see themselves."

Which would be lovely. I mean, at least we count gender in the honours list. God knows how the rest of it looks. We know very little about race and ethnicity and we can only deduce class by looking at the postcodes.

As the GG's office points out, the gender imbalance that persists in the Order of Australia will only change if more people from across the broad Australian community nominate exceptional women for recognition.

So yeah, apparently, it's our fault. Exhausting (as is the process of nominating).

So much to take responsibility for, so often. Yep, we ordinary, nominating Australians do not do a good enough job. From December 1, 2025, through to April 30, 2026, only 37 per cent of nominations received were for women, slightly worse than the historic average over the 50-year history of 64 to 36.

Apart from the fact that we don't nominate enough women, there's also a backlog of men because the former governor-general was trying to get honours lists to equal in his lifetime (in the job).

Nominations overall are still consistently running about 60/40 in favour of men and sometimes it's as unbalanced as 70/30. When you've got nominations like that, you get a result like this year's King's Birthday Honours, where just over 67 per cent of recipients are men.

Which is so strange. About seven or so years ago, nominations were approaching equal. Happy days - 1200 in 2019, nearly 40 per cent. What happened in the meantime? Did men suddenly become greater and more deserving of nominations? Haha. That would be a definite no.

Here's my........

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