Former prime minister Julia Gillard takes a glance back at the House before leaving question time on Thursday. Credit: Alex Ellinghausen The heroine's journey is not an easy one. The path of women's leadership, says feminist writer Maureen Murdock, has no well-defined guide-posts, no map and no straight lines. It is a journey that seldom receives validation from the outside world, but instead faces sabotage and interference. It's a textbook description of Gillard's time in power. It was never really a surprise that the press, the public and the Labor spin doctors struggled to create a narrative for "the real Julia". What stories do our history and literature provide to nourish an understanding of an Australian woman trailblazer? Too often in heroic tales, women are confined to bit parts of virgin, mother and whore. Gillard was none of these. No wonder no one seemed to know what to do with the flame-haired woman vying for the leading role in the story. Last night, Gillard was ambivalent about the impact gender had on her rise and fall. It explained some of what had happened to her, she said, but not all of it. In social media, there were fewer shades of grey, as men and women from across the country acknowledged the impact of an underlying sexism, even misogyny, on her leadership.

Gillard's journey, although not triumphant in the way so many women and men hoped, provides a rich legacy nonetheless. She's changed the role of prime minister forever by capably knitting together the loose threads of an election to create a durable, hardworking government. The 43rd Parliament has passed more than 500 separate pieces of legislation, most of them with bipartisan support. She has demonstrated that a good leader is prepared to answer the hard questions, whether they come from the floor of a packed media conference or the Q&A audience, and that the best political moments are those that are truly authentic. Losing a beloved father and returning to work a week later, then going on to deliver the greatest speech of her political life took guts. She will deserve the long-term accolade that the "misogyny speech" gives her. But the former lawyer's real legacy is her legislative reforms. Cold, asbestos-ridden makeshift classrooms have long been the norm for the majority of Australian school children in the public sector. When Labor came to power it inherited a decade of Coalition neglect of education. The GFC gave Labor the economic stimulus it needed to pump $15.9 billion into schools across the country as part of the Building Education Revolution – 7920 schools, 10,475 state-of-the-art learning facilities. We must never forget that Gillard presided over this investment as education minister.

The BER, MySchool and a national curriculum were not enough for Gillard, though. Only a long-term Labor goal – the redistribution of school funding based on need – would do. Gillard meant it when she said that seeing every child get an opportunity for a good education had been the "defining passion" of her life. Sadly, the Gonski reforms passed the Senate just as the leadership slipped through her fingers. With fellow EMILY's Listers in her cabinet, Gillard also used her time as PM to ensure that caring for the young, old and people with disabilities – responsibilities borne traditionally by women – became a shared responsibility of the nation. She delivered on paid parental leave and disability care, and reduced the cost burden of caring for lung cancer patients by diminishing cigarette consumption. Every one of these reforms happened on her watch because she let her talented caucus achieve. Of course, Gillard didn't make every woman happy. Single mothers, women locked behind razor wire in our detention facilities and lesbians wanting to marry are right to feel let down by her term. No leader is perfect. One of her final, important gifts as prime minister was to women. The much-maligned speech at the Women for Gillard launch achieved what it set out to do – to wedge Tony Abbott on abortion. We should all be grateful to Gillard, said Anne Summers at last week's EMILY's List Oration, for flushing Abbott out. After Gillard's speech, he was forced to publicly rule out doing a deal on abortion with Senator John Madigan, or any other senator holding the balance of power.

Sadly, on the day the world stopped to listen to little-known US Democrat Senator Wendy Davis filibuster a bill designed to roll back Roe v Wade in Texas, in our own country we bid goodbye to our first openly feminist, pro-choice prime minister. EMILY's List believes 50/50 representation of the sexes is a key to great leadership. In the three-year Labor leadership merry-go-round, there's a lesson for all of us about the noble and heroic things shared leadership between genders can achieve. In the political world of my imagining, there is room for shared leadership between women and men, without a need for ego. One woman in the top job was never the aim of our organisation. We want parity between the sexes. So while we pay tribute to Julia and the other women of her generation – Trish Crossin, Kirsten Livermore, Nicola Roxon – who are leaving federal parliament, we call on the next generation of heroic women to step forward. You will, of course, need to be brave. It is the lot of a heroine to discover, midway through her journey, that success is illusory. Having got the very thing she craves for, the heroine often realises there is so much more. Witness Hillary Clinton, vanquished by her loss to Obama in the democratic primaries, reborn as secretary of state and now the forerunner for the presidential nomination in 2016.

Gillard's best years are before her. She will be feted here and overseas for championing causes dear to the hearts of women across the globe, just as Helen Clark, Hillary Clinton, Mary Robinson and other trailblazing political heroines have been. Loading Tanja Kovac is a writer, lawyer and national co-convenor of EMILY's List Australia. EMILY's List was established to help promote Labor women. Follow the National Times on Twitter