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Women's childcare responsibilities are the key cause of the pay gap. Employers welcome the report's recommendations to ensure that part-time work is not seen as a second class option and to give women returners the training they need to access better paid jobs.
Girls out-perform boys at school and university, but too many choose lower paid occupations in caring and clerical professions. The report's recommendations to overcome occupational segregation - a major cause of the pay gap - will require educators and employers to work together to revolutionise careers advice and work experience.
Old stereotypes will be broken by work experience placements in occupations not traditionally taken up by young women, "taster days" for pupils in primary school and the promotion of apprenticeships in occupations usually dominated by men.
John Cridland, deputy director-general of the Confederation of British Industry and one of the Women and Work commissioners
This report has shortchanged a generation of women. These measures alone will not bring change quickly enough for women up and down the country who are being paid too little. If this Government wants to go down in history as having closed the pay gap, it is going to have to try a lot harder.
It is not enough to encourage employers to change - that's been happening for years, but change is too slow. The time is long overdue for rigorous measures that will actually work.
Dr Katherine Rake, director of the Fawcett Society
The commission has produced an impressive body of work with business-friendly recommendations. Businesses need to attract the best and the economy cannot afford the waste of talent that comes with under-using women's skills and talents.
Alan Johnson, Trade and Industry Secretary
This report deliberately misses the point. The pay gap between men and women is due to discrimination by employers, not because women make bad career choices. To get pay justice, individual women need to take lengthy legal cases. Without compulsory pay audits women will wait till Doomsday for equal pay.
Derek Simpson, Amicus General Secretary
Being a woman still means being paid less - a quarter less than men, which is the highest gap in Europe. Audits simply ensure an employer is complying with the law. Without an audit, employers will be vulnerable to thousands of individual, costly equal pay cases.
Diana Holland, national organiser for women race and qualities, Transport and General Workers Union
The Commission's recommendations are innovative and cutting edge but they are also practical and acceptable to all key players. We will examine them in detail and produce an action plan setting out what the Government and public services need to do to achieve the progress that women deserve and the economy needs.
Tessa Jowell, Minister for Women
The UK still lags behind the rest of Europe. This is not a lack of understanding; it is a lack of political will to do anything about the problem. Not only are part-time women workers lower paid, they are often on poorer contracts and in non-unionised workplaces, making it much harder for them to demand their rights
Labour local authorities have perpetuated women's low pay for decades and are now shamefully attempting to fob off women workers, while Blair and Brown attack their pensions. A legal commitment to equal pay clearly isn't enough: we need pay reviews and the political will to tackle it.
Carolyn Leckie, MSP for central Scotland and spokeswoman for Scottish Socialist Party
The scale of the continuing inequality between men and women at work still has the power to shock. Today's report presents a real programme of action that challenges government, employers and unions to take further action to close the gap.
Of course we are disappointed that the commission could not agree on mandatory pay audits in the private sector, but that should not obscure the positive policies that now go forward with strong endorsement by this broadly based commission.
Brendan Barber, general secretary of the Trades Union Congress
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