By AAP Sydney Morning Herald - http://www.smh.com.au Published: January 25, 2008 Women are not being paid as much as their male counterparts in the workplace, even in the top echelons of the business world, a new government report has found. A report by the Equal Opportunity for Women in the Workplace Agency (EOWA), to be launched by Minister for Women Tanya Plibersek, found that only 7 per cent of top earner positions in the ASX 200 list of companies - or 83 out of 1,136 - are held by women. The report found female chief financial officers and chief operating officers earned half the salary of their male equivalents, while chief executive officers fared only slightly better, earning two-thirds what a man would in the same job. The damning figures, contained in the EOWA's Gender Income Distribution of Top Earners report were based on data collected by Macquarie University for the 2006 EOWA Women in Leadership Census. The top five positions in each of the ASX 200 companies were examined. The female median salary remains less than a man's in nine out of 10 industry sectors, the report said, and there is no industry in which women are likely to out-earn men. EOWA director Anne McPhee said Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) that reveal there is a 34.9 per cent gap between the average weekly wage for men and woman, and a Graduate Careers Australia study showed male graduates have higher starting wages and got salary increases faster than women. "It is clear that pay inequity starts in a women's first job and puts her on the back foot for the rest of her career," she said in a statement. "The gaps between women's and men's earnings reflect a number of obstacles women still battle such as the undervaluation of women's skills: women's lower share of payments like overtime and bonuses; occupational and industrial segregation; lack of access to education and training; the impact of family responsibilities; the lack of mentors and champions; the prevalence of gender stereotypes and in some cases outdated ways in which remuneration is calculated."