Have you noticed people never use the phrase "fatherhood and apple pie"? How they talk about parents and parenting when they really mean mothers and mothering? We are strolling in the foothills of the 21st century and yet our notional stereotypes of the male/female roles seem preserved in some kind of stubborn, sociological aspic.

When women fulminate, quite properly, about the inequalities dished out to the female sex in terms of employment, pay and career advancement, maybe we should also take a hard look at how little we value men's capacity to nurture, and how that may impact on the value systems within the workplace.

When we complain that it is so rarely men who pick up the tab for sick kids, their care and their essential health-related appointments, perhaps we could take time to examine how much we casually denigrate their capacity to fulfil these parental roles with competency. That it is a man's world in terms of material reward and advancement is still a hard statistical fact of life, but only the wilfully blind cannot see that today's young fathers inhabit a different planet from their fathers and entire solar system from their grandfathers.

There is a strength in male gentleness that we too often ignore or belittle. Examine two stories which much exercised the media yesterday, One was was the extremely sad case of Natallie Evans, who failed in her final throw of the legal dice in the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights. Natallie and her former partner stored frozen embryos when they learned she had cancer and would likely become infertile, which she now has.

Subsequently, they split up and Howard Johnston refused to give her permission to use the embryos, as is his right under UK laws on IVF, which require both parties to agree to implantation. This is surely classic confirmation that hard cases make bad law. Of course, it must be intensely painful to cope both with childlessness and the knowledge that the possible means to remedy that are within your physical but not your legal grasp. But the embryos were created by a couple and belong to a couple. Mr Johnston's continuing ability to procreate with another partner rubs salt into the gaping wound of her frustration, but it cannot alter the fact that any child she had would have Mr Johnston as its natural birth father.

Those of us opposed to forcing women who become pregnant accidentally to give birth regardless of their wishes would find it hard, in logic, to deny men the same rights to choose. Self evidently, being pregnant and giving birth are quintessentially different experiences from contributing sperm and largely becoming a spectator for the next nine months.

But in an age when we have given children born through IVF the right to have full knowledge of their natural parentage, that opportunity denies men the anonymity previously guaranteed in sperm donation. Additionally, what does it say about our view of fatherhood if we consider Mr Johnston's wishes so irrelevant that we are wholly insensitive to his concerns about having his genetic progeny born in defiance of his express wishes?

In truth, there have been no winners in this six-year battle to resolve the increasingly bitter conflict between two people who were once close enough to consider spending the rest of their lives together. She proclaimed herself "distraught", he "crumpled with relief". Both have been emotionally battered. The previous case of Diane Blood, who successfully petitioned European courts to have two children using the donated sperm of her dead husband differs in the important respect that he could no longer be affected by the decision. Then there was the televised interview with Leading Seaman Faye Turney, during which it was alleged her captors had told her failure to comply would lead to her never again seeing her little daughter.

No account I've read appeared to feature the family circumstances of most of her male colleagues or whether or not they, too, feared being separated from their children. Equally, the only persistent questioning she encountered from the blessed Sir Trevor concerned the advisability of young mothers being in the front line. Young fathers, by comparison, were implicitly expendable. Male and female parents bring different qualities to their roles, but it would be iniquitous to suppose there was an automatic difference in their commitment. And counterproductive to continue to suppose that, in some indefinable way, a mother will always give a superior brand of care.

When paternal leave, brief as it is, was first mooted, it attracted widespread derision, as if there was little need for a father to have an early bonding experience with his new baby. OK, the dads aren't much in the breastfeeding department, but cuddles and kisses are gender neutral.