Three stories broke in Australia this week. On the surface, they have nothing to do with each other: a university job ad, a court injunction protecting three sportsmen, and a rape trial involving a “well-connected” Melbourne businessman. Look closer and they are the same story, told three times, in three different rooms of the same house.
The job ad
The University of Melbourne posted a position for a Lecturer/Senior Lecturer in Mathematical Physics, paying up to $176,065 plus 17 per cent super open only to women, cis or trans, under the special measures provision of Section 12(1) of Victoria’s Equal Opportunity Act 2010. It is not a new mechanism. In 2014, the university used the same provision to advertise up to 20 women-only roles in engineering, when women made up just 20 per cent of that school’s 300 academic staff. VCAT approved it then, noting that despite the university’s stated commitment to gender equity, progress had been slow and limited.
This time, the university says it is committed to increasing diversity and addressing the underrepresentation of women in disciplines with a long history of imbalance. One Nation and Murdoch media picked it up, and the comments followed the same script they always do: DEI hire, what happened to merit?, they’ll let anyone teach as long as she’s a “woke woman.”
One comment in particular incensed me the most “..you popped out kids and jumped on benefits paid for by mostly hard working/better educated men. How’s that sandwich coming along?”. A man whose profile was locked, because of course it was, felt entitled to say that to a stranger applying for a physics job. That tells you everything about what ‘merit’ arguments are actually protecting.
The group chat
Also this week, three high-profile sportsmen won an emergency Supreme Court injunction stopping the ABC from publishing details of a private group chat. Justice Anthony McGrath found the messages were private and ruled the men’s contracts would be breached if the ABC published them.
The chat reportedly contained shared jokes, insults of other named people, and crude descriptions of sexual acts and domestic violence. One of the men holds ambassador roles, sponsorship deals and media positions built on his public image as an advocate. He said that it “would be devastating to the important work he performs as an advocate within and outside his sport” and all three men said the messages were “likely to lead to serious harm to their reputations and standing as well as their financial interests”. Advocacy work, apparently, that can coexist with joking about sexual violence in private. Not one of them, as far as we know, argued the content wasn’t true.
The trial
And in the County Court, a “well-connected” Melbourne businessman is on trial for one count of sexual assault and two of rape, accused of assaulting his former personal assistant, a woman decades younger, who had reconnected with him for work at his home in the early hours of a March morning in 2023. He has pleaded not guilty. His barrister told the jury the case rests entirely on whether they believe her. He cannot be named. She can be disbelieved in open court, on the record, by a man whose identity the legal system has decided is worth protecting.
The thread
Structural sexism doesn’t announce itself. It shows up as a comment section insisting a woman got a job she didn’t earn, as an injunction that protects a reputation over public knowledge of what was actually said by apparently highly influential and powerful men in the community, as a legal system built to shield the powerful while a woman’s credibility is picked apart by strangers.
Representation matters because rooms without women in them are where all three of these things happen unchecked as the joke gets made, the ad gets mocked, the door stays shut. A women-only physics post isn’t a threat to merit. It’s simply an admission that “merit,” left alone, has quietly meant “men” for a very long time. And the fury aimed at that one job ad, compared to the silence extended to men accused of far worse, tells you which imbalance actually bothers people.
We don’t get to demand women prove themselves worthy of opportunity while extending the benefit of the doubt, the suppression order, and the injunction to men accused of exactly the attitudes that keep women out in the first place. You don’t get to ask “what happened to merit” in one breath and defend a men’s group chat joking about sexual violence in the next. That’s not principle. That’s privilege, and it always speaks two different languages depending on who’s in the room.
When you are accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.