Calls for more family-friendly work policies and radical changes in how the legal system handles violence against women were made at a weekend conference.
The need for the legal system to be "infused with emotional support" for women who experience the most devastating humiliation and disempowerment in it was highlighted.
The annual conference of the National Women's Council of Ireland also heard that a comprehensive childcare service was needed to allow women access to the labour market.
These were among the findings and recommendations of six national reports published on issues of women and local development, health, work, education, violence and poverty.
The reports were based on a millennium research, analysis and action project involving 610 women aged from 17 to 75 which will influence the National Women's Council's future policy strategies and lobbying.
The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mrs Mary Robinson, was the keynote speaker at the conference in Dublin on Saturday.
She said the millennium research project was an opportunity for women to show the barriers and problems they faced. She said she was "quite taken aback" by the criticisms of the criminal justice system in the report on women and violence and the humiliations suffered in that system.
She also cited the lack of a truly decentralised and accessible health system.
"The points that are coming through are quite tough policy points that the National Women's Council now has the strong basis on which to make representations on and to seek to get a full response to the millennium project," she added.
The report on women who experience violence found that they are cast as "the problem" at social, judicial and interpersonal levels and made to feel ashamed.
Women experienced "the most devastating humiliation and disempowerment" in the criminal and civil justice system.
"The legal/judicial system requires `fundamental revision' and reconstruction from the ground up," the report states.
"It needs to be `infused with emotional support' for women who experience violence and it needs to invite women to consult and participate in this process of reconstruction," it adds.
Training for the judiciary, gardai and service-providers and public awareness initiatives highlighting that violence against women was a crime was stressed by research participants.
Ms Maire Dorgan, an activist with the Mna Feasa domestic violence project in Cork, said women were largely invisible in the legal system, as judges and gardai were predominantly men.
"Until more and more men come out and disown those men who are abusers and until increasing numbers of men analyse the relationship that they themselves have with the patriarchal system, it's very hard to be a man and be equal.
"They have to make huge personal journeys of awareness to begin treating wives, sisters, daughters as absolutely equal," she said.
The report on women and work said childcare was a fundamental factor in determining the extent of women's access to the labour market.
In addition to State funding such as a universal childcare payment, participants stressed the need for more flexibility in working conditions, a comprehensive system of family friendly policies and automatic paid parental leave for men and women.