Recognition comes decades later for veterans of women's rights campaign

The most enduring image of Zelda D'Aprano is of the long-time women's rights campaigner chained to the front door of the Commonwealth Building in Melbourne's Treasury Place to protest against the slow progress in gaining equal pay for women.

The act of civil defiance in 1969, in which she was threatened by police with jail, ultimately cost her her job as a clerk with a Victorian meat workers' union.

So it is with some irony that the pioneering women's activist, now leading the quiet life on the NSW North Coast, ponders her belated elevation to Officer of the Order of Australia (AO).

One woman, the scientist Professor Adrienne Clarke, has been recognised with the highest honour, the Companion of the Order of Australia (AC), in the Australia Day list, and half of the 18 new Officers of the Order of Australia are women.

Dr D'Aprano, 76, and Beatrice Faust, 64, a founder of the Women's Electoral Lobby, head a select group of women's rights campaigners honoured with AOs for their advocacy of women's workplace issues.

Recognition has come late for the two pioneers who each made their key contribution to the improvement in women's working conditions 20 or 30 years ago.

Mrs Faust said she believed her AO was awarded for her ability to "say the unsayable" and to stir public debate about taboo issues of fertility control, sex and reproduction.

"I started talking about abortion before it was fashionable; there was only two women willing to say the word abortion in public. When I began reading newspapers it was called an illegal operation."

The Melbourne based intellectual went on to become a founder member of the Victorian Council for Civil Liberties, a former president of the Abortion Law Reform Association, author of the influential Women, Sex and Pornography.

These days she considers herself a "retired activist" but despite helping to strike new freedoms in gender and sex, senses a shift is occurring in gender debate.

Questions of parental - as opposed to maternity - leave, child care, the casualisation of the workforce and widening salary gaps needed new institutional champions, she said.

Dr D'Aprano laments a world in which women remain concentrated at the bottom of the pay scale and job security and maternity leave provisions have not vastly improved.

Despite these setbacks she has never believed struggle is for nothing, she said. "Action is needed more than ever. We had full-time jobs in those days and some kind of security but today with part time work and casual labor young people can't even plan for five or six months ahead.

"Young people have taken for granted all the things we fought for and they are going to have to learn to take up the cudgel."

Westpac's New Zealand and Pacific banking boss, Ann Sherry, is one of the new breed of female executives driving change from within. Honoured for her services to gender equity, social justice and family friendly policies in the workplace, Ms Sherry, 49, has been instrumental in cementing the bank's position as Australia's private sector leader in supporting workers with families.

Humbled to be honoured alongside Mrs Faust and Dr D'Aprano, whom she describes as astonishing women, she is generally more optimistic that the Australian workplace is changing for the better.

"I've seen change people have not dreamed of, and it's more universal than you would think. I speak to a lot to younger women and they have very high expectations.

"Ten years ago there were few female role models and no CEOs. Unlike today, 'The world is your oyster' was a saying, not an aspiration."