Not everybody in the Ireland of the 1970s was enthused about giving women a leg up the corporate ladder. Speaking in the Seanad, Fine Gael's Dalgan Lyons said that the Catholic church's teaching was that "a woman's place is in the home and that her first duty is to the family".

"Let us face it, " he continued, "the question of equal opportunity in the home would be decried by every male I know because no male would accept the duties of a woman in the home for 24 hours a day and seven days a week. A woman has to rear her family and at the same time, probably has to endure the problems associated with husbands, problems which are not negligible."

This, it has to be said, was at a time when the civil service had only just lifted its ban on married women holding any job in the civil service . . . a ban which the current secretarygeneral of the Department of Transport, Julie O'Neill (see panel), said had denied the state the services of hundreds of bright and intelligent women.

At the time, women had also only just started being employed as cashiers in the banks. Up until then, the banks had said that businessmen would not lodge money in what would be regarded as an "unsound and unbusinesslike" organisation if they employed women.

'That's women for you' Sixteen years later, little had changed. In 1992, the then Taoiseach, Albert Reynolds, put his politically incorrect foot right in it when, in the face of constant interruption from Fine Gael's Nora Owen during a debate on the illfated abortion bill, he leaned back and said "that's women for you".

Two years earlier, the former EU commissioner, Padraig Flynn made a far more serious gaffe when, during the 1990 presidential campaign, he remarked on radio about candidate Mary Robinson's "new- found interest in her family".

This remark seriously backfired for Flynn and Fianna Fail, and only galvanised support . . . particularly from women . . . for Robinson, who romped home and was duly installed as the first woman president of Ireland.

The then Taoiseach, Charles Haughey, recognised the scale of Flynn's mistake and, at Robinson's inauguration ceremony, admitted that "untoward, hurtful and wounding" remarks had been made.

While Haughey pleaded that such rows be "set aside", a year later he and Flynn were both gone and Robinson went on from the Park to the UN.

But while women have undoubtedly made significant strides across the shop floor, inequality still exists 30 years on. The last major Irish survey on pay differences between men and women, conducted by the ESRI in 2001, showed that women across the country still earned 15% less than men.

Same work, less pay A more targeted survey by the ESRI before last Christmas indicated there had been little to no movement since then. A study of the pay differences between male and female graduates just three years after leaving college showed that "a significant" hourly pay gap of over 8% . . .

14.70 for men and 13.50 for women . . . was evident among graduates working in the private sector. There was no gap, however, in the public sector.

The ESRI focused on graduates just three years into their careers on the basis that most would not yet have started a family. This meant that what the ESRI termed "the wage penalty around motherhood" would not be factored into the survey so that any difference in pay could be put down to raw discrimination.

On top of the considerable 8% salary gap in the private sector, this study also found that more men than women received bonuses at work.

Even where both received bonuses, men on average were paid over 2,900 while women got 2,200 . . . a difference which pushed the earnings pay gap out to 13%.

Last year, a separate survey of human resources managers . . . ironically a profession now dominated by women . . .

showed a massive 37% pay gap, with women earning an average of 43,000 a year while men enjoy 59,000.

A third ESRI survey produced around the same time more than hinted at underlying causes for the gap. The ESRI's Time Study showed that women spent on average almost five-and-a-half hours a day doing unpaid housework and looking after children and the elderly, while men managed just over an hour daily at the same activity.

Men, however, were way ahead in terms of time spent in the pub, whiling away an average of 25 minutes a day at the bar while women could only fit in 11 minutes.

Probably the biggest gain made by women over the last 30 years has been their increased participation rate in the workforce, giving them financial independence from their husbands.

Back in the 1970s, just over 13% of married women in Ireland were engaged in paid work. Today, that figure has ballooned to over 60% and rising. Of the over 90,000 jobs created last year, 40,000 were taken up by immigrant workers. But the next biggest group of 25,000 were women aged 40-plus returning to the workforce after their children were reared.

The downside, however, is that the majority of these women take lower-paid service-related jobs, copperfastening the ghettoisation of women into lower-paid jobs.

The fear is that economic necessity is forcing women into poorly paid jobs rather than potentially well-paid careers.

According to Gillian Bowler, who rose rapidly to the top of the business world with her company, Budget Travel (see panel), the growing economy has provided women with greater opportunities but it has also created new issues around how working couples manage the shrinking number of family hours in the day.

Claiming Civil rights Despite the public service being to the fore on equality, almost 80% of the lower paid clerical officer grade are still women while men dominate the top grade of secretarygeneral. This has given rise to several claims of indirect discrimination from the CPSU trade union, which represents clerical officers in the civil service.

Last year, it won over 23m from the government after successfully arguing that its clerical officers did greater value work than the higherpaid 'paperkeeper' grade which, up until recently, was solely reserved for men.

The CPSU will shortly ratchet up the battle when it lodges more than 10,000 equality claims, potentially worth 300m, against . . . somewhat ironically . . . the Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform, Michael McDowell.

The lotto-like claim follows last month's decision that seven clerical officers working in garda stations should be paid the same as the gardai working on clerical duties beside them, who earn up to 10,000 more.

Though these claims are seen as opportunistic by the government, the CPSU says that the reason it takes, and wins, these cases is because discrimination against women still exists in the public service.

Back in the mid-'70s, while introducing the equality legislation in Ireland, the then minister for labour, Michael O'Leary, said that while the new law was a beginning, "the full realisation of equality between men and women will necessitate changes in deeprooted assumptions and attitudes about women's and men's roles in social and economic arrangements".

Thirty years on, it seems that many of those assumptions remain as deep-rooted as they did 30 years ago.