AS you may have heard, this is Men's Sport Week.

To help promote it, The Herald, in common with other newspapers, will publish a series of daily supplements celebrating the sporting prowess of males.

Not to be outdone, radio stations will devote hundreds of hours of programming to men's sports, including many discussions with some former professional sportsmen. And of course television will join in: some channels will be almost wall-to-wall men's sport, while even those largely dedicated to news will set aside a couple of minutes every hour to reporting at least the bare bones of the main masculine sporting stories.

Together, that multimedia output will add up to one giant advert for Men's Sport Week. Granted, there will still be some space left over for coverage of minor matters such as war, famine and pestilence, but the message will be loud, clear and inescapable: men's sport really matters.

Except, as you've probably worked out by now, this is not Men's Sport Week at all. Not officially, at least. Not with that initial-capitals title.

But, if all that media output is a guide, this is still definitely men's sport week. So, by default, is every week - and that includes last week, which was, officially, Women's Sport Week.

Writing in these pages last Wednesday, my colleague Susan Swarbrick put the case for Women's Sport Week, making specific mention of the disparity between men's and women's earnings, and of the vastly greater coverage given to men's sport. In some quarters there have been marked improvements of late in that coverage - the BBC's UK output, for instance, is now more inclusive, thanks in large part to the efforts of Shelley Alexander, the broadcaster's editorial lead on women's sport.

But the fact that, to take one prominent example, the England women's cricket team now gets a modicum of coverage on Radio 4's sports bulletins is of little or no consolation to most of us in Scotland. And, while sections of the Scottish media do take women's sport seriously, other elements would happily preserve their part of the profession as a men-only zone.

Indeed, despite the modest publicity given to Women's Sport Week, if anything the disparity between the treatment of male and female sport felt worse than usual last week. While women's sport is habitually ignored by many men, last week it was subjected to some extra disparagement. It seems that, whenever women decide to publicise some aspect of their lives and encourage others to take an interest in it, some men feel compelled to respond by rubbishing their efforts.

On Saturday night, for example, when the FIFA Women's World Cup kicked off within hours of the men's UEFA Champions League final finishing, the comments soon started on social media: women's football is pathetic compared to the Champions League; it's not a real sport; women can't play the game. The usual drivel.

Of course, people are entitled to like or dislike anything they want, and no-one with any knowledge of football would say the Ivory Coast team that conceded 10 goals to Germany on Sunday night in the World Cup was a patch on the Juventus side that shipped three to Barcelona in Berlin a night earlier. So what's the problem with such criticism, besides the implicit misogyny which it often contains? Well, for a start, there's the fact that it's not comparing like with like.

In terms of technical ability, the Champions League is the pinnacle of world football. Everything else - not just women's football - compares unfavourably to it, including many men's World Cup matches, not to mention virtually every match played in domestic Scottish football. So do we just dismiss everything because it's not as good as the very best? Or do we compare athletes with others in their category?

To take a couple of examples away from football, do we dismiss Serena Williams's status as one of the great tennis players because there are scores of men who would probably beat her? Do we write off Ricky Burns as a poor boxer because there are hundreds of heavyweights who could crush him? Not if we've got any sense, we don't.

Besides, any fair analysis of women's sports would recognise that in many cases they are only just starting out on a path to full professionalism that the male equivalents embarked on long ago. Glasgow City, the pre-eminent women's football team in Scotland, were only founded in 1998. The Scottish women's rugby team first played an international in 1993 - more than a century after the first men's international.

Yes, organised women's football was played as far back as the inter-war period. But, as Margot McCuaig's 2013 BBC documentary Honeyballers showed, for much of the last century the football authorities throughout Britain actively tried to suppress the women's game.

In other words, far from merely ignoring or casually dismissing women's sport, many men have mounted militant opposition to it - and given that historical background, for men to criticise women's sport as "not real" or "not as good as the men's game" is a bit like robbing someone then sneering at them for being penniless.