“Get a grip boys and start playing football - these are girls!” spat an incensed spectator as my daughter’s all-girls team hammered a second goal into the opposition’s net.

It was summer 2023: the Lionesses had just played and lost the World Cup final – despite a belter of a penalty save from Mary Earps – while in the background much was being made of a decision not to sell women’s replica goalkeeper tops and of course there was that kiss by Spain’s FA chief that came to somewhat overshadow his country’s victory.

And yet on a football pitch in Kent was still a struggle to read the room. (Not a wholly unusual occurrence if you speak to the girls or coaches now taking on the country’s boys’ leagues).

Fast forward to this week and the Lionesses goalkeeper shirts sold out in under five minutes on Monday following Nike’s U-turn and Earps has made it onto the BBC Sport’s Personality of the Year shortlist (alongside athlete Katarina Johnson-Thompson).

Should England’s Number 1 win next weekend – she’d be the second Lioness to scoop the accolade following Beth Mead’s award in 2022.

It all sounds extremely positive for the women’s game – in fact not even football - but for women’s sport in general.

Particularly in light of worrying warnings from Sport England about how few teenage girls enjoy PE and the numbers now dropping out of sports teams and clubs by their mid-teens - crippled by a lack of self-confidence and worries about body image.

But a scroll into the comments below stories about these sportswomen – footballers in particular - often make for a dark, somewhat depressing, read that leave me questionning whether society is moving very fast at all.

There’s the suggestion Earps – and KJT – make the shortlist to fit the ‘woke agenda’. That Earps doesn’t deserve to win because she’s not ‘won’ anything and made the list simply because she’s female. She merely ‘ticked a box’.

While the majority of the 200-plus commentators underneath one particular story about the sale of her shirt clearly only rolled-up to mock with the predictable ‘I bought one to wash my car, she couldn’t save a shot from a man’ and ‘Mary Earps denies buying all 10 of them’.

Taking their lead from ex-pro Joey Barton's rant at female pundits this week are also comments saying exactly that - ‘women should stick to what they know’ and there isn’t a man watching football who is ‘paying any attention to what a women is saying’.

In fact, despite the many comments swirling around social media agreeing wholeheartedly with the suggestion women should only speak on women’s matters and vice versa - there are ironically large numbers of these particular posters congregating under stories about women’s sport?

In September former players Gary Neville and Jill Scott went as far as to switch social media accounts to test the issues around gender bias with the opinions Neville shared under Scott’s name being greeted with misogynistic comments like ‘get back in the kitchen’ believing them to be from the (female) Euros winner.

On Sunday Arsenal set a new Women’s Super League attendance record of 59,042 for their clash against Chelsea; the Lionesses goalkeeper shirts have sold out and Earps could indeed become the second female footballer to win the Sports Personality accolade.

But while the tide is turning slowly, the reality is that advocates for the women’s game - and to a certain extent women’s sport in general - have some way to go before in terms of attitude they find an even playing field.