A badly designed and painfully clunky page hidden away on the Government Equalities Office website is beginning to grab the attention of women all over the country. If you work for a company that employs more than 250 people and you haven’t looked at the site yet, set aside some time and prepare for your eyeballs to spring from their sockets.

The government’s gender pay gap reporting website opens up for scrutiny the hidden power dynamics inside all mid-sized to large organisations, revealing pay differences between male and female staff, and the proportion of women in the best- and the worst-paid roles. With a month to go before the deadline for reporting, the site is already having an explosive impact on how women view their employers.

Last week, a female senior manager at Barclays investment bank in London opened the site, searched for her own company and discovered that women’s median hourly rate is 43.5% lower than male colleagues and that women’s bonuses are 73.3% lower. It was an unpleasant sensation, confirming in black and white something that she had long suspected. Perhaps most revealingly, the website also divides organisations into four groups according to the amount staff are paid – the best-paid quartile, the second best, the third best and the worst quartile. At Barclays, 81% of the best-paid employees are men; 63% of the worst paid are women.

“Sadly, I wasn’t shocked,” the woman, who has asked not to be named, says. At 29, she is paid very well but is conscious of younger male colleagues advancing faster through the ranks. The pay gap data has crystallised her desire to quit. “Junior women are feeling very dispirited and upset. The figures made me feel that this organisation isn’t the right place for me, that it won’t let me achieve my potential.”

The concept of extreme pay disparities in City finance is not particularly new, but what is arresting about the site is the way it offers an x-ray of the inner workings of diverse organisations from universities to meat-packing businesses, government departments to high-street fashion retailers, sewage companies to the Ritz. It is no surprise to see that men are better paid across the board and dominate the upper reaches of the pay scale, but the detail of how much more they are getting and how comprehensively they have seized the best jobs is addictively fascinating. Companies are stripped naked by the process, and attitudes towards women are revealed with uncomfortable clarity.

Over the next month, a massively important chapter in the struggle for equal pay will be unfolding in real time. Remember the noise made by the BBC’s disclosures last summer and multiply that by 9,000 for an idea of the scale of what is happening.

Aware, presumably, of the incendiary nature of the data, organisations are in no hurry to report. Eleven months since the exercise launched, only 1,294 of the 9,000 or so companies that need to file have done so; the remaining 7,700 will need to report in the next month. Many are holding on in the hope that scrutiny of their pay decisions will be less intense if they participate in a last-minute data dump.

University lecturers protest against the gender pay gap. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo

The disparities in some of the most high-profile companies have already been well aired. The hourly rate for women at easyJet is 45% lower that of their male colleagues, and 89% of the best-paid staff are men, while 68.9% of the worst-paid are women. These differences have been shrugged off as simply reflecting the fact that cabin crew tend to be women and pilots tend to be men, as if that makes everything OK. At the travel group Tui Airways (previously known as Thomson Airways) there is a similar picture, with men paid more than double women, and where 95% of the best-paid employees are men, while 79% of the worst-paid are women.

But pluck almost any organisation at random and there is a similar picture. At Abingdon Flooring, on an industrial estate near Newport, 86% of the best-paid employees are men. At Rowe Farming in Doddington, 94.9% of the best-paid staff are men. At North East Derbyshire council, 100% of the best-paid quartile of staff are men. At the Dorchester hotel, women’s median bonus pay is 61% lower than men’s.

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Part of the point of the reporting exercise is to trigger a debate about how men and women are paid; there are no sanctions for having a big gap – the idea is that companies will be forced to examine their record and improve. A surprising number of organisations, however, seem puzzled about why the figures arouse any interest at all. The bigger, slicker companies have invested a lot of money in creating videos and explainers designed to reassure female staff that they are not being discriminated against. The main points seem to be: one, there are simply more men in senior roles (as if that is most natural thing in the world, and requires no explanation); and two, the companies are not doing anything illegal. The videos offer calm explanations of the difference between unequal pay (which is illegal) and the pay gap, which simply reflects how women are working in different ways in different parts of the companies, and are paid differently (ie usually less) as a result.

“The less enlightened companies say: ‘Oh well, it’s a social issue,’” says Ann Francke, the chief executive of the Chartered Management Institute, which has been monitoring this issue for more than a decade. “Let’s not blame society. There is a glass pyramid in many organisations – many more women are getting better grades, good degrees, getting hired into junior positions, before slipping away. It’s not just a motherhood penalty. We have to mentor and sponsor talented women and pull them into the upper ranks.”

She believes the process is already forcing constructive conversations. “When we’ve talked about the pay gap before, the response has always been: ‘That must be happening somewhere else, it couldn’t possibly be in my organisation.’ As more and more companies are forced to confront their own data, they realise: ‘Oh my goodness, it is me.’ Because we made progress and got more women on boards, a lot of CEOs thought: ‘Tick, we’ve done gender.’ But, of course, they haven’t even begun to do gender.”

There has been discussion of implementing an ethnicity pay gap on a similar model, but the government is still reviewing the feasibility of this, and it looks a way off. In the meantime, many organisations feel they have done enough simply by publishing laudable diversity objectives.

The information required by the government on gender is basic; it gives no insight into how race and class feed into pay differences, and is not detailed enough to allow people to look at how their pay compares with that of the people sitting next to them. “The metrics are crude, but the conversations they are promoting are very helpful. It displays the structure of a workforce in a way that we could never have seen otherwise,” says Vanessa Pine, who, as special adviser to the Lib Dems Jo Swinson and Vince Cable during the last years of the coalition, helped push backroom negotiations that forced David Cameron to enact this line of the 2010 Equality Act, requiring this information to be published.

A whole industry is rapidly developing around managing the message to staff once the data emerges. Pine has set up a company, Atlas Partners, which – among other things – advises organisations on the importance of explaining to female employees why the gap is there and setting out what they are doing about it. “There will be an emotional impact on staff, and organisations have to anticipate what the backlash from both male and female employees is going to be. Handled badly, it could make women feel disaffected, make them want to leave, increase whistleblowing or corporate espionage because they’ll be thinking: ‘Well, fuck that,’” she says.

If you are outside the building, some of the justifications make hilarious reading. Giving context to the revelation that women’s bonus pay at Whitbread is 67.3% lower than men’s, the hospitality company declares, with typically cheerful corporate gloss: “We believe in giving people the chance to shine.” It adds (without any apparent need for regret or explanation) that the bonus gap simply “reflects the weighting of more males in the senior leader bonus schemes”.

The CEO of the Ritz – which turns out to be heavily staffed by men all the way up the pay scale, and where 79% of the best-paid people are men – asserts that the results (women’s hourly rate 6% lower) are “extremely positive which I am delighted about”. In an in-house video, with tranquil piano music tinkling in the background, white male executives from Boston Consultancy Group (where women’s hourly rate is 35.2% lower than men’s) promise that: “Integrity, diversity and respect for the individual are part of our core values. Gender diversity is a top priority. We are highly committed” etc etc. Explaining that the pay gap is not illegal, the company states: “We have fewer women in senior roles.”

The fashion company Phase Eight, where the median hourly rate for women is 54.5% lower than the rate for men and bonuses for women are 62.4% lower, ties itself in knots trying to justify the anomaly. The real reason for it is that the company has very few male employees, but almost all of those it does have are at the top of the business: 53% of directors are men. The company can say “we have a positive commitment to diversity and inclusion” until it is blue in the face, but it remains an organisation led by a well-paid male CEO and staffed by a lot of less well-paid women.

Internally, these justificatory presentations can be as upsetting as the figures themselves. The senior Barclays manager says: “We have a diversity and inclusion team headed by a man who says we don’t have an issue with gender. It starts right at the beginning. I watch male colleagues with five years’ less experience being primed for promotion. I think I was brought in one pay level below where I should have been. The way in which we interpret talent is different. A young man who can string a sentence together is recognised as a future leader. An older woman with more experience is often ignored.”

A Halifax banking consultant, helping customers open bank accounts at a high-street branch, said the news that women employed by Lloyds, the parent company, receive 53.1% lower bonuses than men and that the hourly rate was 32.8% lower for women, made her “blood boil”. She is paid £21,000 after 10 years in her post and is now considering looking for new work.

“It clarified a lot of things for me,” she said. “It’s disgusting but I’m not that surprised. There was a round of management vacancies recently and the bulk of them went to younger male employees. Now I think I won’t get promoted. I’m way beyond anger – I’ve been through anger and being depressed. I just feel disappointed.” She got a 0.75% pay rise last year, equating to £157 before tax, and an annual bonus of £160. She has been told that she could be disciplined if she talks about money with colleagues, so she doesn’t know how her bonus compares with those of male colleagues, but she has her suspicions. “Whether you get along with your line manager influences the size of the bonus, and they’re all men,” she said.

Sam Smethers, the chief executive of the gender equality campaigning charity the Fawcett Society, said she found the revelations around bonuses particularly powerful. “It’s hard to argue that a 70% or 80% bonus pay gap is justifiable. That won’t be driven by performance alone, it will be asked for. Women are not 70% or 80% less productive than men; when women ask for bonuses they are seen as pushy.”

A small handful of organisations have come out looking not too bad – but these tend to be bodies such as Westminster Abbey and the British Museum (where the median wage for women is slightly higher) where you imagine top pay doesn’t reach hedge fund levels. The pay gap at the Guardian is expected to be released on to the site in mid-March.

There is some cynicism about the likelihood of the findings triggering change. A female employee, with 30 years’ experience at a bank that has reported a huge pay gap (who, like all the women quoted here, did not feel able to speak on the record about pay and company culture without getting into trouble at work, and who was so worried about being identified that she also asked for the bank’s name to not be published), said she was paid £50,000 and had no way of knowing how that compared with male colleagues. She understood that the gap wasn’t about women being paid less for equal work, but was because of a glass ceiling at middle-management level.

“Women take time off to have children, and they never catch up in terms of career progression. Then they take time out to look after elderly dependents. There is inherent sexism in how that’s dealt with. We try to get change, but men are holding the levers of power. We’re expecting our oppressors to change the system – it’s like asking turkeys to vote for Christmas.”