Carrie Gracie’s claim of pay inequality has exposed injustice at the broadcaster, and revealed just how poorly it compares to the commercial rivals it seeks to emulate.

When journalist Carrie Gracie walked into parliament on Wednesday, ready to deliver some damning testimony about her treatment at the hands of the BBC – testimony that would be beamed around the world – she was accompanied by a representative from her union, and that was about it. The BBC director general Tony Hall, in contrast, had a dozen minders. “Tells you all you need to know really,” commented one seasoned BBC campaigner, eyeing the scene wearily.

That day Gracie, the former China editor who stepped down from her post over unequal pay in January, bore with her the hopes of women across the broadcasting industry. Her outraged words rang out from TV monitors around the BBC’s headquarters for more than two hours. The effect was immediate, and colleagues think it may last.

Lindsey Hilsum, international editor at Channel 4 News, believes Gracie has boosted the confidence of many: “Carrie has galvanised a whole generation of women journalists to ask ourselves whether we may have been discriminated against throughout their career. We don’t know yet, of course, until all the figures come out elsewhere.”

Yet Gracie’s evidence, ostensibly about fair pay, has also exposed BBC management’s failure to handle the impending crisis just as much as it has shone a light on any discrimination. For one former high-ranking BBC television executive, the “classic ineptness” of the organisation’s management leaped out. “It really is what we might call ‘too much, too late,’” she told the Observer.

Gracie’s recent Radio 4 series and hit podcast, Murder in the Lucky Holiday Hotel, was about the killing of businessman Neil Heywood in China. The events of the last five days seem to have played out with all the tension of the mystery she unravelled then. True, there are no dead bodies, but there are six high-profile BBC presenters, including John Humphrys and Huw Edwards, who have had their lofty emoluments lopped. And according to a BBC spokesman this weekend there is more financial damage to come, with decisions to further reduce some men’s pay about to be taken “on their merits”, not just on the size of pay packets. And, although there is no secretive national congress of the Chinese government at work here, there is a sinister phalanx of besuited executives inside what Gracie likened to a male “fortress”.

The BBC now promises a clearer range of pay grades for “on-air” talent as a result of the review published on Tuesday, which was carried out in response to the demands last summer of 45 of the corporation’s best-known women presenters, including Clare Balding, Victoria Derbyshire and Sue Barker.

Yet for some female journalists the BBC pay structure was already all too “clear”: women got less. And especially those women who had come, as Gracie had, from the World Service division of the BBC, where pay is traditionally lower.

At one time, not so long ago, most of the top-rung jobs at the BBC were occupied by women. They were running BBC One and Two, and in charge of television content and drama. Sexism looked like history then, although newsrooms were regarded as a “problem area”, with a “very macho” culture.

Some BBC veterans date discrepancies in newsroom pay back to John Birt’s time as DG, while others suggest that it was Mark Thompson, one of his successors, who became beholden to the idea of a competitive market for on-air talent. Several current women correspondents in BBC news believe the recently departed head of news, James Harding, had made worthy efforts to promote more women to prominent roles. Unfortunately Harding’s initiative coincided with a general reining-in of budgets.

This weekend a spokesman for the corporation emphasised that all promotions to staff of both genders had been less generous of late. Hall himself has recently pronounced that: “Our bill for talent is down 25% since I took over and we do live very consciously within our means.”

No wonder, as Gracie noted, even supportive managers were once thrilled that she “asked so little”. In a news division that has just cut back drastically on coverage of annual party political conferences, and where the managers working on Panorama are now rumoured to outnumber the reporters, it is certainly possible that stingy excuses for lower pay, such as keeping experienced staff “in development”, actually are the result of budget restraint as much as of endemic sexism.

A key problem for the BBC is Gracie’s standing within the corporation. Kate Adie, who attended the select committee last week, said that she went along chiefly to back the pay parity message (“I was there to support the principle of equal pay for equal work, which I actually had thought was the law!”), but added that she also particularly admires Gracie’s work. “I think she is an excellent correspondent,” Adie said.

Other colleagues make reference to Gracie’s White Horse Village reports, a remarkable series of bulletins from a small Chinese community over a period of years. Hilsum pointed out that Gracie would walk and interview in Mandarin, while translating fluently for the camera: “A really difficult thing to do.” A few of Gracie’s colleagues put it more bluntly. “Carrie could probably do Jon Sopel’s job, but he could not do hers.” While Sopel, the North America editor, is admired, two of Gracie’s female peers point out that it is not necessarily harder to follow the White House agenda “on Trump duty” alongside an army of foreign correspondents than it is to work in adverse conditions in China.

The real mystery at the heart of the BBC’s handling of Gracie, however, is just why it moved so slowly to put out a fuse that had been burning since well before the enforced revelation of the list of highest-paid BBC talent last year.

The embattled status of the BBC is one explanation. The world of broadcasting, and especially of news, is rapidly changing. The value of named correspondents is going down as more of the public find their news online, in text and video and often not filtered through a reporter. As a result, the market value of even the BBC’s big news beasts has dropped and all pay levels look increasingly wonky, for men and women, in a corporation funded by the licence fee.

Hilsum’s fear is that, as money seeps away from newsrooms everywhere, the work of a foreign correspondent will start to be seen as a vocation for selfless women. “When I look at young foreign journalists coming up, the majority of them are women. They are incredibly brave, many of them, and brilliant. And nearly all freelance. So there is a danger this will soon become a low-paid caring profession. It can make one feel a bit depressed.”

Meanwhile, the BBC is working its way through the second half of the 230 grievance cases put before it last summer despite diminishing faith in its on-air review of pay.

Not for the first time the BBC is bearing the brunt of criticism for a widespread failing because its funding method makes it publicly accountable. But losing Gracie as an expert voice in China just before Theresa May went there to do business does not look like a good deal for the licence-fee payer.

For two or three decades the BBC has shared the expansionist ambitions of rival commercial broadcasters. It has adopted their budget-cutting zeal and management hierarchies. Yet it seems unable to react with the speed and decisiveness of a commercial outfit.