Generation EEO Veteran social researcher Eva Cox can still vividly recall the day she applied for a job in the ABC's mail room as a young woman, believing the only requirement was the ability to sort letters and parcels. The hiring officer asked whether she could type and Cox replied that, no, she could not. The manager said, 'We don't have any jobs for women unless they can type'. And I said, 'How do you spell mail room? I stormed out. How do you spell mail room? Equal employment opportunity laws, introduced in the mid-1980s, were supposed to change all that and there are some shining examples of women in their 40s who have established their careers on a playing field which is, in theory, level. Telstra: Cynthia Whelan. Moya Dodd is a former Australian soccer player, a partner at legal firm Gilbert + Tobin and a member of FIFA's executive committee. At 48, she is at the top of her game and doesn't take the enormous cultural change of the past 25 years for granted. "It's easy to forget that in my lifetime women had to leave work when they got married or pregnant or they were in very small minorities in the professions they worked in," she said. Google: Maile Carnegie. Dodd has observed the breaking down of numerous barriers during her career, particularly in relation to balancing work and family. "I remember being a young lawyer at Mallesons when the first woman partner had a baby," she said. I don't know whether this is an urban myth or not but the story went that she had the baby on a Friday night and was back on Monday. Nobody at that time really knew what would happen to a woman partner if she had a baby and whether that might affect her work habits. Now of course it's a well-worn path. I think my generation owes them a lot because they showed that it was possible for a woman and a mother to contribute and succeed at the highest levels of her profession. Maile Carnegie, the new managing director of Google Australia and New Zealand, is 43 and has two young sons. In her previous role as Procter & Gamble's local boss, she insisted on travelling with her family in tow and would also work one day a week from home. "I was able to juggle my mum and corporate roles during a very demanding, high-travel time in my career," she told BRW in March. Pip Marlow, the managing director of Microsoft Australia, is in her early 40s and has two daughters aged nine and 12. She expressed the view that being a woman and having children has never held her back, noting that she was promoted at Microsoft during both her pregnancies. However, in the book 500 Words of Wisdom she acknowledged that true gender equality is still a fair way off. "Today, only 3 per cent of ASX 200 CEO positions are held by women but by the time my kids are in the workforce I want them to have an equal chance at achieving their full potential," she wrote. There are numerous individual examples of high-achieving members of generation equal opportunity who have established their careers in the era of legally enshrined equality. There's Fiona Simson, NSW president of the Farmers Federation, Telstra's head of strategic finance Cynthia Whelan, Reserve Bank of Australia board member Kathryn Fagg and NAB's private wealth executive general manager, Angela Mentis. But such achievements remain a rarity and the statistics for women overall remain fairly grim. The 2013 Boardroom Diversity Index, released by Women on Boards this month, revealed women comprise only 15.8 per cent of board positions in ASX Top 200 companies, although that marks a significant leap from 8.7 per cent in 2010. Among Australia's top 500 companies, there are only 13 female chairs and only 12 female CEOs. Workplace Gender Equality Agency statistics show women still earn 17.5 per cent less than men. In industries such as healthcare, finance and insurance and professional, scientific and technical services the gender pay gap is more than 30 per cent. There was a public outcry last week when Tony Abbott unveiled his 19-member cabinet which included only one woman - Julie Bishop. When asked how far we have come since that incident in the ABC's mail room and the introduction of the Commonwealth Sex Discrimination Act in 1984 followed by the Affirmative Action Act of 1986, Eva Cox lets out a laugh. "Well, we're not doing well in cabinet, we're not doing well on boards and we're not doing well on equal pay," she said. Yes, we have got rid of all the overt discrimination but what we have now is much more toxic. She pointed to Bob Hawke's recent comment that Tanya Plibersek might not be suitable to lead the Labor party as she had a three-year-old child, completely overlooking the fact Bill Shorten has a three-year-old at home too. "It's really good that we have equal opportunity laws but we only have half the problem solved because until we change workplace cultures and get a little easier on working hours and flexibility, things won't improve," Cox said. We still have a workforce that assumes the ideal worker is somebody without family responsibilities. Helen Conway, director of the Workplace Gender Equality Agency, agrees that progress has been slower than many would like. "People get very depressed about this topic," she said. We have been trying to get improvement for decades and many people say there has been glacial progress. But there have been some dramatic advances as well and we should not lose sight of that. She points out three key areas for improvement which would help address the gender balance, including increasing the number of women in leadership positions, reducing the gender pay gap and boosting female workforce participation which sits at 59 per cent. "We're in the middle of the pack of OECD countries on female workforce participation but you have to compare that with female educational attainment where we are generally rated at No.1," she said. The investment we are making on the education of women is not translating into increased workforce participation by women. Research by Ernst & Young released in July found that more than $8 billion of investment in education is being wasted as a result of women not going into full-time employment. Marian Baird, professor of employment relations at the University of Sydney, remembers the era when affirmative-action laws were being passed. "There were discussions about equal opportunity in all sorts of fields," she said. What always stuck in my mind is the difference between equal opportunity and equality of outcomes. We still haven't reached equality of outcomes. True equal opportunity will only be achieved when women can work collaboratively with their employers and male colleagues and partners. "Perhaps women have made all the changes they can possibly make, or want to make," she said. They take on more paid work, they do a greater share of domestic and childcare work. Where the shift now has to happen is amongst men and amongst workplaces. Whether or not that's going to actually happen is another question.