Women are invisible at the top of Australian business and many from diverse backgrounds are excluded from the traditional frontlines of feminism, Labor MP Anne Aly said on Wednesday.
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Delivering the 2016 Emily's List Oration in Canberra, the Cowan MP said her experience as the first woman on a previously all-male board had taught her that men regularly take credit for the work of women.
"It was then that I discovered the incredible power that we women have. We are invisible.
"Put us in a room full of alpha males and we don a magical cloak of invisibility. Believe me if I had the invisibility superpower there are a few things I would rather do with it."
Dr Aly argued that only full diversity in Parliament should be acceptable to contemporary Australian society.
"History is truly watching us, and we will be judged tomorrow for what we do today, so let's find more women," Dr Aly said.
"Let's build a movement bigger than any of us have ever seen. Let's disrupt, let's destroy the joint and when we celebrate wins, let's make sure all of us have something to celebrate.
"Only by doing so can we truly adhere to the core principle of feminism."
Australia's first Muslim woman elected to Parliament, the counter-terrorism expert said she had become aware of her own status as a minority at the age of six or seven.
Wondering why she didn't have a Barbie doll that looked like her, she was told by her mother thinking too much would make her go crazy and stop a man from marrying her.
"Too often I am told I must be quiet, a delicate flower, grateful for the equalities and opportunities afforded me because I live in Australia and not Saudi Arabia," Dr Aly said.
"Too often I am told that I should be happy that I even have a place at the table. Too often I am told by men that I should have stayed in the kitchen . . . Too often I am told not to get angry, not to be a diva, not to call out a nong when he is behaving like one."
Dr Aly said Australian women face disproportional impacts from disadvantage, including through the significantly higher rates of incarceration faced by Indigenous Australian women and racial abuse faced by Muslim women wearing traditional head coverings.
"We need to recognise that women like me don't need to be 'saved' from oppression or 'added' as an afterthought in the feminist movement.
"We do not need to be liberated and we do not need to be culturally converted in order to be feminists.
"The cultural patriarchy that binds you, that creates glass ceilings and concrete walls, binds us too though we may experience it in different ways," she said.
