IT’S just more woke nonsense, eh? Forest Green Rovers, the UK’s first vegan club, are at it again. They have appointed a WOMAN as their new head coach, for heaven’s sake, the latest step in their lefty crusade following the previous appointment of - *checks notes* - Duncan Ferguson.

Some of the reaction to the news that Hannah Dingley had been placed in interim charge of the club by flamboyant owner and green energy entrepreneur Dale Vince, thus becoming the first woman to take charge of a senior men’s team in England, was as predictable as it was sad.

But while Vince and Forest Green have become renowned for their quirky, progressive approach – they use the urine from the stadium toilets to fertilise their organic pitch and have a beehive on the roof of their Main Stand – this is no gimmick.

READ MORE: Hannah Dingley Forest Green caretaker boss is no gimmick

Dingley has been in charge of the Forest Green academy since 2019. She has a UEFA pro licence, the highest coaching qualification there is. As is commonplace in football, clubs more often than not will look within to plug the managerial gap when an appointment fails, and Dingley was the natural choice. If anything, it might have been peculiar had she not been asked to take the step up.

Whether that will eventually be on a permanent basis remains to be seen, but it seems she will be given the opportunity to stake a claim for the role through her performance in the dugout, and her sex will play no part in the decision-making process.

One day, perhaps her sex won’t even be worth mentioning, but as the first through that particular glass ceiling, it does carry significance. You can’t be it, unless you can see it, as the saying goes, and Dingley is now a trailblazer who has shown women and young girls that being a female is now no barrier to coaching at the senior level of even the men’s game.

Throughout her coaching career, Dingley has been mistaken for the physio more times than she would care to remember, but she hasn’t allowed the in-built sexism that is still in the game deter her from pursuing her career.

What has been heartening is that among the reaction to her appointment, amidst the tired old gags about her being there to wash and iron the team’s kits, has been an outpouring of positivity and well-wishes from male and female football fans alike.

There will be those out there who are desperate for her to fail, and if she does struggle to pick up points and ultimately doesn’t get the gig on a full-time basis, those same people will no doubt hold that up to be proof positive that women can’t hack it as managers in a man’s world.

READ MORE: Jo Potter on Hannah Dingley, her coaching career and Rangers deal

That argument conveniently forgets of course that she is following a manager in Ferguson who picked up just six points from his 18 matches in charge as the team slid into League Two at the tail end of last season, a record that may be held against him as an individual, but not against his entire sex.

The positive slant to much of the reaction though got me thinking if we up in Scotland might be ready to see a female coach break through into the upper reaches of the men’s game here.

I used to fear that the first openly gay footballer here since Justin Fashanu back in the 90s would be on the receiving end of horrendous abuse, but Zander Murray bravely stuck his head above the parapet on that issue, and while I am sure he has been on the receiving end of some negative reaction as a result, I know from interviewing him that the support he has had has drowned that out tenfold or more.

So, maybe we are a little more progressive up here than even I would have imagined, and a female coach could indeed be welcomed into the men’s game in Scotland and be judged by the same parameters as her male colleagues.

Former Scotland women’s national team head coach Shelley Kerr has of course already been in charge of Stirling University in the Lowland League, but appointments further up the ladder have proven harder for both her individually and women collectively to come across.

Kerr was mooted at various stages for roles with prominent clubs in the men’s game, but for one reason or another, speculation never turned into anything more concrete. In fact, even in the women’s game here, until recently we had men in charge of both the Celtic and Rangers women’s sides as well as the women’s national team. Jo Potter has now succeeded Malky Thomson at Rangers, and she described Dingley's appointment as 'huge' this week.

Perhaps Potter or Leanne Ross, currently making a name for herself as manager of Glasgow City, may be the ones to eventually smash through the barrier into the men’s game, if that is a path they wish to pursue.

As well as leading Glasgow City to a dramatic last-day SWPL title win last season, Ross is an assistant coach with the SWNT and has been mooted as a potential successor to Pedro Martínez Losa in time. But perhaps her talents may take her towards the men’s game, which appears more ready than ever to accept them.

Dingley’s appointment at Forest Green is a momentous step. But when women in the near future make similar strides into men’s football, perhaps it won’t merit that much attention, never mind a newspaper column.