STORIES like Kathleen Wyatt's rarely make a big splash in the papers.

Here is a 55-year-old woman who, as a 21-year-old new age traveller in 1981, met a man named Dale Vince, who was two years younger than her. They lived together, along with Wyatt's two-year-old daughter, and soon married and had a son. The marriage didn't last long. Vince moved out and started travelling; not long after that he was driving a fire engine down to Spain with a new partner. They were divorced in 1992. Many years later she had two more children with another man.

Wyatt never experienced luxury or wealth. When she was bringing up her children, she lived a mainly precarious, often hand-to-mouth existence, surviving on earnings from low wage jobs and benefits, sometimes living in caravans, for most of that time without financial support from any of the fathers of her children. She would be another statistic - among millions of women who struggled to raise their children mostly on their own - except for what happened to her ex-husband. Dale Vince set up a green electricity firm and is now worth at least £57 million. Last week, the Supreme Court in London decided Wyatt had the right to seek payments from him - though probably not anything like the £1.9 million she is pursuing.

The Wyatt decision came only a few weeks after another high-profile divorce settlement case whose ruling seemed almost the opposite. Tracey Wright, ex-wife of a wealthy horse surgeon, was told by an appeal court that she should have her future maintenance slashed, and advised to "get a job" as she had no right to an "income for life" at her husband's expense. Both these cases raise questions about whether a woman should be supported long after her marriage has ended. But they also tap into frustrations about inequality. The Wyatt case seems to encapsulate many of the current political narratives around social justice and fairness. Many commentators' responses to the story reeked of either anger at the rich or sneering about benefits culture.

I have to admit most high-profile divorce settlement stories leave me cold - perhaps because the people involved are usually loaded and even, post-divorce, seem to be living a comfortable existence of relative luxury. Wyatt's story, though, doesn't give me that feeling. Rather, I was left struggling to imagine how any sense of fairness could emerge from this, given the disparities of wealth between Wyatt and Vince, and the time that's passed since they were together.

Dale Vince appears to believe, on a point of principle, that Wyatt's claim is "wrong". He points out that the son he had with Wyatt has lived with him for the last 13 years and worked for him. But, nevertheless, given he's hugely rich, can't he give the woman who raised that son just a bit of that £57 million?

Meanwhile, Wyatt's 18-year-old daughter, Jessie, has said that her mother told her that she was pursuing the case for "women power". It's possible to imagine why Wyatt might feel that. None of the men in her life supported her children - at least not until 2001, when Vince began to do so.

This story, however, couldn't have happened in Scotland, since our divorce law demands that financial settlements always have to be made at time of divorce - and that the only assets shared between the couple on divorce are those acquired between the beginning of the marriage and its end.

London is considered the divorce capital of the world. This is because English law has features which favour what is often called the "financially weaker" party. All that seems good - particularly given research shows that women following divorce tend to lose financial status and men gain it. But at the same time, it seems attached to a very old-fashioned vision of marriage. As family law expert Gillian Crandles put it to me last week: "Most marriages now are created between two parents who work. If they divorce then what we have to do is allow people to uncouple and divide assets fairly and then move on. With English law they aren't released to move on."

I don't think generous divorce settlements can bring further equality or fairness to our society - particularly at a time when relationship patterns are changing. Rather, that has to come from other parts of our culture: revolutions in flexible working, living wages, shared parenting and a revaluing of care-giving.

Our progress on this last point is slow. We know we should value caring and child-raising, yet we also seem to deplore the benefits that support those carrying out such tasks. Many rail at the super-rich; many also despise the poor and low-wage workers. Wyatt versus Vince is all those feelings bundled up in a divorce settlement.