Former Liberal MP Sophie Mirabella has said her party must do more to redress the gender imbalance within the party – and has come out swinging against male Liberals who she claims ran an “orchestrated” campaign to undermine her election chances.

Ms Mirabella, who unsuccessfully re-contested the seat of Indi at the election, says she believes senior male Liberals backgrounded against her (and assistant treasurer Kelly O’Dwyer), in the early days of the campaign.

“So many blokes, so little courage,” Mirabella told reporters this week, adding: “It would be less objectionable if these people were geniuses, but they had serious deficiencies, as you can see from the election result.”

With only 13 women among the 60 Liberals elected to the lower house this month, the figure represents 21.7 per cent of the party’s MPs – a marginal decline, but a decline nevertheless in an already low proportion in the last parliament, where 17 women were among the 75 Liberal MPs (22.7 per cent).

Mirabella is urging the party not only to set, but to achieve targets on gender equity.

“Without the cultural change, it is not going to be attractive to a lot of women and the hurdles are significant,” she says.

Ms Mirabella (née Panopoulos), formerly a public policy fellow at the University of Melbourne, was one of the first to sign up to the Melbourne Declaration on Women’s Participation in Australian Politics in 2014. The declaration includes a commitment – at a minimum – to ensure that 40 per cent of party official, parliamentarian, ministerial, shadow ministerial appointments – across all political parties and parliaments are women over the next two candidate selection cycles, or by 2020, whichever is sooner.

While the Liberal federal executive has put forward “a national aspirational target of 50 per cent for female representation in Australian parliaments by 2025”, the ambition looks pie in the sky, particularly given each state division has to devise and agree a strategy for reaching it, and few in the party support a move to quotas.

Labor is looking to have the same split in parliament by 2025, but having set quotas, along with rules that require it to preselect 40 per cent women, quota targets are proving very difficult to meet, with the party still preselecting men in traditional Labor seats by a factor of about five to one.

Sophie Mirabella lost her bid to reclaim the seat of Indi to Independent Cathy McGowan, who achieved a 4.5 per cent swing against the Liberals after preferences. Mirabella’s first preference vote dropped over 17 per cent from the 2013 election, largely due to the Nationals Party fielding a candidate.