LAST weekend more than four million women from across the globe gathered to celebrate women’s rights. Following the inauguration of President Trump on Friday, women congregated in more than 300 cities in the United States alone.

Huge numbers took to the streets in Washington DC, New York and Los Angeles, and in doing so joined with others as far afield as Edinburgh, London, Sydney and Nairobi in an act of joyful solidarity which spanned seven continents.

Dozens of female scientists in Antarctica even halted work to make a stand.

Those attending the marches and demos formed a broad coalition of views and political beliefs.

Amnesty International USA, which co-sponsored the main march in Washington DC, listed its main concerns as the Trump administration’s proposals for a register of Muslims in the US and the new President’s “willingness to use policies to exclude particular communities”.

At the same time, media coverage showed political leaders and activists from established political groups walking side by side with teachers and community campaigners, but mostly alongside mothers, daughters and sisters with no political affiliation at all.

As well as representing a huge panoply of views, these events were characterised by their overwhelmingly peaceful nature. Unlike some of the protests seen in DC and elsewhere on the day of the presidential inauguration, there were virtually no reports of violence or significant numbers of arrests of attendees anywhere in the world.

It’s astonishing and heart-warming in equal measure that millions of women and their male supporters gathered in one of the biggest global political protests the world has seen, but in the absence of virtually any public disorder.

On any measure, these marches were a significant and potentially ground-breaking moment for women. We’ve made our mark.

Now we must be listened to. So let’s not get angry. Let’s get organised.

We now have an opportunity to move forward together. If we are to harness the positive energy that’s been created in the past few days for good, we must begin to act now.

I agree with the US academic Erica Chenoweth, who said this week that if these protests are to be effective in the long term, they must develop a real purpose beyond simple public statements. Their aim must ultimately be “to change incentives, not to melt hearts”.

To do this, we need to keep all those who attended involved.

We need to encourage those who took their first steps into the political arena last weekend to sign up to help organise the next steps.

We must persuade these women to sign up to support campaigning groups or join the political party which most represents their views.

This would replicate the experience in Scotland following our own political earthquake in 2014, when voters bucked a decades-long trend by turning out in huge numbers to take part in Scotland’s referendum.

The unprecedented upsurge in membership of political parties has been a force for good for Scotland, improving our democracy by making our civic life more representative of our population.

If those millions of women across the world who turned out on Saturday, or who were inspired by the mass mobilisation of hope we saw on our TV screens were to become active in the process of changing the world for the better, we’d see a democratic political realignment on an unprecedented scale.

Imagine a world where women are the centre of the political process, not consigned to the periphery.

Imagine the collective power of millions of politically active women, working to drive forward progressive changes across the world.

Imagine how different our politics would be if they truly reflected the aspirations, hopes and dreams of both men and women, and weren’t politically skewed by an unbalanced representation of our population.

When democracy doesn’t go your way, that’s democracy in action.

But being on the losing side of an election shouldn’t mean that you should pack up your bags and go home. There’s too much at stake to turn your back on the world around you. Democracy itself will fail if we don’t strive to hold our governments to account, or are afraid to express a contrary political view.

So, to all those women who took to the streets on Saturday, thank you for standing up and making yourself heard. Now it’s time to harness our full collective potential, and work together to build a better world for all.