All in all 2016 hasn’t been a great year for women’s rights. The small flicker of hope that we might finally have a female president in the US was thoroughly doused by Donald Trump.

Last year two women won a Nobel prize; this year there was none. The number of female CEOs in the Fortune 500 dropped. And research announced at the World Economic Forum found that it will take approximately 170 years to close the gender pay gap around the world. One hundred and seventy years.

So overall it doesn’t look like 2017 is going to be the year women finally achieve gender parity. In fact, so far the attempts to move us toward it have proved to be, well, a bit half-hearted.

The UK government’s attempt to make pay gap reporting mandatory for all companies with more than 250 employees has been met with disgruntled muttering and very little action from business.

A few organisations have made some tentative steps towards it, and those already reporting their gender pay gaps should be applauded, but for most it was just another piece of red tape to be ignored. Much easier to point the finger at women and say it’s our fault for not asking.

A great deal is made of the need to encourage women to negotiate more effectively. However, even if we take that into 2017, research suggests it’s not going to help. While women ask for pay rises as often as men do, they’re much less likely to get them. The reality is we expect men to be pushy about salary, to ask for more money and to vocalise their worth, so when they do it we’re not surprised.

However, society has taught that it’s not polite for women to do the same, so when they do, we tend to see them as pushy and arrogant, and that instantly makes us less likely to reward them. So while it’s useful to encourage women to negotiate their salary more firmly, it’s also not the only way to solve this problem and certainly won’t help women in the coming year.

This doesn’t mean equal pay in 2017 is impossible. We might not be able to achieve it on a worldwide level, but within the UK, the US and Australia it should certainly be achievable.

In 2015, Salesforce did an audit of its pay gap. CEO Marc Benioff was so sure the company wouldn’t have a gender pay gap that he made a deal with his senior female employees. If they could prove there was in fact a pay gap he would instantly fix it.

They proved it and Benioff instantly paid out US$3m (£2.4m/AU$4.1m) to fix it. He found every woman who was being paid less than a male colleague doing the same job and adjusted her salary accordingly. In the grand scheme of things $3m is not much to a big corporation like Salesforce, but the amount of goodwill it bought was priceless. There’s absolutely nothing stopping other businesses following suit.

And this is the one bright light that has come out of 2016. While it hasn’t been a good year for women’s rights, it has been a great year for women speaking up and making their voices heard. From politics to Hollywood, women around the world have been calling time on the sexist attitudes and experiences they’ve encountered and pushed back against them.

If we can keep doing that in 2017 then maybe, just maybe, we’ll be shouting so loudly that no company would dare to underpay us ever again.