A QUICK question. When you look around, on the global stage, what do you see that characterises an increasing number of the heroes of our time? I would suggest it is that a great many of them are women. We haven't, till now, heard a great deal of talk about women as heroes – or, for that matter, proper villains or anti-heroes. More often they are victims, saints, seductresses. But right now that could be changing. This doesn’t mean necessarily that these women are in power, but that they are the figures who touch us emotionally, whose stories inspire us, who are capable of leading us by the heart, providing the narratives we crave, as heroes do. Michelle Obama emerged as one of those figures when she made her “I’m with her” First Lady speech in support of Hillary Clinton last week.

The speech was impressive; a moving tearjerker and rallying call, deftly delivered. Partly she convinced by telling her own story, partly by connecting Hillary’s candidacy to hopes and dreams for the next generation of Americans, for “the children”. “Today I wake up every morning in a house that was built by slaves,” she said, “and I watch my daughters, two beautiful intelligent black young women playing with their dogs on the White House lawn, and because of Hillary Clinton, my daughters and all our sons and daughters, now take for granted that a woman can be president of the United States."

She even managed to make vaguely believable the line: “Don’t let anybody tell you this country is not great…. This right now is the greatest country on earth.” Her husband’s tweet saying “incredible speech by an incredible woman” was the most shared item on Twitter. Even Trump praised the speech. And on YouTube, at time of writing, it had already had nearly 4 million hits (far more than Bill Clinton’s speech in support of his wife). One couldn’t help half-wishing that she, not Hillary Clinton, was running for president. I'm with Michelle, many of us were feeling.

But Michelle Obama’s speech also served as a reminder of something else that is going on. Women are now seen as credible leaders more than ever before in human history. There is an “I’m with her” feeling out there in the world. It’s a shift that we have seen over here, in Britain too, where post-Brexit, the media seemed to be cooing over Nicola Sturgeon’s speech after the result and describing her as the “only grown up” in British politics, then collectively sighing relief when finally it looked like a woman, Theresa May, was going to take over from the boys club that had made a hash of things. Even the German newspaper Die Welt ran a piece saying that May, Angela Merkel and Sturgeon were a new “femokratie”, coming to “clean up the mess created by men”. Of course the idea of Sturgeon as “credible” is not really anything new to us here in Scotland, where her personal popularity ratings have long been high. We've known her as a hero-of-sorts for a while.

My belief is that one of the reasons so many women are emerging as hero-figures and leaders is that outsiders are what we’re looking for now. If there’s one narrative that people relate to almost more than any other it is that of the hero from outwith the club – whether that be Donald Trump, Nigel Farage, Nicola Sturgeon or Theresa May. And women, by virtue of their gender, are still mostly seen as outsiders.

Of course, this is a problem for presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, who, in spite of her gender, is frequently seen as one of the elite rather than an outsider. It’s why she needs to keep on repeating those gender messages, as she did last week in her acceptance speech, talking of how this was the first time a major American party has nominated a woman for president. “I'm happy for grandmothers and little girls and everyone in between," she said. "I'm happy for boys and men. Because when any barrier falls in American it clears the way for everyone. After all, when there are no ceilings, the sky's the limit.”

But these heroes aren’t just cropping up in politics. Shifts in the Hollywood film industry suggest we are connecting more with female heroes and their narratives. Female-led movies are big box office – bringing increasing returns - and this year has seen a stream of them, from Star Wars: The Force Awakens at the end of last year, through to the girl-buddy reworking of Ghostbusters and, shortly to be released, Suicide Squad, starring Margot Robbie as supervillain Harley Quinn, proving women can be the baddies as well as the goodies these days. Suicide Squad’s feminist credentials, however, are seriously in doubt, given the frequency of shots, even in the trailers, of her in just the skimpiest of hot pants. But, given there’s already promise of an all female-led spin-off (in which Robbie has declared she won’t be wearing hot pants), and talk of Harley Quinn as the saviour of the DC cinematic universe, the message is clear: we live in a time when both our lead action-heroes and anti-heroes can be women.

In some ways, it’s this, the arrival of the anti-hero or villain, that says most about the range of roles we are allowing women. Hence, I think we shouldn’t get upset when a commentator like Piers Morgan describes, as he did last year, Nicola Sturgeon as the “most dangerous woman in the world”. A world that lets women be heroes is also one that can also see them as proper villains, rather than just Eve-like seductresses, and all the shades of grey in between. Fearing women’s power and what they may do with it is an inevitable by-product of putting our trust in them to be our leaders and heroes. Bring on this monstrous regiment of women.