Australian country singer Keith Urban has launched a new song inspired by the Harvey Weinstein allegations, and performed it at the Country Music awards in Nashville on Thursday night.

The song, Female, features vocals from Urban’s wife, Nicole Kidman, who has worked with Weinstein on several films, and was written by Shane McAnally, Nicolle Galyon and Ross Copperman.

Copperman told Associated Press it was inspired by allegations of sexual abuse against Weinstein.

“We were in a room and we were like, ‘what can we do about this?’ And that’s the one thing we could do, is write songs.”

Female features lyrics including “When somebody laughs and implies that she asked for it, just ‘cause she was wearin’ a skirt/ Oh, is that how this works?” and “When you hear somebody say somebody hits like a girl ... Is that such a bad thing?”

On Thursday, Urban confirmed that Kidman did the backing vocals on the song, along with Galyon. “I thought it was very nice and personal to blend these girls into the song, because it felt very, very right,” he said. He told Rolling Stone that when he first heard the song, “It affected me not just as a husband but also a father of two young girls, and a son.”

“I think it’s time for a recalibrating of the past, you know?” Urban told Associated Press. “Things have been a certain way for a long, long time and I think you’re seeing a turning of the tide for that right now ... This song spoke to me so strongly that I just wanted to get in and record it right away.”

Last month, Kidman spoke out in support of the victims of domestic abuse and workplace harassment: “We need to eradicate this behaviour,” she said.

This week, screenwriter Aaron Sorkin detailed an experience early in his career – when he was working on the 1993 film Malice starring Kidman and Alec Baldwin – that he said highlighted how widespread gender imbalance and harassment was in Hollywood.

“The director [Harold Becker], very close to the start of photography, decided that we were missing a sex scene between Alec and Nicole,” Sorkin told USA Today. “I went back to the hotel and I wrote like four pages of banter that ended with them falling into bed and we cut to the next day. Harold Becker said, ‘No, no, no, you have to write the scene.’

“I said, ‘Boy, exactly what do you mean?’ And he said, ‘Look, it’s easy, just go back to your hotel and write what you’d like to see Nicole Kidman do.”

Sorkin refused to write in the scene, but it got shot regardless. “Without me in attendance, Harold, the director, Alec and Nicole got into a trailer and they decided what they were going to do. It got done. It’s a terrible scene.”

For the most part, this year’s Country Music awards dodged politics, as hosts stayed notably silent on the topic of gun control – a key issue for the industry following last month’s mass shooting at Las Vegas country music festival Route 91 Harvest, which left 58 people dead.

The Country Music Association (CMA) issued guidelines last week requesting journalists to “refrain from focusing your coverage ... on the Las Vegas tragedy, gun rights, political affiliations or topics of the like”, a request it was forced to retract following public criticism. It still has not commented on the allegations of sexual abuse against prominent CMA member Kirt Webster.

Urban’s song has received a mixed response – some critics say it essentialises women, and have called the song “truly atrocious”, “mansplaining” and “maddening”.

“Urban’s well-meaning song is maddening because it points to a wider problem. Many men have been conditioned to believe that they deserve points and prizes simply for showing up to feminist causes,” wrote Daisy Buchanan in The Pool.

Others have applauded Female for its message of empowerment, delivered in a genre that tends to be apolitical and in which women are under-represented.

“No matter how you feel about the ballad, it’s an important song to have in country music right now from one of the biggest stars in the genre,” writes Emily Yahr in Washington Post. “As an influential Nashville figure, Urban has the power to inspire other artists to record songs with a message.”