Individual companies having a gender pay gap doesn't mean the market has a gender pay gap. And if you work at one of those companies and are told that you can't be given a raise because of the internal, secret gender pay gap, you should quit that company and find a new job.

I mean, even if it's true that particular company is paying its women worse than its men, and even if legislation means they can't quickly fix it (I don't know how onerous this legislation is in the U.K.), the proper response on the part of any employee who is given these excuses ought to be "Look, that sounds like you have a difficult problem, but that isn't my problem. My problem is that my salary is $X when it should be $X+Y." Because at the end of the day their excuses aren't going to change the fact that they can either fix your problem or not, and if they don't fix your problem somebody else in the labor market can.

Even when this company has > 100,000 emploees and has individual divisions with more engineers than Google

What does the company's size have to do with whether or not you are being paid the amount of money you want?

Because they set industry standards for pay which is why the pay suppression cartel was so important

FWIW in the UK the pay gap favours young women I gather; it changes over somewhere around the time a lot of women take a career break (32 IIRC, will try and trace the source).

It's interesting because younger women hear the USA stats and complain about how they're being hard done by.

The same dynamics happen in USA. The statistics people report in the USA in the media are aggregates between all men and all women, which is why they're misleading.

In both cases, it's because women choose to leave the labor force for a while, which makes them no longer like the men who made similar choices as them up until that point.