Cupcakes at 10 paces: This year's corporate morning teas for International Women's Day had a spicy new ingredient

Any pub galah will tell you that politics is a numbers game.

Polling numbers regularly trump reason. Leadership ballot numbers fulfil or frustrate dreams. Economic numbers, rolling in with the regularity of breakers, tell governments what they can feasibly do while looking vaguely fiscally responsible. Looping zeros in the blithe out-years of federal budget papers paint us a picture of what Government X will do if it survives that long, which of course it rarely does.

Whole fields of expertise coalesce around the analysis of numbers in politics, whether it be the holy findings of quantitative pollsters, or the sweatier, less precise work of the party "numbers men" with their swivelling eyes and scribbled, close-kept lists.

It's fascinating – with such an air of numerical expertise about the place – how challenging certain other data sets can be for some participants.

"Count Her In!" was the theme for International Women's Day, and this year – in addition to the customary morning teas and 24-hour online scented candle discount offers – Australian womanhood also had the chance to leaf through the newly released data from the Workplace Gender Equality Agency (WGEA) on disparities between what Australia's biggest private companies pay men, as opposed to what they pay women.

Comedy moments galore at the bigger corporate functions, one imagines, as ASX200 companies with the biggest pay office gender differences discovered once and for all whether cupcakes are considered "legal tender" or "reasonable projectiles".

A2 Milk, according to the WGEA data, came out with the starkest difference at 40.5 per cent; very hard news for the segment of the population best-known for producing its titular product.

And at Qantas, Friday's International Women's Day feature of certain flights entirely staffed by women might have come across as slightly off, tonally, in light of its gender pay disparity of 37 per cent.

Was it all just a feminist plot?

What wasn't surprising, however, was the clamour that erupted immediately over what this information meant, and what WGEA was suggesting by releasing it, and was it all just a feminist plot and so on.

The Nationals' Matt Canavan, who used to be a federal minister but is now an opposition backbencher, and thus richly entitled to a full range of blue-sky thinking, declared that "the gender pay report is useless data because it does not even correct for basic differences like hours worked".

Posting to the freedom-loving frontier now known as X, Senator Canavan wrote: "The gender pay report is now the annual Andrew Tate recruitment drive. It just breeds resentment and division. Andrew Tate is so popular because governments and corporates push a simplistic, divisive and clearly incorrect gender narrative. This creates a massive vacuum for the likes of Andrew Tate to fill."

Your correspondent does not know (and is unwilling to research on an ABC device) whether three mentions of Andrew Tate in one post carries some kind of bonus in Tateworld.

But the data collected by WGEA, including the data on specific companies, is far from a government plot. In truth, it's a rare moment of bilateral intergenerational collaboration.

The compulsory data collection on gender from big corporates was initially mandated by the Gillard government when it created the Workplace Gender Equality Agency in 2012. Companies were obliged – and compliance has been high – to provide data on the gender statistics in their workforces, boards and executives.

Which meant that in 2020, enough data had been collected – from real companies, in real time – for analysts to have a proper crack at answering the question of whether improvements in gender balance actually improved a company's bottom-line performance.

Very few countries have this detailed data, so it was something of a sensation when clear evidence was discovered that improving the number of women on a company's board, or in its executive, could be linked causally with the improvement of that company's fortunes.

The director of WGEA at the time – Libby Lyons (granddaughter of Dame Enid Lyons, the first woman to serve in the House of Representatives) declared it to be a pivotal moment.

It was a subsequent WGEA director – the former Liberal politician Mary Wooldridge – who pushed for the pay data also to be released publicly. And it was the Morrison government's "Prime Minister for Women" – Marise Payne – who legislated this new approach in the late days of the Coalition government.

So much for government plots.

What does the data tell us?

But what does the data tell us? It tells us what the median pay is for men and women in the organisations covered. Some are – as the WGEA data sets out – roughly neutral. Some pay a lot more to men than they do to women. Qantas – and the other airlines with elevated figures – say that that's because the majority of their pilots and engineers are male and those are highly-paid jobs, while the majority of their lower-paid jobs (customer service workers, flight staff) are female.

Is this … is this not an interesting thing to know? I mean, if we totted up how much we've paid since Federation to Australian prime ministers who are male, and how much we've paid to PMs who are female, that would be a big disparity too. The difference is that we all know about that one. Finding out more about the big companies who sell to us, who advertise to us, who fly us about – that's far from useless data.

"Count Her In" – the theme of International Women's Day 2024 – is a timely reminder that counting things is always important.

The Dunkley by-election continued the theme

Speaking of which, the major democratic event of the past week was the Dunkley by-election, held to replace the late Peta Murphy MP.

Labor's candidate Jodie Belyea retained the seat for Labor, promising to carry on Murphy's feminist legacy, and thus the numbers of the House of Reps remained unchanged, as did the proportion of women in that chamber.

The Liberal party, having recently resolved again to Do Better in the matter of female representation while always adhering to the principle of merit-based preselection, preselected a male candidate in Nathan Conroy, who was duly vanquished notwithstanding a modest swing.

After the poll, The Australian reported searing denunciations from anonymous sources within the party – not of the male candidate who ran in Dunkley, or of the Opposition leader – but of the female sitting Liberal MP in the neighbouring seat, Zoe McKenzie, who after the result published a social media post warmly congratulating the winning Labor candidate, Ms Belyea.

"Zero political judgement," fumed one outraged Liberal. "Naive!" said another. "We are at war with Labor… to think this new breed of Liberal thinks otherwise is infuriating." Another asked how the party was supposed to attack this Labor MP at the next election (now that a Liberal woman had been nice to her).

There is no way of knowing for sure that these sources, talking to the bloke who wrote the story, were also blokes. I mean, from the anonymity, one might even infer a certain timidity, a certain delicacy around the rough and tumble of robust political debate, that might suggest they were all female?

I mean, it's possible. But seriously: Fellas. When your party's just lost a clutch of seats to independent female candidates, a result significantly driven by female voters who got sick of ideological warfare coming before community interest, is an act of courtesy-above-politics from one of your MPs who DIDN'T lose really your biggest worry? Is there… a merit problem going on here?

As Amanda Vanstone said in 2002, to a gathering of political women on the centenary of the federal Suffrage Act: "Each of us should think of the least useful MP we possibly can. Let me assure you of something, that when you get a woman that ineffective, that's when we'll have real equality."

Are we there yet, Amanda?

Not when, also this week, a preselection for the safe seat of a retiring PM was won – not by a female candidate, as the departing incumbent said he'd prefer, as did other senior Liberals, in warm and general terms – but instead by the meritorious candidate. A guy who doesn't live in the electorate and is indeed best-known in politics for losing — with a swing of 7.9 per cent — the previous seat for which he was preselected last election, which had belonged to another former PM and in which he also didn't live.

Long live merit! In all its glorious elasticity.