Women employed in the retail and hospitality industries had the least chance of access to some form of paid parental leave.
Fewer than a quarter of enterprise agreements have paid maternity leave arrangements and even fewer have paternity leave provisions, a study of 1865 registered agreements has found.
Research from the University of Sydney found that two industries with high numbers of female employees - hospitality and retail - had the smallest number of agreements with parental leave provisions.
"We cannot rely on enterprise bargaining to deliver maternity leave benefits to most women," one of the report's authors, Associate Professor Marian Baird, said.
"What this underlines is the need for a universal system so that new parents are not forced into an early return to work and can properly take the time to be with their newborn child."
The report's findings come before the federal budget on Tuesday which will reveal the Government's decision on whether to introduce a system of taxpayer-funded parental leave.
Last year the Productivity Commission recommended the Government pay for 18 weeks of maternity leave at $544 a week, roughly the minimum wage, and a further two weeks of paternity leave. The scheme would cost $450 million a year but much of that would be covered by scrapping the $5000 baby bonus to women who qualified for the scheme.
It has been speculated that the Government will announce its commitment to parental leave next week but that it will use the economic downturn to delay the scheme's start or offer it first to low-income earners only.
The University of Sydney study, to be published in the Australian Bulletin Of Labor, found those people who did have parental leave arrangements were eligible for more time off work. In 2000 the average duration of parental leave was 12 weeks. By 2008 it had increased to 14 weeks.
People employed in the public service and the not-for-profit sector are the most likely to have parental leave provisions as part of an enterprise agreement.
But only 22 per cent of enterprise agreements had a paid maternity leave clause and 16 per cent had paid paternity leave arrangements.
Women employed in the retail and hospitality industries had the least chance of access to some form of paid parental leave. Only 1.7 per cent of enterprise agreements in the hospitality industry and 1.4 per cent of retail agreements had provisions for paid maternity leave.
"At the other end of the spectrum, the industries with relatively high proportions of women, such as education, government and health services, have a high incidence of paid maternity leave clauses," the report found.
Australia remains the only developed country without a national system of paid maternity leave.
Meanwhile, a submission to the Ken Henry tax review by the National Foundation for Australian Women has decried the overly complex nature of Australia's tax and transfer system which imposes punitive tax rates on women who return to work after childbirth only to have their income eaten up by taxes and the withdrawal of benefits.
The submission argues that the Government would be better off making family payments universal and attempting to correct for inequalities by taxing high-income earners at a higher rate.
The paper also supports a paid maternity leave scheme.
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