Of the 968 people who made the Queen's Birthday honours list on Monday, women received just 30.6 per cent of those awards.

I could have sworn it was 2017.

Those skewed statistics instantly took me back to the olden days, say the late-1970s.

I imagined women were being increasingly better represented in Queen’s Birthday honours, Australia Day awards and other prestigious titles, year-on-year. 

The statistics tell a different story.

The Queen’s Birthday honours list showed that the percentage of awards that went to women had dropped even lower than the five-year average, which was already hovering around 31 per cent.

In the general division of the Order of Australia, women made up just 30 per cent of the recipients with 467 males and 206 females.

The gender disparity showed we haven’t made much progress at all and, in fact, were going slightly backwards.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” my husband goads me.

“Cate got an award, didn’t she?”

“Do you know how absolutely, beyond extraordinarily gifted Cate Blanchett is?” I reply.

He agrees: “Yes, Cate is great.”

There was no doubting the calibre of prize-winners on Monday.

On the Border the brilliant Dr John Brabant was honoured for his service to the homeless as the founder of Carevan while the scribe who inspired me as a 12-year-old reader of The Border Mail, Howard Jones, was recognised for his journalism and history-writing. Fertility specialist Dr Scott Giltrap was another standout recipient at home.

But as The Border Mail editorial (June 12) pointed out: Of the 12 OAMs distributed in our region, just a single laurel went to a female. That means 92 per cent of OAMs went to men, despite them representing 50 per cent of the population.

Liz Chapman’s groundbreaking work on the Today: Tomorrow Foundation in the Benalla community was rightly honoured on Monday. She was the sole female recipient in our region.

Every week I meet or read about extraordinary women doing extraordinary things to make the Border a better place.

Therefore the lack of women represented in Queen’s Birthday honours and Australia Day awards can only come down to the nomination process.

The Sydney Morning Herald reported: In September 1990, Senator Margaret Reynolds (former minister assisting the PM for the status of women) issued a report titled Women and the Order of Australia.

She found women were not being nominated in equal numbers to men and she urged women's organisations to alert their members to the nomination process.

In 1992, the Lavarch parliamentary committee conducted an Inquiry into Equal Opportunity and Equal Status for Australian Women. Its report, Halfway to Equal, made two recommendations relating to women and the honours system: a fully-funded public awareness campaign, and that the honours secretariat investigate “making the process more accessible to the public to ensure that the contribution of women, particularly in the voluntary sector, is recognised and nominations are made”.

Now a quarter of a century later we’re in the year 2017.

The more things change the more they stay the same.