After scoring a victory on parental leave, City Councilmember Jean Godden continues her gender equity crusade by hosting a town hall tomorrow on Seattle’s infamous pay gap between men and women—the worst, a report last year revealed, among the country’s major cities. Promotion for the event highlights the sorry news: Women earn 73 percent of what men do in this city.

Yet, the pay gap is a tricky issue, unlike the slam dunk of parental leave. The U.S. is one of the few countries in the world that provides no paid leave to new mothers, and some offer such leave to fathers too. This is sensible and necessary in the modern working world, which employs people who want to be both parents and productive employees.

Is there a country in the world that has pay equity between men and women? If so, it would be great to hear about it. But one suspects that the U.S. is more standard in this regard, and the reasons are complicated. A task force report on the gender pay gap among city of Seattle employees— far lower than the city as a whole but still a perceptible 9.5 percent– got at this notion. “Much of the data tells us that the wage gap is not caused by identifiable discrimination, but rather by institutional norms and practices that keep our departments and job categories largely segregated by gender and/or race,” read the report published last spring.

In other words, men and women cluster into different type of jobs. And those that men do tend to pay more, those that women do pay less. Women are also far less likely to be in leadership positions.

That suggests that solutions like the federal Paycheck Fairness Act—championed by at least one of the scheduled speakers, SW profile subject and MomsRising exeuctive director Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner—might help only to a limited extent. That act, stalled in Congress, would protect employees who complain about pay disrimination and allows them to sue for punitive damages. The city’s task force report offered up a host of other recommendations, including increasing the “integration” of jobs and creating leadership opportunities for women—worthy goals, but not easy or quick fixes.

As the issue gets more attention, new ideas may emerge, however. New Yorker columnist James Surowiecki last week wroite a piece about the tech industry’s glaring gender problem. (See, for instance, the awful outburst of misogyny known as gamergate, or the advice to women by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella to avoid asking for a raise.) Surowiecki mentioned a 2012 study that showed scientists identical resumes except for the gender of those supposedly submitting them. The scientists gave the men higher marks and suggested bigger starting salaries for them.

Surowiecki suggested creative, “disruptive” solutions that get at unconscious biases, along the lines of blind auditions instituted by symphony orchestras. Might something like that integrate male-dominated fields? Would it lead to more women being promoted?

If you have ideas on the subject, you can bring them to Langston Hughes Performing Arts Institute tomorrow at 5:30 for Godden’s town hall.