But it's all too slow. We are only at 34 per cent, while the United Kingdom got to 41 per cent this round and our friends across the ditch had more women than men on its list. Australia must embed change.

As Australian Honours and Awards Secretariat director Sharon Prendergast predicted in January, the dramatic increase in the number of women nominated for honours is finally trickling through. It's been a long, long battle for gender equality in this small part of our lives, the recognition that what women do is as important as what men do and that they too deserve recognition.

For years, there have been endless stories, just like this one; and any change was incremental one year, reversed the next. So it's positive but slow – and we should be aiming for 50-50 by 2020.

But 2018 signifies a shift, at least in this list. Cate Blanchett, for example, was the only woman among 15 Australians being named a Companion last year. Now there are six women out of 10. There's been a change up. More women nominated, more successful. More women at the top. Honour A Woman, the advocacy work of Elizabeth Hartnell-Young, Ruth McGowan OAM and Carol Kiernan, is bearing fruit – but harvest is a way off.

State and federal governments must be proactive – Victoria now has embedded its own process for nominations, so Victorian women are recognised. Other governments need to step up. It can't just be on the community – because that means that only those with the resources can nominate.

The positive news? This year, the percentage of women nominated has grown by nearly 10 per cent; and by more than 70 per cent since 2013, according to the honours secretariat. Women used to make up only 30 per cent of those nominated, now it's close to 40 per cent; and the success rate for nominations of women was nearly 80 per cent, 10 percentage points higher than the success rate for men.

But there are still some inequities in the nomination process (although, it's become a lot easier since it moved to electronic nomination forms – a more than 70 per cent increase year on year). The honours secretariat did a quick analysis of the gender of those nominating against the gender of the nominees. Men appear to have a lot of time to do these nominations: this year they nominated more than double the number of men than women (386 to 158), while women were much more even-handed (142 women and 126 men). This might just mean that men get more help in office with their nominations (after all they made 544 nominations all up, nearly double the number of women who made nominations). Maybe women should hold nomination hackathons.

Yet there is something else about this list that is ground-breaking for our country. Just one week ago, when New Zealand published its Order of Merit, Catherine Healy, the founder in 1986 of the New Zealand Prostitutes Collective, was made a Dame Companion for services to the rights of sex workers. When I heard that news, I thought it could never happen here. But Julie Bates knew differently. Bates, 68, sex worker and activist, had moved house when the letter with the notification of her successful nomination was sent – instead, she got an email eight weeks ago with a crown insignia.

Her initial response was not one of elation, instead she thought: "What have I done now?"

That's what happens when you've spent years fighting authority for its disgraceful attitude to sex work and sex workers. She says her Kiwi mate Healy had the same response when she first heard about her award.

"We still live with a bit of trauma around those days and we fought hard to make changes," Bates says.

Bates's recognition may be a sign the list will no longer be comprised of straight white men really being honoured for their paid work. Not that there's anything wrong with that – but there are so many Australians who do the work of activists and advocates and make real change. Blessed be the troublemakers, the people who stand up for those at the margins.

They are from all kinds of backgrounds, maybe born here, maybe not, but they deserve to be recognised for the way they support this country. And one way to encourage diverse nominations is to make the list more transparent. From what is published, it is impossible to know whether this list of honourees reflects the Australia we live in. We know gender and we know postcode (an analysis I did a few years back showed that wealthy postcodes were more likely to produce honours – but from there, it's all guesswork).

But Australia is more than men and women, more than rich or poor. Is it too hard to ask on the nomination form (or even at the award time) whether someone wants to say they are from other cultures, ethnicities, religions, races?

The word Indigenous appears 27 times but it's hard to know whether those people are actually Indigenous (and, while we are at it, could someone please explain to me the omission of Adam Goodes?).

I note that it's not just Goodes. Rosie Batty and Tim Flannery are also missing.

Blessed be the troublemakers. Without them, this country would be worse off.

Jenna Price is a Fairfax columnist and an academic at the University of Technology Sydney.