Advance Australia Fair! I can't think of a better title for a session exploring issues affecting women in the workplace. 

Because we want a fair deal for women. We have not had that for far too long but we can hope that, with the election of the Rudd government, that is going to change.

In the time available to me today, I want to remind us of what we lost under the Howard government and what we want restored to us under the Rudd/Gillard government.

In November 2003, I published a book called The End of Equality, which documented the reversal of women's rights under the coalition government.  It made three key points:

• That the Howard government brought an ideological perspective to women and tried to send us back to the 1950s; in particular, it tried to bribe us into having more babies and it used policy to deter mothers from working, unless they were single mothers in which case they were given no choice.

• The Howard government also downgraded, disempowered or outright abolished key agencies and offices designed to advocate for women's equality and to monitor our progress.  As a result, it sent a strong signal to the community that women's status was no longer of concern. 

• As a result of these key moves, women's status declined in almost every area, their earnings dropped, and their opportunities for promotion and leadership were constricted.

Today that is still the case. We know that women still are treated unequally in employment, both with the jobs they get (or, more accurately, don't get) and the remuneration they receive. Women still receive on average around $300 a week less than men, and the situation is getting worse.

ACTU President Sharan Burrow released a report in March this year that showed that women earn 84 cents for every dollar earned by men, down from 87 cents in 2004.

It seems the higher up you go in an organisation, the worse the pay discrimination is.  A recent report from the Equal Employment for Women in the Workplace Agency (EOWA) revealed that women CEOs receive only 67 per cent of what male CEOs get, while Chief Financial Officers are even worse done by, getting just 49 per cent of the salaries of their male counterparts.

As an example of CEO pay disparity, you just have to look at the case of the newly appointed CEO of Westpac, Gail Kelly. According to reports at the time of her appointment, Kelly was to have an annual salary of $2.1 million. Last year, David Morgan, her predecessor as CEO, took home $8.41 million.

We know that despite women graduating in equal, or even greater numbers, from universities that they soon fall behind in the workplace. The higher up you go in any organisation, the fewer the women. At the very top, the numbers are pathetic: less than 10 per cent of senior management positions, and less than 10 per cent of directorships are held by women. And the numbers are not improving.

When it comes to the new government, the questions we all want answered are:

• Will women be better off under the Rudd government?
• In what ways will they be better off?
• Is there need to worry that in some ways we could be worse off?

While there have been some early indications of the government's willingness to respond in a positive way to enabling women to participate on an equal footing with men socially and politically there have also been some worrying oversights. I think we were all pretty stunned when the government neglected to achieve anything remotely resembling gender balance in the selection of people to chair sessions at the 2020 Summit.

There was a surprisingly strong and angry reaction to this news. It became a big story in the media and put the government on the back foot in an area where it had tried to demonstrate its equality-promoting credentials. 

Sadly, we have become accustomed to having our history ignored or distorted; we know that our present is still subject to discrimination, violence and enduring double standards.  But, we could console ourselves with the hope that at least the future would be different.

Then the government planned a huge event to discuss the future of Australia and women were almost entirely excluded from the running of the event, and gender issues were nowhere to be found in the agenda of topics being discussed.

In other words, we are not even going to have a say in our own future.  No wonder so many women felt sick with anger and disappointment.  I have met quite a few women who say this fiasco prompted them to write their first-ever letter to a Prime Minister.

Obviously, it did not occur to the men who signed off on the Committee list that there was anything wrong with it. Let us hope that this blunder by the Rudd government will be an early wake-up call that it needs to be mindful of gender balance when making appointments. 

Anne Summers is a best-selling author and journalist who has had a long career in politics, the media and the non-government sector. Her political background includes her time as a political adviser to Prime Minister Paul Keating prior to the 1993 federal elections and she ran the Office of the Status of Women for Prime Minister Bob Hawke from 1983 to 1986.

Ms Summers also presented these ideas at the 20th annual Women, Management and Employment Relations Conference, held in Sydney in July.