Rosheen Callender has featured prominently in recent debates on financial issues, especially pensions. It is not just that the State's largest union wants to shed its traditional male-dominated image, or that Ms Callender is an acknowledged expert in the area.
"The reason I am concentrating so much on them, and on the social inclusion commitments in Partnership 2000 like the implementation of a national minimum wage, is that the majority of workers affected are women," she says.
This is why she is so angry at the Minister for Finance's proposals to allow the self-employed increased tax relief on pension provisions. It is unacceptable to allow wealthy people to stow away £60,000 a year tax free, she says, when there has been a clampdown on other tax shelters for the PAYE sector.
The measure may be open to legal challenge and could lead to the unravelling of the present system, to the detriment of most employees, she adds.
In contrast, Ms Callender says the Government has been slow to move on legislation to provide pension schemes for casual and part-time workers. Most of these are excluded from company schemes, which tend to be restricted to permanent staff.
If the legislation is not introduced by September 1st, when the EU Directive on Part-Time Workers and the 1998 Employment Equality Act come into force, she says there will be a major problem in ensuring equality for these vulnerable workers.
SIPTU has 80,000 women members, a figure exceeded only by the Irish Countrywomen's Association. Yet, when it was set up in 1990, there was only a handful of women holding positions of responsibility in its two constituents, the Irish Transport and General Workers' Union and the Federated Workers' Union of Ireland.
SIPTU still has no female general officers; Ms Callender is the only woman in the next main layer of senior officials, the national and regional officer grade. But women now comprise 20 per cent of the national executive and 19 per cent of the regional executives' membership.
Some 27 per cent of branch committee members are women and they form 25 per cent of shop stewards. Women have filled seven out of 17 recent vacancies for full-time officials.
Ms Callender believes there is no quick fix solution for women's absence at the top of the union. But she predicts that their rapidly increasing numbers at local level, and as full-time officials, will result in them coming through at leadership levels.
Ms Callender also sees equality as much wider than a gender issue. Many marginalised groups are affected, such as people with disabilities and Travellers. Ageism is another area where she believes the new laws will be tested at a very early stage.
"Age could be used to change some quite fundamental aspects of employment," she says. So could family status. Indeed, people may use more than one heading for equality cases, she says. For example, someone forced to take a career break for child-rearing purposes and returning to work to find themselves left behind in the promotion stakes, might use both age and family status as the basis for making an equality claim.
As for pensions, she says "elder care" will be an increasingly significant issue in the workplace. "Pensions only deal with the financial aspects of the problem," she says. Equally important are its health and social aspects.
"We have time to learn from other European countries and plan properly our own approach to the problem."