Australian women would get better policy outcomes if women led economic agencies, and if women’s representation increased in the federal parliament, according to the shadow assistant treasurer, Andrew Leigh.

Leigh will use a speech to the Women in Economics Network on Friday to argue part of the reason the gender gap and inequality in the tax system is not being addressed strategically is because women are not prominent enough in economic agencies.

He will say Australians have elected female prime ministers and premiers, and women have been appointed to senior roles in the courts, but Australia has never had a female treasury secretary, or Reserve Bank governor, or chair of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, or financial services regulators, or the Future Fund or the Productivity Commission.

“We need to change that,” Leigh will say Friday. “Good policies for women are more likely to emerge when there are more women in the room.”

Leigh will also point to comparatively low levels of parliamentary representation as a relevant consideration. In the national parliament, women make up 32.4% of participants.

Leigh says the conservative parties face particular representational challenges. “Women now comprise 46.3% of Labor’s federal representatives, about twice the share of the Liberal party 23.5%, and just 9.5% of National party parliamentarians are women.

“No political party is perfect but when Julia Banks last week announced that bullying and intimidation had led her to retire from politics after just one term, I couldn’t help thinking that the bad behaviour was partly a function of the Liberals having fewer women in the party room now than in 1998.”

Leigh’s speech lays out a lack of progress for women across a range of fronts – women earning 85 cents for every dollar earned by men; women twice as likely to be sexually harassed as men, and three times as likely to be a victim of intimate partner violence; half of mothers experiencing discrimination while pregnant, on maternity leave, or after returning to work; women doing a disproportionate share of house work; and women having half the superannuation balances of men.

He says the “tax system already exacerbates gender inequality in a number of important respects” – including women facing higher effective marginal tax rates than men.

Effective marginal tax rates are the proportion of an additional dollar of earnings that is lost to both income tax and the reduction of mean-tested government payments.

Leigh says high effective marginal tax rates dampen labour market participation, citing one study that finds a 10% increase in effective marginal tax rates reduces married women’s labour force participation by 3%, whereas men don’t change their behaviour.

“This result has led economists Alberto Alesina, Andrea Ichino and Loukas Karabarbounis to argue that, from the standpoint of optimal taxation theory, income tax rates should be lower on women than men,” Leigh will say.

“Before Scott Morrison’s head explodes, I should be clear that I am not making this proposal. My point is a different one: women are highly responsive to effective marginal tax rates, so if we want to encourage more women into work, we need to get the tax and transfer system right”.

He will say pursuing a feminist tax agenda is multifaceted. As well as reducing the incidence of high effective marginal tax rates, the tax system needs to remain progressive, tax loopholes need to be closed and governments need to stay away from higher consumption taxes that have a more adverse effect on women than on men.

“Gender gaps in Australia remain significant, and if we want our sons and daughters to grow up in a more equal world, it isn’t enough to just focus on how government spends money – we also have to look at how it raises revenue.”