ABSTRACT
It is difficult to feel anything other than discouraged when considering the general context for women today. There have been advances, of course, particularly in the latter part of the 20th century in Australia. Women have achieved, for example, equal pay for equal work, the ability to pursue any area of study, to apply for jobs in almost every area of employment, and have access to maternity leave, but the lived reality for women is not as equals to men in Australian society. Women earn a third less than men in equivalent positions in 15 industries, across 350 jobs and from 556 companies. In some cases women were paid 50% of male wages for the same work. Women in full-time positions earned 81% of their male counterparts’ salary packages; the implication drawn from this was that women were not as able as men in negotiating salary packages (Carson, 2000b, p. 3). The Australian Centre of Industrial Relations Research and Training predicts that at the current rate of change women would have to wait 177 years to have true equality in the workplace (Carson, 2000a, p. 9).
