Women are ''clustered in those organisations with a local focus, poorly resourced and with little status'', says the report, commissioned by the Rural Industries Research and Development Corporation.

Female farmers are on the rise, but masculine ''heroic'' management styles and traditional gender roles which assign rural women most of the housework mean that male voices still dominate regional boards, say authors Alison Sheridan and Fiona Haslam McKenzie.

Rather than a glass ceiling, women face a ''labyrinth'' made up of multiple barriers when they seek leadership, says their report, Revisiting Missed Opportunities - Growing Women's Contribution to Agriculture.

This has improved little in the 11 years since a report which first counted female ''gofer'' jobs, nurturing and volunteering, found that women contributed 48 per cent of total real farm income.

The political will was not there to act on its suggestions to increase female leadership and by the late 1990s there was even a fall in female representation, the latest report says.

No women chief executives were recorded in a review of regional bodies two years ago, while just 6 per cent of agricultural company leaders were female.

Companies need to set targets for women's representation, the report recommends. ''Waiting for the 'pipeline' to deliver is no longer credible,'' it says.

The report recommends the re-establishment of women's units within government departments; the mentoring of young women; the targeting of older women to join regional boards; and a departure from the private sector model which sees women as a liability.

In the past, women were blamed for not grabbing the spots available, said the president of Australian Women in Agriculture, Patricia Hamilton.

''Most women enter farming through marriage and don't have all the skills,'' she said. Many learn to handle the farm business while the men focus on the produce, but they need to be ''skilled up'' for boards.

In the 18 months since the report was researched, the Federal Government has doubled women's representation on agricultural research and development corporation boards to more than 40 per cent, a spokeswoman for the Minister for Agriculture, Tony Burke, said.