This year has been no different.

In NSW, 82 girls topped the state in a subject, compared to 34 boys. In terms of school performance, all-girl schools took out half of the top 20 spots, with Willoughby Girls being the only fully comprehensive school to make the top 50.

For these young women, the future shines brighter than bright. HSC exams are not the only predictor of life success, but in the rigorous competition that is school learning, they have proven their brains are just as – if not loads more – capable than their male counterparts.

And yet, jump forward a decade or three and the situation is nowhere near as peachy for the ladies.

You've heard all this before, so let's whip through it quickly: Australian women working full-time take home a base salary that is almost 20 per cent less than men. Women make up just over 20 per cent of top 200 company board directors. And just under a quarter of the federal cabinet.

Indeed, each year, we also find ourselves wondering why amazing results at school seem to get chewed up and spat out. As Leigh Sales asked during an ABC 7.30 segment on Wednesday: "what happens?"

Along with all the talk about girls not going into higher paying job streams and the lack of quotas or targets, it has been striking that we are again having this conversation in a week where the federal government persists with its plan to cut paid parental leave.

This comes despite a long-established expert consensus that primary carers should have 26 weeks of paid leave to care for, breastfeed and bond with a newborn.

At the moment, women can access both the government's scheme of 18 weeks at the minimum wage, plus anything else they get out of their employer – at least giving them the chance of reaching the 26-week mark.

The Coalition (with its delightfully misleading "double dippers" line) wants to find about $1 billion of savings by preventing women from accessing two schemes in full.

The latest version of the policy is that from July 2016, those with a shorter employer scheme can then top it up with the government one up until 18 weeks. The government is billing it as a "fair" compromise. But as Sydney University employment relations professor Marian Baird points out, this is still "going in the wrong direction".

It's 2015 going on '16, and we're actually winding back what new mums are entitled to.

However, it's not just about finding room in the budget or in workplace agreements for more PPL. Our professional and cultural attitudes towards women continue to suffer from a severe case of old fashionedness.

Last year, a Human Rights Commission study found that 49 per cent of surveyed mothers reported workplace discrimination during their pregnancy, parental leave or return to work. Almost 20 per cent said they were sacked or had their work "restructured", when they asked for leave or came back after a baby.

Beyond the tiny baby stage, childcare remains the great pickle.

For smaller children, it's not even the exorbitant fees that present the real problem - it's finding a blessed place in a centre. When kids get a bit older, spots can be easier to come by, but preschool and school hours are completely incompatible with the standard working day.

And while this generation of new parents is getting better at sharing child raising, overwhelmingly, it is still women who take the career hit.

Fifteen years ago, I graduated from one of the girls schools that graced the top 10 this week. When I look at my peers – now corporate high flyers and established professionals – who have children, I can't think of any example where a male partner has been the primary caregiver.

Overall, it is still women who do the majority of unpaid work at home, spending 311 minutes on the stuff each day, compared to 172 minutes for men.

Beyond questions about breeding and who cooks dinner, we still live in a society where women are judged by weird standards that men aren't subjected to (look at the Duchess of Cambridge, who copped a blast from the Eyeball Police this week for daring to walk down the street with a slight frown and pony tail that hadn't been done by a hairdresser).

Numerous studies have also shown supposedly objective "merit-based" recruitment processes are biased towards male qualities.

And we still live in a society where women aren't as safe as men. A 2012 national survey found 25 per cent of women report they have been sexually harassed at work. Over the age of 15, one in six Australian women will experience physical or sexual violence by a current or former partner. Apart from anything else, this is not a career booster.

It doesn't take an ATAR of 99.95 to work out what's going on here.

We know that women face a tougher time in the workplace even if they don't have children and that having kids is not an equally shared or adequately supported activity.

So depressingly, there's no great mystery here about why girls' school success doesn't translate down the line.

As my 18-year-old self would have said: "well, der."