Mrs Mirabella would have sat in Tony Abbott's cabinet as Industry Minister had she not lost her seat of Indi to independent Cathy McGowan at the 2013 election.

Speaking in her new role as a public policy fellow at the University of Melbourne, Mrs Mirabella said she felt "propelled" to do something to boost female participation after watching recent Victorian state Liberal preselections.

"I felt somewhat responsible having lost my seat and deprived the government of a second woman in cabinet and thought perhaps there is something I can do to precipitate this discussion," she told a bipartisan panel discussion in Melbourne on Wednesday night.

Less than one-third of Australia's parliamentarians are women and less than one-fifth of Abbott government ministers are female..

Former Labor staffer Nick Reece, a fellow with the University of Melbourne, was also on the panel and showed a graph that named Rwanda as the country with the highest number of women in parliament. Australia's world ranking in terms of the number of women elected to its national parliament has plummeted from number 21 in 2001 to 45 in 2013.

Another graph showed the Liberal Party has failed to significantly lift the percentage of women in Australian parliaments for a decade. Despite gains in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the number of women in Australian parliaments is now lower than at its peak in 2010.

But Mrs Mirabella warned against short-term measures like changing party rules or legislating quotas to address the problem.

"They come from long term change in the culture of the political parties and the communities in which we live," she said.

Kelly O'Dwyer, a rising star in the Abbott government, said she wanted to see more than just one woman in the federal cabinet, claiming many of her female colleagues who deserve promotion were being overlooked.

Ms O'Dwyer, the MP for Higgins in Melbourne's south-east, said she would not hide her disapproval with her own government's lack of female representation in leadership roles.

"I would like to see more women in cabinet," she said.

"There are lots of very good female colleagues of mine who are ripe for promotion. The question is how do we drive that change."

The sole woman in cabinet, Foreign Minister Julie Bishop, is widely considered one of the government's best performers.

Liberal National MP Teresa Gambaro has called for an immediate reshuffle to boost the number of women in the executive, saying the current situation "cannot be allowed to continue".

But a senior government source has told Fairfax Media the party did not have enough women ready to promote to cabinet at the time of its 2013 election victory.

However, several female members of the outer ministry have since performed strongly, including Marise Payne, Sussan Ley and Michaelia Cash and would likely be considered for promotion in any reshuffle.

Former speaker Anna Burke told Wednesday's panel the corporate sector also had a role to play in fixing the gender imbalance.

She added women in politics will have "made it" when one of the major parties appoints it's first female treasurer.

She said while women had become national leaders and foreign ministers, they are rarely given the task of managing national economies.

A petition, dubbed the Melbourne Declaration, was launched at Wednesday's event. It calls for new targets for women to make up at least 40 per cent of party officials, parliamentarians, ministers and shadow ministers by 2020 or over the next two candidate-selection cycles. The targets would be across all political parties and all tiers of government.

with Nick Toscano 

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