Tuesday, March 8 was International Women’s Day. One whole day devoted to more than half the population!

This month was also the first anniversary of the shocking death of Sarah Everard, kidnapped, raped and murdered for the appalling crime of walking home alone mid evening.

In the six months that followed, 80 more women were slain in a variety of circumstances. Some at the hands of domestic abusers.

So it was no accident that Baroness Helena Kennedy chose International Women's Day to launch a report on misogyny, the commission she led having taken some hair-raising evidence of the day to day experience of many women.

Women who got touched and groped on public transport. Women who got called unprintable things, and threatened with unmentionable fates if they responded negatively to being “chatted up” at a bus stop.

Women who were routinely fearful of walking home alone with footsteps behind us; who grasped keys in their hands as a weapon against assault; who learned at an early age that they must at all times take care of their personal safety.

As Kennedy noted, it’s not the norm for guys having a night out with their pals to promise each other they’ll text to say they’ve got home OK.

The world is full of decent men who have never abused women or slagged them off, but who have taken an unconscionable time to wake up to the everyday anxieties of their wives, girlfriends, and female colleagues.

The stark fact, though, is that while it’s only some men who behave very badly, it’s almost all women who have had some unsavoury experience.

Baroness Kennedy’s commission proposes a law to deal specifically with these kind of assaults, verbal and physical, on women.

It would allow judges to take that behaviour into account when a perpetrator is awaiting sentencing in the courts, rather as they do where other crimes involve racism.

Having spent half a century as a criminal barrister in the English courts, Glasgow-born Kennedy is not daft. She doesn’t think that if the Scottish Government passes such a law, appalling behaviour will be magicked away.

What she does believe is that unless and until the police, the judiciary and society as a whole grasps the nettle of ingrained misogyny, things will never materially change.

And that tackling the sense of (sometimes unwitting) entitlement one sex has long enjoyed is the only thing which can liberate women from an ingrained sense of inferiority.