Today marks Equal Pay Day, when based non the disparity in pay between men and women, the latter are effectively working from free from now until the end of the year. It's an emotional topic, but what does science have to say about the whole issue?

A common argument for why the gender pay gap exists is that women tend to work in lower-paid occupations. But new in-depth research has found even when contributions to their employers are the same, women are still paid only 84 cents for every $1 men receive.

Why? Well, it's sexism, they say.

Five years ago, Silicon Valley was rocked by a wave of “brogrammer” bad behavior, when overfunded, highly entitled, mostly white and male startup founders did things that were juvenile, out of line and just plain stupid. Most of these activities – such as putting pornography into PowerPoint slides – revolved around the explicit or implied devaluation and harassment of women and the assumption that heterosexual men’s privilege could or should define the workplace. The recent “memo” scandal out of Google shows how far we have yet to go.

It's not been a happy time at Google. Following the algorithmic advertising debacle that reared its head a couple of weeks ago, where Google was inserting ads from well known companies into YouTube clips from terrorist organisations, they've been caught up in a salary equity brouhaha. But the company has hit back, claiming they don't have an equity and equality problem.

Today is Equal Pay Day in the US, which symbolises how far into the year women work to earn what men did the year before. In addition to pay, many women face different treatment in their careers than their male colleagues. If you're a woman, what strategies have you used to close the pay, and treatment, gap?