LOVELY news last week in politics with the announcement of the coming patter of tiny feet.

No matter the surrounding gloom, the promise of new life is always lifting to the spirits. So congratulations then to Andrew Bowie, the Scottish Conservative MP, on the announcement he's going to be a dad.

Oh, and Kate Forbes is also having a baby.

You did have to feel slightly for Mr Bowie last week as his family's joy merited little more than a single paragraph tacked on the end of news stories about Ms Forbes, where it was tacked on at all.

Kate Forbes does have the headline advantage. When she takes maternity leave in the summer she will be the first serving Cabinet Secretary to do so and her high profile gives her the edge on Mr Bowie.

The public wants to know who's going to be managing the purse strings while she's out of office but will have less interest in the constituency goings-on of West Aberdeenshire and Kincardine.

Still, the questions were predictable and tedious. How, asked the BBC, will you manage and your constituency work and travelling back and forth to the Highlands and the baby and cabinet work?

"I don't know yet," Ms Forbes replied, adding that she would "take a steer from other people who have lived to tell the tale".

Presumably Humza Yousaf has plenty of top tips for her, given he's dad to a two-year-old, but I can't recall seeing Mr Yousaf questioned about how he'd manage to juggle it all.

And of course not, because he has a wife. The reality still is, in a great majority of cases, that mothers take on the burden of childcare alongside work in a way that men do not and that is not expected of them.

The question of "having it all" is still as complicated and burdensome and one-sided as it was when Ms Forbes mother was having her in 1990 and as it was when the expression first gained real ground in 1982.

The coverage of the finance secretary's pregnancy has had a firm focus on her maternity leave - how she's going to manage it, how it will be covered, will her job be open for her when she's ready to return. These are all deeply personal questions, the sort normally reserved for parents and an HR department but, as Ms Forbes described herself in an interview, she is a high profile individual and women will be watching her to see how she copes.

Parents will also be watching the Scottish Government to see what sort of supports are in place - the government is also supposed to be a role model for the rest of society.

In all the chatter following Ms Forbes's pregnancy announcement, there was one glaringly obvious question that went unasked: how much parental leave is the baby's father going to take?

The cabinet secretary is being expected to set an example for working women everywhere but will she and her husband, Alasdair MacLennan, split the parental leave?

If they do, they'll be unusual. Shared Parental Leave (SPL) allows parents of children born or placed for adoption on or after April 5, 2015, to share leave of up to 50 weeks and statutory shared parental pay of up to 37 weeks.

Yet, far from this being a game changer in giving children more time with their dads, dads more time with their babies, and lessening the burden on women to be default care providers, very few heterosexual couples take it up. Estimates vary from around two per cent to eight per cent but either way, it's low.

Gender stereotypes and macho workplace cultures have a big part to play here. The policy itself is also deeply flawed. At its heart, it's unfair to ask women, who have campaigned for 52 weeks leave, to them ask them to forfeit that time. A far more equitable situation would be to increase paternity leave but we just don't have a family-friendly workplace culture in the UK that allows for that suggestion to be seen as a reasonable ask.

Successful SPL policies - such as in Sweden and Iceland, where uptake is around 90 per cent - have solid financial backing and are ringfenced, that is, they are non-transferable and use-it-or-lose-it.

By contrast, SPL here can't be claimed by the self-employed, those on zero-hours contracts or agency workers, so it's financially prohibitive for tens of thousands of families.

SPL is a failed policy and it has failed in large part because of the lack of pushback due to unwavering societal expectations that babies are a women's issue.

One step to change is to normalise the fact that infants have fathers too and should feature in the discussions of childcare. Lazily excluding them from the conversation, as we've seen this past week, is no way to nurture long overdue progress.