Would Julia Gillard still be prime minister if she were not a woman? She has managed to split her party and the nation, sowing division and discord on gender, class and xenophobic lines that have won her the approval of Pauline Hanson but few others.

She remains prime minister because of these dishonorable tactics.

She continues to play the gender card not just to try to neutralise her male opponent but to ward off the rational men of the old school in her party, like Martin Ferguson and Simon Crean, who tried to impart the message last week that polarisation is the road to electoral oblivion.

Gillard claims to be a victim of "misogyny" _ as if her problems are a result of being a woman in a man's world.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

She has had a rails run because of her sex.

As instigator of the Emily's List quota doctrine that has contributed to the ALP's decline, she was elevated because of her sex, not in spite of it.

Any questions around her past career as a union lawyer were ignored because she was a woman.

The due diligence that should have been performed before the Labor Party elevated her to the most important job in the nation was less rigorous because she was a woman.

And then, as her judgment was found wanting, the mistakes piled up, the polls plummeted and her colleagues came to the terrible realisation she was, if anything, worse than Kevin Rudd, she whipped out the failed woman's last resor: the gender card.

Suddenly, out of the blue, last October she accused Tony Abbott of misogyny for such terrible sins as looking at his watch while she was speaking.

She began popping up in women's magazines with her team of women. "The ministry of sisters" is how The Monthly puts it, as Gillard created a human shield of female colleagues.

She pandered to obscure mummy bloggers, inviting them repeatedly to Kirribilli House and to a private dinner in Rooty Hill while ignoring the plain-speaking men and women of Labor's heartland outside.

Right on cue, feminist author Anne Summers returned to prominence with a series of speeches and articles claiming Gillard's bad press was the result of sexism.

Despite suggestions last week that she was a victim of misogyny because she was being challenged by men, the fact is Gillard's sex protects her.

Labor men are afraid of being called out as sexist, which in this blokey party with its roots in the even blokier trade union movement, is not too far from the truth.

Exhibit A: a video circulating last week showing Bill Shorten and Mark Butler in parliament ostentatiously ogling their comely colleague Kate Ellis.

All Gillard has left now is the label of "toughness" Wayne Swan keeps tweeting about.

Last week she was reduced to declaring herself "a strong, feisty woman" pitted against a "policy-weak man".

Abbott cannot respond in kind because of the twisted politics of gender.

Gillard complains about being hindered by her sex when it is Abbott who is expected to fight clean while she fights dirty.

She is free to abuse the opposition leader while he is forced on to a playing field littered with landmines.

Gillard and Abbott's speeches at Thursday's formal apology for past adoption practices illustrate the point.

Gillard's speech was mechanical, empty, and pandered to the sense of grievance and victimhood that real leadership avoids.

It even contained a seed of discord in its attempt to match Rudd's stolen generation apology, which is regarded by some as his finest moment.

Abbott's speech by contrast was real, inclusive, and rooted in his own painful youthful experience of a former girlfriend's unplanned pregnancy and the baby they adopted out.

He could not have expressed more sympathy for the women who lost their babies to forced adoption, but he also paid tribute to birth fathers and adoptive parents.

In a sign that the Opposition Leader is damned whatever he does in the eyes of some women, his speech was interrupted by angry hecklers.

They were enraged that he had used the term "birth parents" and because he said adoptions "have to be chosen and they have to be for the right reasons".

Expressing the anti-adoption zealotry that has taken over the debate, one woman in the crowd declared: "All adoptions should be banned."

Abbott rescued what was becoming a political disaster by correcting himself.

And yet the report of the Senate Committee into Former Forced Adoption Policies, which gave rise to the apology, uses the language he used: "Birth parent" is used 69 times, "birth mother" 15 times and "birth father" 11 times.

How else do you distinguish between the people who contributed the DNA and gave birth and the people who adopted the child and brought it up. It's not a value judgment but a statement of fact.

But as the hecklers demonstrated, the stigma against adoption now defies common sense and the best interests of children in an era of escalating child abuse and neglect.

The apology only made it worse.

As the Centre for Independent Studies' Dr Jeremy Sammut writes in a new report on adoption: "In reaction to past forced adoption practices, Australian child protection authorities believe in family preservation at nearly all costs, which profoundly harms children by prolonging the time they spend in the custody of abusive or neglectful parents, or in temporary foster care."

Gillard's speech ignored the harms of demonising adoption and played to its audience. It brought rapturous reviews: her "finest" moment.

As she hugged women in the audience, and Abbott edged his way out through hostile territory, the message was that only a woman could show such empathy.

That is the sexist, patronising fraud which Gillard has decided will save her career. The reality is her party is paralysed because the stakes are so much higher to remove Australia's first female prime minister. But, ironically, the example of her catastrophic leadership of the Labor party has set back the cause of women's progress.