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For the first time, employers with 250 or more employees are having to publish figures comparing men and women's average pay across their organisation.

Dame Helena Morrissey is heading a project which aims to improve diversity across all dimensions in the investment industry.

Here, she admits the financial and insurance services sectors really need to step up:

The first-ever mandatory reporting of UK gender pay gap data was always bound to be controversial and in some areas, depressing.

My own sector, financial and insurance services, has reported the very widest pay gaps, confirming our lack of decisive progress towards better gender balance at all levels despite countless initiatives since the financial crisis.

Those stark numbers just can't be denied.

For all the inevitable criticisms levelled at the Government's methodology (remember only 200 employers across all sectors took the trouble to contribute to the 2015 public consultation), we now have transparency around gender pay imbalances, not just an aggregate, no-one's-really-accountable level but company-by-company, vastly increasing the motivation for executives to do something about it.

Let's not make excuses - let's make this a turning point.

This is especially important in financial services, where the problem threatens to become a chicken-and-egg conundrum, at significant cost to culture.

For me, the gender pay gap data reflects the 'gender career fulfilment gap' - the flip side of the explanation (not a justification) from many companies that their large pay gaps reflect having 'very few women in senior roles'.

:: Q&A: Gender pay gap explained

The unavoidable truth is that women are, on average, doing less highly valued work.

The question is, what can we do to ensure more women fulfil their career potential - and are then rewarded fairly?

The answer should not be to 'simply' train women to be more assertive about asking for a pay rise.

I should not have to behave like a (certain type of) man to be as valuable as a man.

Companies should recognise and reward talent based on contribution, not according to he who shouts loudest.

Nor should the gender pay gap revelations necessarily prompt a redoubling of effort around existing diversity initiatives.

Those 'special' initiatives aren't translating into real results; what's needed is a new approach.

I believe we have a much greater opportunity today to achieve a big breakthrough in our long quest for gender equality - and the pay gap data can help us seize this moment.

It's time to bring gender equality into the mainstream, to make it integral to the modernisation of our businesses and lives.

Other factors are creating the right context.

The digital revolution is shaking up working practices for both men and women, while increasing longevity is creating more varied career patterns.

And the next generation expects work-life balance, with men playing a role in their future families' upbringing and women having equal career opportunities.

This powerful cocktail gives us a brand-new opportunity to work together, men and women, to re-devise how we work, live and bring up families together, as partners.

If we do that, we will finally be able to move on from centuries of patriarchy that have sown the seeds of the data we pore over today.