Just 2.5% of chairs of the top 200 companies listed on The Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) are female, according to a report from professional services firm Ernst & Young.

The report shows Australia sits in 29th place in the World Economic Forum Global Gender Equality Index, behind Latvia, Mozambique and the Philippines, falling from a “relatively respectable 15th” in 2006. The countries scoring highest on the Index were the Nordic nations, while New Zealand were fifth.

The fact that Australia scored so highly on equality in education helped to mask other worrying statistics, such as Australia ranking 59th in the world for wage equality for similar work, or as Ernst & Young’s people and organisations lead Amy Poynton told The Australian, “equity ends at graduation”.

The Australian also reports that Sex Discrimination Commissioner Liz Broderick sees quotas having a definite role to play in forcing change. Kim Schmidt, director of HR at Woolworths, who were profiled in the Ernst & Young report, told The Australian that her organisation agrees, having set a target to have 33% of executive roles filled by women by 2015 – double what it was in 2004.

Schmidt concludes that the company has “never received any resistance to putting a target in place”, adding that the business “[has] targets in place for everything else”.