The world may have been concentrating on the climate change conference in Paris, the EU renegotiation talks and Star Wars; but future historians may record this week as the moment the earth finally moved in social relations between women and men.

Today, for the first time, the Equalities and Human Rights Commission will be called upon to recognise formally that men and boys can be in positions of systemic disadvantage and inequality in British life - such as education and family life and law.

A tiny fissure will thus be driven into the unyielding concrete crust that has covered gender politics for the last half century. For the entire lifetimes of most people in this country, it has been a central, unquestionable article of faith that where inequalities pervade our society by gender, they must inhere exclusively to females.

Today is the deadline for submissions to the EHRC for proposals to be included in that body’s strategic plan for 2016-2019.

Now Mark Brooks (chair of the ManKind Initiative), Glen Poole (UK coordinator of International Men’s Day), Dan Bell (features editor, insideMan magazine), Martin Daubney (journalist, broadcaster and committee member, Being A Man Festival) and Ally Fogg (writer and journalist) have composed a letter drawing attention to a range of significant troubles for men and boys.

These include:

The authors have also invited a number of organisations, academics and opinion formers to add their support. I am among those additional signatories.

Mark Brooks, coordinator of this initiative, expects the EHRC to report back in Spring 2016 on the submissions it has received. “Our expectation is that there will be recognition of these issues concerning men and boys," he says. "The credibility of the organisations and individuals involved and their mature and responsible approach should mean that the EHRC must take notice. Those organisations and individuals will simply not allow these issues to be ignored any longer.”

International Men's Day is on November 19 every year

Responding to the prospect of receiving the letter, a spokesperson for the EHRC indicated that they have already shown themselves open to recognising social maladies that are specific to males: “Equality is for everyone. Our recent comprehensive review of progress on equality and human rights in Britain showed that poor white boys experience a combination of disadvantage.

“The study also revealed that men aged 45-49 now suffer the highest rates of suicide – a figure which has increased significantly over the last five years.

“We will be taking these findings forward in our next strategic plan.”

"This is far from the end of the road for genuine gender equality in Britain" Neil Lyndon

As an independent public body, the EHRC can make recommendations about the action Government and others should take. Whether or not people in power actually do take action, however, is up to them.

It does not necessarily follow, therefore, that even if the EHRC should give formal recognition to the systemic disadvantages and inequalities itemised in today’s letter, any change will directly result. The Secretary of State for Education may not instruct local authorities to ensure that boys are treated equally in schools. The Justice Minister may not direct the family courts to correct the most egregious human rights abuse in our society and make sure that fathers are treated equally with mothers as parents.

This, then – to borrow from Churchill – is far from the end of the road for genuine gender equality in Britain; nor is it even the beginning of the end; but it may the end of the beginning.

Speaking personally, the conception and delivery of this letter to the EHRC will be the best reason outside my family life to celebrate Christmas and the New Year for 25 years.

Men are more likely to commit suicide than women Credit: Alamy

It was December 1990 when – in a 5000-word essay for a national Sunday newspaper – I became the first writer to point out that males in our society were subjected to a slew of systemic disadvantages and inequalities, including most of those now listed in the letter to the EHRC. We did not notice or care about these obviously serious issues, I wrote, because modern feminism had appropriated and monopolised to women all consideration of gender inequality.

Listing the numerous inequalities for males in my 1992 book No More Sex War: The Failures of Feminism (now republished in the collection Sexual Impolitics ), I wrote:

“Each of those disadvantages is an element of fissive material which can be bound together to make a grenade. If the assembled device is lobbed over the ramparts so that it drops deep into the foundations of modern feminism, it may blow up that towering edifice of bulls***, that babel of intolerance and casuistry which has cast a murrain over the life of the West.”

To my mind, the very existence of those inequalities for men annulled the notion of patriarchy which is central to every form of modern feminism: “If any disadvantage applies to all men, if any individual man is denied a right by reason of his gender which is afforded to every individual woman, then it must follow that ours is not a society devised to advance and protect advantages for men over women. In reason and logic, it cannot be called a patriarchy.”

If, therefore, the EHRC gives formal recognition to the list of disadvantages for males in today’s letter a pebble may be removed from the very foundations of feminism.

Meanwhile, the leading benefits of this revolutionary moment will not be merely theoretical or intellectual: they will eventually be felt in the improved lives of countless men and boys whose disadvantages will no longer be dismissed, neglected or scorned.

We owe that prospect to the brave, committed guys who have now put the Equalities and Human Rights Commission on the spot.

Cheers.