BY standing for election as First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon hopes to "send a strong message to every girl and young woman in Scotland - no matter your background, in Scotland in 2014 there is no glass ceiling on ambition".

Listening to that speech, I felt a small systole of pride that this country was about to have what the UK hadn't in all the years since my childhood: a female leader. Westminster may remain in the grip of a boys' club but here - assuming Johann Lamont hangs on in there - we could soon have three female party leaders.

Scotland still has still a lot of ground to break, however. As Labour's Margaret Curran pointed out earlier this year, despite the SNP having spent years in government, the boards of some public bodies are less than one-third female. Our Parliament now has a lower proportion of women than when it was established. The White Paper on independence often seemed tokenistic in its attempts to woo women with childcare.

Many of the statistics that allow us to gauge how we are doing in a global context lump us in with the rest of the UK. So we learn the UK came 18th in The Economist Glass Ceiling Index, and 18th in the World Economic Forum's gender gap index, just below Lesotho and South Africa and just above Austria and Canada. In Scotland, the 2012 council elections returned only 25% of seats to women.

But we sometimes like to convince ourselves we're doing better here than the rest of the UK. A recent report by anti-sexism campaign group Engender said that "overall, the direction of travel in Scotland since devolution has been more progressive on gender issues than south of the Border". But it looks as if we have been stalling.

However, I'm not advocating despondency - quite the reverse. I believe we stand at a moment of great potential for the feminist movement within Scotland. A few years ago it seemed like feminism was something that was happening in England. Scotland's feminists often seemed like distant cousins, straining to be part of the bigger wave, offshoots working away at their missions. But now, as a result of the independence movement, women of all ages are connected, and united under the ideal of a better Scotland for women.

And the energy was not only there in the Yes movement. There have been plenty of pro-Union feminists arguing the case of solidarity with the UK, yet sharing some of the same vision and aims as their Yes sisters. One hopes these two groups can come together and links can be formed. Many of these No campaigners, after all, have been long-term fighters for women. At an event I chaired for undecided women, I was struck by how much was shared by women on both sides of the debate. At one point, in a lightning piece of political flattery, Sturgeon quipped to No advocate Kezia Dugdale that she would like to see an independent Scotland with Dugdale as its First Minister.

The referendum has given feminism here in Scotland a very distinctive flavour. It is as if by considering what it might mean to build a new, more equal nation, the idea of feminism as a political, not cultural, matter has been revived. Since everything has been open for discussion, ideas not contemplated seriously for some time have been thrown into the pot.

What would it mean for caring for family members to be seriously valued? Why do women still feel excluded from the public domain of politics? How did Better Together imagine they could get away with that "Patronising BT Lady" advert? And why didn't the SNP not think bigger for women? Why advocate 40% quotas of women on public boards, when that falls short by at least 10% of the ideal?

Women here had a moment to dream - and some did. The result is books like Cat Boyd and Jenny Morrison's Scottish Independence: A Feminist Response, which is worth reading now, even in the aftermath of a No vote. It is new groups of activist women formed all over Scotland, some under the banner of Women for Independence, some small informal gatherings.

Of course, yet again, we are faced with the big battle, the grinding practicalities, and the feeling that movement is excruciatingly slow. As yet we don't know what further powers devo max really will deliver, but currently much of what shapes our equality landscape here in Scotland is defined by Westminster. We can change things on some levels - over issues like childcare, gender-based violence and education - but we have to reach south for changes in welfare or equality law, or to have an impact on the institutions that tackle discrimination.

When Sturgeon is finally "crowned" First Minister, I'm sure I'll feel thrilled, as though a glass ceiling were melting away. But I'll be conscious that there are huge distances to travel. After all, when we look down from that ceiling, we don't see a sparkling glass floor, but the hard, cold, uncomfortable ground.