In 1973, women’s tennis champion Billie Jean King beat former male champion Bobby Riggs in three sets in a match publicised as the Battle of the Sexes. The wins for women kept on coming. By 1987, for the first time, slightly more women than men were enrolled at university.

We’ve come a long way since former prime minister Paul Keating declared in his maiden speech to Federal parliament in 1970 that “the government has boasted about the increasing number of women in the workforce. Rather than something to be proud of I feel that this is something of which we should be ashamed”.

Keating’s view was not uncommon. A neighbour who got married in the early seventies told me her husband refused to help her make the bed on the first morning of their honeymoon. She asked, “why not? You slept in it

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