The first weeks of July, 2017, were especially intense for Carrie Gracie, the BBC’s China editor. She travelled seven thousand miles to record more than a dozen television and radio pieces. The dissident Liu Xiaobo died, and Gracie scrambled to explain to the British public why the Chinese authorities had found him so dangerous. “For a jealous ruling party, an outsider with conviction is an affront,” she wrote, “and those who cannot be bought or intimidated are mortal enemies.”

On July 14th, Gracie left for a vacation. She flew to London from Beijing—where, for two hundred days a year, she lived alone, in a rental apartment—and caught a train to the Scottish coast. She planned to unplug from the news cycle and spend time with her children, Rachel, twenty, and Daniel, nineteen. They went to the beach, walked their dog, ate fish-and-chips. On the eighteenth, they celebrated Daniel’s birthday. The next day, a friend of Gracie’s asked her whether she had seen that the BBC—under pressure from the government, as a publicly funded broadcaster, to be more transparent about its costs—had published a list of its highest-paid stars.

Sixty-two men and thirty-four women qualified for the list, which concerned on-air talent earning more than a hundred and fifty thousand pounds a year. The highest-earning woman was making £1.7 million less than the highest-earning man. A number of the BBC’s famous female names were conspicuously absent, a scandal over which the London media were in a frenzy. “Piers Morgan sent me a text and then a D.M.—‘I’m so outraged by your rate’—clearly digging,” the sports broadcaster Clare Balding, who appeared at the bottom of the list, told me. Being on the list meant a putatively embarrassing breach of one’s financial privacy. But for many of the BBC’s top women, not being on it, in an organization where opportunity often followed cost, could be a professional liability.

The BBC had four foreign editors. Jeremy Bowen, who covered the Middle East, was paid between £150,000 and £199,999; Jon Sopel, who covered North America, got between £200,000 and £249,999. Neither Gracie, whose salary was £135,000, nor Katya Adler, who covered Europe, appeared on the list. Gracie calculated that she and Adler were getting paid around fifty per cent less than their male colleagues. “It’s such a deep blow that your body kind of goes into a profound stop,” she told me recently, of the revelation.

Gracie, who is fifty-six, considered the China-editor job to be the pinnacle of her career. The daughter of a diplomat, she was raised mostly in Scotland, the second-eldest of five siblings, among whom “aggressive idealism” was a common trait. After graduating from Oxford, she spent a year teaching English and economics in Chongqing, in southwest China. “You could tell that big things were afoot, even if it was a nightmare to work out what they were,” she recalled. She started at the BBC in 1987 and, four years later, became a China correspondent with the BBC World Service. She threw herself into Chinese life, becoming fluent in Mandarin and falling in love with a rock musician named Cheng Jin, whom she later married. In 1997, just after the Hong Kong handover, the BBC appointed her Beijing bureau chief. She was the main breadwinner of the family. “There was a lot of rattling around in minibuses as a heavily pregnant person with a small baby,” she has said.

In 1999, Rachel, still a toddler, got sick. Gracie consulted doctors in Beijing, and then evacuated Rachel to London, where they learned that she had leukemia. Jin visited from China when he could. (The couple divorced in 2006.) Effectively a single mother, Gracie made a “necessary move” into television, which had a regular schedule, becoming a morning presenter on the BBC’s news network. She continued to cover China from abroad. In 2005, she began shooting the first installment of “White Horse Village,” a ten-year project that chronicled the transformation of a rural community. (She received a Peabody Award for it, with the citation praising her “lean, eloquent narration” and her “startlingly candid interviews.”) In 2011, Gracie received a diagnosis of breast cancer. She had a double mastectomy and underwent chemotherapy, but was back on air within eight months, delivering bulletins about the eurozone crisis with a nearly bald head.

In early 2013, when the BBC offered Gracie the newly created China-editor position, she was ambivalent. Her teen-age children were in school in England and had important exams coming up. But she had often questioned the BBC’s approach to the coverage of China, and women were underrepresented in the most visible onscreen roles. Eventually, the director of news “got down on bended knee,” as he described it to Gracie, and begged her to accept the job. She did, on the condition that she be paid the same as her male counterparts. The BBC assured her that she would be, offering her a hundred and twenty thousand pounds. “I said, ‘If I go, I’m going to have to pay to put my son into boarding school in England,’ and they said, ‘O.K., well, make it one-thirty,’ ” Gracie recalled. She accepted, proud that she had won a commitment to pay parity. “I’d been reading ‘Lean In,’ and I really sort of believed in that,” Gracie said, referring to the Sheryl Sandberg book that urges women to do all they can to seize professional opportunities.

After hearing about the high-earners list, Gracie initially blamed herself for her lower salary, trying to figure out what she could have done differently. On July 22nd, she learned that a group of colleagues, calling themselves BBC Women, planned to send a letter to Tony Hall, the corporation’s director general. “This is an opportunity for those of us with strong and loud voices to use them on behalf of all, and for an organisation that had to be pushed into transparency to do the right thing,” it read. Gracie signed.

She believed deeply in the BBC’s public-service mission. “Trust is the foundation of the BBC: we are independent, impartial and honest,” read the “BBC Values” on the building pass that she’d worn for years. The news of the pay disparity felt as personal—as undermining to her sense of shared reality—as learning about an infidelity. The BBC presenter Samira Ahmed wrote, “I can only describe the feeling of being kept on much lower pay than male colleagues doing the same jobs for years as feeling as though bosses had naked pictures of you in their office and laughed every time they saw you. It is the humiliation and shame of feeling that they regarded you as second class, because that is what the pay gap means.”

Gracie, whose mother died when she was seventeen, had learned forbearance at a young age. For days, she wrestled with her feelings. “Once you know the truth, what are you going to do with it?” Gracie said to me. “Are you going to quit, live with it, or try to act?” Coming to terms with her choice, she said, was “like watching something crystallize in a glass of water.”

In August, she wrote privately to Tony Hall. “I imagined that, once I pointed out my case and pointed out what the law was, we’d sort it out,” she recalled. After two months, the corporation offered her a thirty-three-per-cent raise. It was a substantial amount, but still left her salary far short of her male equivalents’. She turned down the money and filed a formal grievance. For months, bureaucratic wrangling consumed her life. She began to feel, she said, that the BBC was waging “a crushing war of attrition, with casual contempt for its employees.” On January 7th, she published an open letter on her personal Web site.

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“Dear BBC Audience,” it began. “My name is Carrie Gracie and I have been a BBC journalist for three decades. With great regret, I have left my post as China Editor to speak out publicly on a crisis of trust at the BBC.” Gracie explained that she felt well remunerated. She wasn’t asking to be paid more, only to be paid equally. The BBC, she asserted, was perpetuating a “secretive and illegal” pay culture, and, in doing so, failing to live up to its principles. “It is painful to leave my China post abruptly and to say goodbye to the team in the BBC’s Beijing bureau,” she wrote. “But most of them are brilliant young women. I don’t want their generation to have to fight this battle in the future because my generation failed to win it now.”