Two weeks into the 2010 election campaign, Labor was in trouble. Partly as a circuit-breaker, Julia Gillard announced that from then on, voters would see the “real” Julia. “I’m going to discard all of that campaign advice and professional or common wisdom, and just go for it”, she said.

Kamala Harris, like Julia Gillard, is finding that, as a woman, she is held to a different standard.Credit: AP/Alex Ellinghausen

Gillard was slammed. If voters hadn’t been seeing the “real” her, who had they been seeing? Which was a reasonable question, except that many of those asking it had been criticising her for keeping her real self under wraps. She was damned either way. Really, these apparently contradictory criticisms were just different expressions of the same underlying suspicion: that there was something false or concealed about our first female prime minister. It’s worth noting her opponent, Tony Abbott, was subjected to some of the same complaints about restraint – though in his case it was often praised, too, as “discipline”.

This theme followed Gillard through her prime ministership: the idea that she was not showing herself; that something was fundamentally opaque. When she did........

© The Sydney Morning Herald