Those barriers to women are no secret. Their injustice is obvious. Yet they continue:

PAID LESS FOR BEING FEMALE The days are long gone when objective factors, like experience, for example, could even remotely justify women’s relatively low pay. On average, women today make 22 percent less per hour than men, even after controlling for experience, education and location. The gap persists even after controlling for the fact that black and Hispanic workers have historically had lower wages. Women even make less than men in jobs they dominate, like nurse practitioner and preschool or kindergarten teacher. Women not only make less than similarly educated men, but the gap tends to widen as the education level rises.

Reaching the top of the corporate ladder does not improve the situation. Among top earners in corporate America — at the 95th percentile of the wage distribution — women earn 74 cents for every dollar their male peers make.

The dynamics at the lower rungs of the pay scale are even more disturbing. There is rough parity among the very lowest-paid workers, because the minimum wage helps to ensure equal pay at the bottom — with one glaring exception. “Tipped” workers, two thirds of whom are women, are still paid the federal subminimum tipped” wage of $2.13 an hour in most states, a level unchanged since 1991. One result is poverty, with recent typical pay-plus-tips for these workers hovering around $9 an hour. Another result is sexual harassment, as economically vulnerable women tolerate abuse. The restaurant industry employs 7 percent of women but accounts for nearly 40 percent of harassment claims filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Those figures almost certainly understate the problem. As the scandals at Fox have demonstrated, women are often reluctant to speak out about sexual harassment, for fear of retaliation and in the misplaced hope that they can preserve their jobs by avoiding or defusing the situation. If highly paid women in glamorous media jobs feel that way, imagine what it’s like for women living paycheck to paycheck.

SKIPPED OVER FOR PROMOTION Across all levels at companies, women are 15 percent less likely than men to be promoted, a recent study by McKinsey and LeanIn.org found. At that rate, it would take more than a century to achieve gender parity in the executive ranks. The study also captured what appeared to be a tendency of companies to talk up their focus on gender diversity, without doing much. A vast majority of companies reported that gender diversity was a top priority for the company’s chief executive, but less than half of employees thought their company was doing what it took to actually improve diversity.

Women are nowhere near parity in the boardrooms of big American companies, either. They hold about one in five board seats, and serve mostly on “softer” committees dealing with corporate responsibility and human resources, according to recent research summarized by Bloomberg View.