The demands made by America's laws aren't as rigorous, and that may be in part because the people making, enforcing and implementing the laws are still largely men, suggests Jill Gonzalez, an analyst at financial website WalletHub. "The pay gap still persists because women continue to have disproportionate representation in both corporate leadership positions, as well as political ones," she tells CNBC Make It.

“Like many other BBC women, I had long suspected that I was routinely paid less, and at this point in my career, I was determined not to let it happen again.”

California has a new law intended to fight gender pay disparity by restricting companies from asking certain questions about salary history, and requiring them to reveal more about what they pay.

History is full of famous artist couples who inspired one another and fed each others’ creativity, whose passionate affairs helped push them to their artistic limits. But as important as they were to one another, their importance as gauged by the art market is often deeply asymmetrical, with male artists frequently outperforming their female partners at auction, often by orders of magnitude.

"Sometimes you can hear it. Sometimes you can smell it. This one, you can feel. The tide is turning. What started as a slow, steady howl has grown into a guttural growl. It was the year of the awoken dragon, and women are breathing fire. On a global scale, national women's soccer teams and players came together to say enough. To say, we deserve better. To say, we too deserve to be supported, we too deserve to be paid more, we too deserve better facilities, we too deserve respect. Call it courageous or call it long overdue, but the movement is on."

As part of an ongoing lawsuit alleging gender imbalances at Microsoft, attorneys have submitted two studies suggesting the company's promotion-ladder and pay scale need work. As Slate reported Saturday, two reports analyzing the gender dynamics and equity at Microsoft have been filed in U.S. District Court in Washington State in the case of Moussouris v. Microsoft, both offering criticism of the tech giant.

In July 2016, Adobe said a review of its pay practices revealed that female employees in the U.S. were earning one cent less than their male counterparts and that there was no wage gap between white and non-white workers in the U.S. Adobe’s gender pay gap at the time was tiny compared to the national average of 21%, but it vowed to close the divide nonetheless.

Minimum wages are systematically lower in jobs more commonly held by women. For example, minimum wage workers in the health care sector earn substantially less than similarly skilled minimum wage workers in road transportation. The higher the male share of employment in an occupation or industry, the higher the wages for both men and women. The gender wage gap among minimum wage earners could be reduced if it was neutral with respect to the gender composition of occupations and industries.

"But is not immediately clear whether this job-femaleness penalty can be interpreted as discrimination. "In principle, the job-femaleness penalty could result from the commission taking into account factors other than the required skill level, such as 'dirtiness' and 'danger'.

The class-action complaint filed in September provided the most detailed formal accounts to date of gender discrimination at Google, alleging that the company denies promotions and career opportunities to qualified women and “segregates” them into lower-paying positions. Google’s latest efforts to thwart the lawsuit and avoid disclosures come at a time when the tech industry is reeling over allegations of misogyny, sexual harassment and an overall lack of diversity.

Even though the economists disagree on the existence of danger pay, they both conclude that the risk of or experience of harassment leads some women to take jobs that pay them less than what they might otherwise make. The counterintuitive idea that women make may more for being harassed suggests that walking away comes with a price. As more and more women have stepped forward to call out abuse by powerful men, the big question is no longer “does this really happen?” After hundreds of stories and dozens of investigations, the answer is clear: “absolutely.” Now, it’s time to tackle another question: What is sexual harassment doing to us, and what does it mean? It’s time to talk about the complex question of harassment and pay.

There are plenty of numbers which shed light on sport’s inferior status but the sting lies here – “Space is no longer the final frontier. Gender equality in sport is. Female astronauts are almost 12 times more prevalent in their industry than professional female footballers.”