Equal access to work is as important as equal pay, and the two are closely interconnected. Inequalities in men and women’s workforce participation impact on every individual’s ability to reach their full potential in the workplace and are therefore a key issue on the equal opportunity agenda.

Examples of how women’s workforce experience differs from that of men’s include that:

• Women have less access than men to overtime, over-award payments, allowances, bonuses and other employment benefits;
  
• Women are over-represented in lower-paid industries (eg health, community services);
  
• Women are over-represented in lower-paid occupations (eg, over half of all employed women are concentrated in two occupations - clerks and sales, and personal service workers);
  
• Women are more likely than men to work part-time – they make up 71% of the part-time labour force and 34 per cent of the full-time labour force ; and
  
• Of the top 200 companies listed on the Australian Stock Exchange, only one CEO is a woman.
  

Bearing children also has a greater impact on women’s incomes than on men:

• Employed mothers with dependant children are much more likely to work part-time than employed fathers with dependant children - 57 per cent of employed mothers work part-time compared to only 5 per cent of employed fathers. 
  
• Women with dependant children are much less likely to be employed than men with dependant children.
  
• Women’s lifetime earnings are significantly affected by having children– in 1986 a woman with secondary education and two children was likely to earn $510,000 less over her lifetime than her childless counterpart. By 1997, women were twice as likely to return to the workforce when their children reach preschool age as they had been in 1986. Consequently, the lifetime earnings gap had narrowed to $172,000.