Here is the news. BONG! Adam and Eve in scrumping scandal … BONG! Noah heads for boatyard, says: “It looks like rain” … BONG! David takes on Goliath in title fight … BONG! Women are paid less than men. The story about the gender pay gap may not have been around since biblical times; it just feels that way sometimes. If women had a pound for every study which confirmed what they already know to their cost there would be no need for a national lottery because every mother, daughter, sister, aunt, and niece would be as rich as JK Rowling.

And here we go again. This is already shaping up to be a bumper week for pay gap reports with two studies to add to a pile tall enough to qualify as a Munro. First comes a paper from the Chartered Management Institute. The CMI analysed pay data from 60,000 managers in the UK and found that in Scotland the gap between men and women was 29.2 per cent. In cold, hard cash terms this amounts to £10,862 a year – the worst pay gap in the UK. Another one for the trophy cabinet.

Next along the production line was research from the Institute for Fiscal Studies. First, the good news: the average gender gap in hourly wages is now 18 per cent – down from 28 per cent in 1993. You might ask why a still double digit gap is something worth celebrating, but you take the sunshine where you find it in the gloomy lands of equal pay. The bad news, however, is that when a woman starts to have children the pay gap assumes Grand Canyon-like proportions, widening from 6 per cent to as much as 30 per cent.

At the risk of sounding like Beyonce, here is one for all the single ladies out there. All the married and partnered ones for that matter, too. Close your eyes for a second and imagine the following scenario. You go into work tomorrow and there is an email at the top of your in-box marked urgent. It is from management. Due to a change in personnel at the top of the firm, says the email, the pay of men and women in the organisation will henceforth be reversed, so the man you suspect is getting paid more than you for doing the same work (or less) will now get your salary, and you will get his. How long do you reckon it would be before a band of pitchfork-wielding men were laying siege to the boss’s office? Five seconds? Two? Yet this is the status quo that millions of women in this country face every day. We clock in, we clock out, we get ripped off. Rinse your face and repeat.

Wasn’t it nice to close your eyes for a bit? Then let us do it again. In the manner of a female Ebenezer Scrooge, imagine being transported by the ghost of headlines future to a time many years from now. There, in a nondescript office block somewhere, you will find a young working mother. Our female toiler is having a hard time of it, not least because last week the tower of gender pay gap studies toppled over on to her. But she still has enough mobility left to turn to you and ask why, for the love of Barbara Castle, you did not do more to change the situation.

What more could have been done, you might ask? Equal pay legislation is on the books, has been since 1970. That was scored off the “to do” list long ago. There is no end, as we have noted, to the number of studies carried out which show the gap is not going away any time soon (and that the legislation is not being used). Politically, the country is on its second woman prime minister. In Scotland, home to the worst gender pay gap remember, we have not one, not two, but three women as party leaders, with the First Minister a woman. How can women in Scotland be so Borgen when it comes to political advancement and worse than bog-standard when it comes to securing equal pay?

But here women go again, blaming ourselves when really there is no shortage of those willing to take up that particular task. It is not too long ago that Kevin Roberts, chairman of Saatchi & Saatchi advertising agency, tried to be helpful by explaining, in his view, why there were so few women in leadership positions, the kind of jobs where they pay the big bucks and make the big decisions to pay women the same as men. Women’s ambition was not “vertical ambition”, Mr Roberts told Business Insider magazine. They had, instead, “this intrinsic, circular ambition to be happy. So they say: ‘We are not judging ourselves by those standards that you idiotic dinosaur-like men judge yourself by’. I don't think [the lack of women in leadership roles] is a problem. I'm just not worried about it because they are very happy, they're very successful, and doing great work.” Following an outcry over his remarks, Mr Roberts became the former chairman of Saatchi & Saatchi.

What Mr Roberts was describing, what he believed, was that women chose to turn away from the scramble up the career ladder, the fights for promotion, the stand-offs over pay rises, to achieve a happier life. That may be true in some cases, but how many women give up the struggle for equal pay and promotion not out of choice but out of necessity? Women in most cases choose to have children, but the other factors which might hold them back – having to care for elderly parents, the exorbitant cost of child care, simply being exhausted from fighting on the home and career fronts to hold everything together – all of those come as added extras in life. Stuff happens, stuff that it is usually left to women to sort out whether they want to or not. Facebook CEO Sheryl Sandberg has famously advised women to “lean in” at work and take leadership roles. More great advice, if only some were not too busy leaning backwards, or doing umpteen types of other gymnastics, to do so.

The pay gap can be bridged far more quickly than is happening at the moment. Change does not have to be measured in millimetres. Much hope is being pinned on new laws which will require firms with 250 or more staff to disclose the difference between what they pay male and female staff. It could be 2018 before these alternative gender pay gap reports are published, and one looks forward to the reaction in individual organisations once the political truly becomes personal (those pitch-forks could be in different hands then). In the meantime, for all time, there is something women can do for themselves, without waiting for the next report or regulation. They can screw up their courage and demand equal pay. Hold back on excusing and explaining career breaks. Do not think your employer is doing you a huge favour by treating you equally. It’s the law, damn it. And yes, say damn it more often too if you feel like it. Faint heart and politeness never won equal pay – that truly is the news.