What can you do about the gender pay gap?

For years, I've heard the statistic that women, on average, are paid 77 cents for every dollar men make for similar work. As I've developed my career, which has included no breaks for maternity leave or the like, I've spent a few moments wondering if I'm paid less than my male counterparts but have never had enough knowledge to cipher it out.

A post I saw last week from the Lenny Letter really gave me pause, though. The writer, Elva Ramirez, described how she had spent the year since she quit her job at The Wall Street Journal because she was making as much as $13,000 a year less than some of her male colleagues. The first-person narrative can't offer a true picture of whether the jobs were comparable or whether a factor other than gender was involved in her situation, but she said her union found a pattern of wage gaps throughout the organization.

She also reported some more nuanced wage gap data than the 77-cent statistic I have seen casually tossed around:

A 2017 Joint Economic Committee report found that a woman makes an average of $10,500 less per year than her male counterparts; this disparity adds up to nearly a half-million dollars over the course of a career. A 2016 report by the nonpartisan Economic Policy Institute found that women's median hourly wages relative to men's have stalled since 1979.

Ramirez quit without having another job lined up and, a year later, she's actually making less money as a freelancer, which requires her to negotiate pay with each assignment she accepts. Perhaps for her the variety of work, the work-life balance and general job satisfaction outweighs the economic loss of her decision to quit -- but that's not a workable solution for every woman.

CNBC has reported on efforts businesses and leaders are making to close the gap:

Sheryl Sandberg, chief operating officer of Facebook and founder of professional-networking platform Lean In, launched the #20percentCounts campaign to raise pay equity awareness. Marc Benioff, chief executive officer of Salesforce, spent $3 million to close Salesforce's pay gap and announced he would double that amount this year. And Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., expressed her support for pay equity in a Teen Vogue op-ed.

But how can everyday women learn how their pay compares with their male counterparts and what can they do if it doesn't measure up?

One New York Times article reports that women are more likely than men to leave a job without another lined up but the bulk of the pay gap is attributed to women not receiving raises and promotions within companies at the same rate as their male counterparts. This rang true to me, as I suspect I have not been as aggressive as I should have been negotiating salary and pursuing raises.

I'm 36, so I suppose it's better to start now than never. (Tips here.)

I do wonder, though, if it's time for more articles on what individual women can do to close the wage gap and fewer articles on whether it exists.