KEZIA Dugdale has accused Nicola Sturgeon of doing too little to help women in the workplace.
The Scottish Labour leader said it was "not enough" to have a small number of high profile women in positions of power.
Labour's Holyrood manifesto, to be published tomorrow, will include a pledge to establish a commission tasked with getting more women into traditionally male-dominated jobs.
The work would be overseen by a cabinet secretary for equalities, who would also be responsible for "efforts to deliver equal pay," the manifesto will say.
Controversially, Labour would also force all political parties to field an equal number of women and men as candidates in future elections.
The suggestion that Ms Sturgeon, Scotland's first female first minister, has failed to take action to support women in the workplace will be fiercely rejected by the SNP.
The Nationalist leader has put great store by having a gender-balanced cabinet and her party has promised new laws to ensure the boards of public sector bodies include equal numbers of women and men by 2020.
But in an interview with The Herald, Ms Dugdale said: "We have to be careful in Scotland not to be complacent just because we have three party leaders who are women.
"That in and of itself does not deliver for working class women who feel the pain of the cuts, who see the reality of the pay gap in their pay cheque every week.
"I want to use the voice I have and the power I have to actually deliver for women, because being in that position of power on its own is not enough."
Labour, like the SNP, will also commit to delivering gender balanced boards.
The SNP meanwhile, by agreeing to back the recommendations of the government's poverty tsar, Naomi Eisenstadt, is expected to set up a commission on occupational segregation, matching Labour's pledge.
Labour will launch its manifesto with just a week of the campaign left to run before voters go to the polls on May 5.
In contrast to the SNP's large-scale launch-rally, the document will be unveiled in the Edinburgh community centre where Ms Dugdale announced her bid to become Labour leader last year.
Ms Dugdale promised "a simple manifesto launch with a simple message" built around her party's plan to increase income tax to protect public services from further spending cuts.
She insisted the plan - dismissed as a "tax grab" by the SNP - was finding support among better off Scots who would shoulder most of the burden.
She said: "Taking the message out onto the streets of Scotland, I see just as much support for this policy in middle class communities as I do in working class communities.
"Arguably, you might think it would middle class communities that would be silently against this.
"But they are actively for it because I think there is a recognition the cuts while they affect the poorest the hardest, they actually affect all of us.
"Everyone pays the price."
In another swipe at Ms Sturgeon, she accused the SNP leader of abandoning the anti-austerity platform that carried the Nationalists to a crushing victory in Scotland in last year's General Election.
She said: "Nicola Sturgeon became a UK-wide celebrity for being anti-austerity, crusading against cuts and promising to tax the rich.
"A year later she is accepting austerity, she is refusing to tax the rich.
"That's two very different Nicola Sturgeons in the space of a year.
"People are asking, how are you going the transform this country in the way you have promised?"
READ MORE: SNP and Labour clash on tax policies
Ms Dugdale, who also faced questions from Herald readers on the newspaper's Facebook page, expressed frustration with the presidential style of the election campaign.
She said: "I could put my face and my face alone on the manifesto.
"I could go around the country talking about what it's like to be a 34-year-old gay woman in Scotland and make it all about me.
"I take a much more old fashioned, traditional view about elections."
WATCH: Live Q&A WITH Scottish Labour leader Kezia Dugdale
In a thinly veiled dig at Ruth Davidson, the Scots Tory leader who has staged a series of eye-catching election stunts, she added: "It's the same reason I've not been climbing on buffaloes or jumping out of tanks.
"This is serious. This is about who governs the country for the next five years."
She said the campaign should be "an opportunity to debate ideas and values and principles and what the Scottish Parliament is actually for."
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