I SUSPECT many journalists die a little inside when we see one of our own kind embark on a project that is properly meaningful and intrepid. When your job is to sit well back out of harm’s way and throw rotten fruit from the safety of the cheap seats you can feel a little chastened when you see people like David Pratt and Mark Daly at work.

For the last 25 years or so, David has been covering all the big human conflicts throughout the world, most recently for The National’s sister papers, the Sunday Herald and The Herald. He is one of the UK’s finest foreign correspondents and, several times each year, he will put himself in harm’s way to convey the human suffering wrought by every war, lest we ever become desensitised to any of it.

David is no adrenalin junkie; he doesn’t do what he does to pursue a life less ordinary: he simply feels that someone must bear witness to the truth of the horrors which human beings routinely inflict upon each other to slake a wretched despot’s thirst for power, land and influence. If David and his ever-diminishing band of itinerants in this media international brigade weren’t around then the news from these conflicts would be filtered to fit our government’s narrow and self-serving foreign agenda or provided by a host of live iPhone recordings lacking context or a sense of the bigger picture.

Mark Daly, meanwhile, has risked jail and his own physical wellbeing to report on institutional racism in the police; miscarriages of justice and the International Olympic Committee’s catastrophic failure of leadership in dealing with drugs in sport. They are two of my trade’s finest practitioners and we ought to be proud that they were trained and forged in Scotland.

I’ve also admired the work of other reporters who will sleep rough for a week for the purposes of getting close to the reality of life for those of our brothers and sisters who are without a home. Others have attempted to feed themselves on a few pounds a week or to experience for themselves the challenges that wheelchair-users encounter in their daily lives.

Curiously though, I’ve never heard of a male journalist getting into drag and attempting to discover the reality of life for a female worker in the offices of one of our biggest High Street financial institutions. A degree of circumspection, sensitivity and sound judgment would probably be required for such an exercise lest it cross a line into bad taste or condescension. But, God knows it would make for very uncomfortable and compelling viewing if it could be achieved.

There are many excellent female reporters who could use a hidden camera to record the way in which sexism continues to flourish in our workplaces more than 40 years after the Sex Discrimination Act was passed. Yet, I suspect that if a man was to experience what women must endure in her professional life the shock factor would be greater.

A slew of surveys and reports over the last few years have indicated that something rotten continues to fester in our workplaces in the way that women – at all levels of seniority and expertise – are treated. Last week, the Chartered Management Institute published an analysis of pay data from around 60,000 managers in the UK. It revealed that a gap of almost 30 per cent existed between the salaries of men and women in Scotland – the highest of any part of the UK. This depressing picture was given added texture by research from the Institute for Fiscal Studies which found that the average gender gap in hourly wages is now only 18 per cent. It was 28 per cent in 1993 hence the ironic cheering in the corner.

For those virtuous and rich people who say that money isn’t everything there’s more. Assorted surveys have shown that, as well as being made to feel like second-class citizens in their own workplace, many women have had cause to wonder if the office rule-book was lifted from a lap-dancing club.

Women have reported being asked to dress provocatively, especially when meeting important clients. And that’s if they are ever granted the privilege of meeting these people outwith the members’ bar of a male-only golf club. In a recent survey more than one in two women reported having experienced sexual harassment at work.

Much of this is dismissed by self-proclaimed “enlightened” men who say that sexual innuendo is the accepted argot of the workplace and that women are enthusiastic participants. This though, falls down when we are talking about a company of seven men and one woman. And how many “enlightened men” would like their teenage daughters embarking on their first job to be made to endure grossly offensive sexual jokes told from a middle-aged male perspective.

Many younger women will, of course, rarely complain for fear of undermining their future prospects. Even when they are forced to run the gauntlet of leering comments about their bodies or questions about their private lives most will choose to suffer in silence.

It may be that a majority of men have never been guilty of this sort of behaviour but how many of us have stood by and watched a female colleague being abused in this way and chosen to look the other way or to chuckle furtively as she is being humiliated?

In the last couple of months a major public charity spent huge amounts of money on a series of radio adverts mocking the physical appearance of Ann Widdecombe. I can’t have been alone in thinking that if Ms Widdecombe or any of her loved ones had heard these laddish and offensive adverts they would have felt hurt and humiliated. This though, is 21st-century Britain where, it seems, it’s OK to deride the physical appearance of an older woman to sell cheap lottery tickets.

A few days after Theresa May was elected leader of the Conservative Party and thus prime minister of the United Kingdom she travelled north to meet Nicola Sturgeon, First Minister of Scotland. Ms Sturgeon posted a photograph of her greeting Ms May on the steps of Bute House along with this comment: “Politics aside – I hope girls everywhere look at this photograph and believe nothing should be off limits for them.”

This was an impressive and uplifting sentiment. But, while little either remains off-limits in the way we treat women in the workplace, it will remain nothing more than that.