Beyond the stalling, waffling, denying, punishing, and ignoring, some answers. By Claire Suddath – “…Over the past 50 years, women have achieved an astounding level of equality in the U.S. They have become astronauts and U.S. Supreme Court justices and have come so close to winning the presidency it’s easy to forget that until 1974 they couldn’t get a credit card unless a man co-signed the application. Women are the primary breadwinners in half of all U.S. families. They’re more likely to hold a bachelor’s or master’s degree than men, and should they choose to marry, about a third of them will keep their last name. But one of the most intractable and measurable differences between women and men in the U.S. is the kind of jobs they hold and how much they’re paid. The most frequently cited figure when discussing this gender wage gap is that full-time working women in America earn roughly 80 percent of what men do. But that number, though true, doesn’t offer much insight into the underlying social and economic forces generating the inequality, nor why it’s remained relatively unchanged for the past 20 years. It also doesn’t explain how incredibly difficult it is to change the status quo…”