It might be too late, though.

Around the country, one female Liberal MP has been replaced by a bloke and several others are under threat from them.

The party of "individual merit" is already three-quarters male in parliament.

But, finally, the Liberals might have found a solution.

The Dame Enid Lyons Fund, named after Australia's first woman in federal parliament, will financially back women in marginal or winnable seats.

"The Liberal party has got an incredibly proud history when it comes to women," Women's Minister Kelly O'Dwyer said this week.

She's putting in $50,000, so is the prime minister, and other MPs have promised to donate.

It won't change the culture of the Liberal party, where prospective candidates have been quizzed about possible pregnancies and who will look after the kids.

And it won't make it easier for women to win difficult preselections, in which they have to convince largely grey-haired branches to take a chance on them.

But the fund is a proper liberal idea.

The market of voters has decided having more women in parliament is desirable.

So how should a free-market party get enough women in to meet that demand?

Invest.

Investing in a dramatic lift in the number of women MPs is an investment in the Liberal party's electoral future.

The money is finally swinging in behind what the market wants.

The Labor party's quotas were never going to work for the Liberals. They are fundamentally opposed to them on every level.

But it has worked beautifully for the ALP, which decided in the 1990s to lift the number of women MPs.

Almost half of all federal Labor MPs are women. The quotas have been a success.

Redistributing wealth is Labor to the bone. In this case, they decided to redistribute seats from men to women.

It's perfectly Labor - and completely against everything the Liberals stand for.

Ms O'Dwyer said out of 385 cabinet ministers in Australia's history, 24 have been women, the majority from the coalition.

"The Liberal party has demonstrated through direct action that women can serve at the very highest levels of government and they can make a contribution," she said.

"Can we do more? Absolutely."

The fund comes too late for assistant minister Jane Prentice, who lost her preselection to a man.

NSW Liberal MP Ann Sudmalis is under pressure from a bloke.

South Australian senators Anne Ruston and Lucy Gichuhi could be pushed down the Senate ticket for a man.

Victorian senator Jane Hume has also been targeted.

The federal Liberal website lists just 21 women in its team of 85. That looks set to drop lower at the next election.

And this could be where the Liberals' free-market model fails.

"We will never have quotas. We are not a party of quotas. So we're having to work through how we get more women into parliament and how we can keep them," Liberal senator Linda Reynolds says.

Key party leaders recognise they need more women but preselections are decided by local branches, which are generally older and more conservative.

Without intervention to force branches to pick women, can the Dame Enid Lyons Fund prove successful?

Labor fought that problem with quotas. If the free-market solution fails, maybe the Liberals will take a leaf out of the Nationals' book.

Their coalition deal includes a carve-up of ministries to ensure a quota of Nationals get plumb jobs, regardless of whether the MPs are any good or not.

The market is swinging money behind female candidates but markets have to be regulated otherwise they get distorted by powerful interests.

Perhaps if this investment doesn't pay off fast enough the Liberal brains trust will decide just a little bit of market regulation is better than none.

Australian Associated Press