WE welcomed a new baby girl into the Deerin household on Saturday morning. I would say this, of course, but Ruby is gorgeous – flaming red hair, grey/green eyes (though in time they’ll turn brown, like mine), bursting with vitality. She’s already showing signs of a wonderful feistiness – she appears to believe that if she wants to do something, there’s no reason she shouldn’t. Pleasingly, she has a healthy appetite. She’s even sleeping through the night.

Ruby is an eight-week-old Vizsla, a Hungarian pointer. She was a 16th birthday present for my eldest daughter, who has badgered us for a dog hourly since first discovering the power of speech. The rapid progression from shock to euphoria to tears when we surprised her with the puppy will live long in the memory.

Ruby joins a house of girls: we have three daughters. My home surroundings largely consist of drying tights, make-up stains, discarded hair bobbles and an unfathomable number of half-used shampoo bottles. I can seek haven in my study, but the rest of the place has been abandoned to the detritus that seems to be an inevitable consequence of being heavily outnumbered by the better sex.

It’s been quite the education, this being a father of girls. I was an only child with little previous close-up experience of what life is like for women – the obstacles to success, the casual, baked-in prejudices faced on a daily basis, the grotesque pressures placed on them by many of our warped social norms. I have, if you like, awakened into a world that existed beyond the one I knew. I have three very personal reasons to care deeply about the female condition.

We have made great strides on tackling gender inequality over the past century, and each new moment of progress is cause for celebration. There are more senior women in politics and business than ever before. Three of the four leaders of Scotland’s main parties are female, including the First Minister. The Scottish Government’s Permanent Secretary is a woman. The Prime Minister (for now) is a woman. Angela Merkel is the world’s pre-eminent politician. Janet Yellen chairs the Fed. Christine Lagarde runs the IMF. Cressida Dick is Commissioner of the Met.

But we are still, largely, at the stage of firsts: the first woman to hold this post or occupy that role. There are many significant institutions that to this day have only ever been led by men. And each breach of that wall is met with a fresh eruption of misogyny from the small-brained lowlifes who shame my gender.

They were at it again at the weekend, after Jodie Whittaker was named as the first female Doctor Who. Never mind that the character is a preposterous fictional alien from the planet Gallifrey, a telepath with two hearts who can survive without oxygen, who travels through time in a police box and who repeatedly regenerates into new bodies. I mean, a woman? Now you’re just being silly.

According to the social intelligence company Brandwatch, of the half-million tweets responding to the announcement on Sunday around 20 per cent were rated as negative, for which read “misogynistic” and, typically, illiterate. The internet was bubbling over with the stuff. “YOU LOST A VIEWER STUPID BBC NOT WORTH IT ANYMORE,” typed one charmer. “Dr Who is a time lord not a time lady,” said another. “I feel exactly the same way I do now as when Thatcher was elected PM. PC has gone too far,” grunted a third.

My favourite tweet of the day came at the subject from a slightly different angle. A mother took a 45-second video of her daughter, who looks around 10, intently watching the trailer on TV. When Whittaker’s identity is revealed the child turns to the camera with a huge smile on her face and shrieks “the new Doctor is a girl!”. I confess I’m no fan of the programme, and have little interest in who is cast in any of its roles, but in that moment I understood why this choice mattered.

All these choices matter. We live in a time where a man can be elected President of the United States despite being an unreconstructed boor who talks about grabbing women “by the pussy”, and who tells his French counterpart’s older wife that “you’re in such good shape”.

When Yvette Cooper gave a speech recently that tackled the online abuse of women, especially the BBC’s excellent political editor Laura Kuenssberg, she was instantly denounced on social media as a “bitch”, a “bully”, and worse. A poll of Brexiters found that 74 per cent of them see feminism as a “force for ill”.

A British aristocrat, the 4th Viscount St Davids, was jailed last week after writing on Facebook that he would pay “£5,000 for the first person to ‘accidentally’ run over this bloody troublesome first-generation immigrant”, his target being the businesswoman Gina Miller, who has taken the Government to court over its Brexit plans. Ask Nicola Sturgeon, Ruth Davidson or Kezia Dugdale about the rape and death threats they receive regularly on social media.

Women are also far more likely to be judged on the way they look. When I once mentioned to Ms Sturgeon that Barack Obama had removed all unnecessary choices from his life, including the colour of suit he wears, to focus solely on important decisions, she shot back: “I’m a woman, I don’t have that luxury.”

But she also spoke emotionally about the power of precedent and example. “It actually took me quite by surprise when I became First Minister, just the number of women and girls, including quite young girls, that got in touch or emailed or wrote and it was nothing to do with party politics or me necessarily as a person, it was just to say in different ways how much it meant to them because it meant they believed these things were possible.”

These things are, increasingly, possible, even unremarkable, and our species is all the better for it. The misogynistic knuckle-draggers of Left and Right, these unfragrant, lonely onanists, can shuffle off back to their caves.

I want my girls to grow up thinking – no, knowing – that, like Ruby, if they want to do something, there’s no reason they shouldn’t.