Keeping Pace With Our Gender Role-Changing Realities
I’ve been talking with a lot of men lately about if and how gender roles or stereotyping issues come up for them (or against them) in life and in business. Mainly our conversations have been about how, while they don’t know about other people, they feel like they’ve built a very gender-role balanced life with their wives and kids.
For the most part, their wives also work and the men do a significant share of household and kid management (and like to do it). Their wives love their jobs and iPods as much as each of the guys does. These men still have all the usual masculine traits, but, as well, they seem to like tapping more of their "feminine" traits" (for lack of a better way to describe things like caring about your grooming/apparel and having no trouble hanging out with your kids).
But, in the marketing realm, I see a lot of brands lagging behind and have been wondering… do they see the forest for the trees? Male-ness or female-ness is not going away, but today’s men and women are feeling more comfortable with the perhaps less sex-assigned aspects of themselves too. Marketing approaches are not necessarily reflecting this.
Take Father’s Day grill ads as an example. Grilling has long been marketed as a more "macho" thing. Still, the utility of grilling and the fun of "playing with fire" are actually quite gender-neutral and family-inclusive. If you want to reach more female grill buyers, there is no need go to the extreme of "thinking pink" by represent grilling as some sort of "girls only" activity. Just get out of the macho, beer-swilling habit and notice how grills are being used in the backyards around your house. In the same way, consider a chocolate milk or cookie television ad, which, like so many food/household product ads today, still reflect the at-home, care-taking parent as "mom." A sudden conversion to dad-only chocolate milk and cookie ads would be ridiculous, but a more gender-mixed approach for reaching parents would better reflect the realities we all see in our own neighborhoods.
I bring this up because there is new research on gender roles and culture that has marketing implications galore (if you ask me).
At the Congress of Humanities and Social Sciences, a conference I wish I were attending in Vancouver, B.C. this week, there is talk of this interesting cultural gender disconnect. Anne Marie Owens of the National Post reports that one study showed men are taking on more and more of the parenting and "executive management" tasks of the household than ever before. Gillian Ranson, a sociologist involved in the study, said that her research found:
…that those mothers who do cede some of this control to their spouses, however, begin to regard each other more thoroughly as partners in a shared venture. As one of the women she interviewed said, "I can talk to Matt about Emma the way I would talk to one of my girlfriends about our daughters. We can use the same language. We are absolutely on the same page."
To be clear, the study included a very small sample of Canadian-only households, but - I see similar things happening in the U.S., especially as the men/household executives research relates to another study covered by the Congress on the representations of gender and family work in Mother’s Day and Father’s Day cards. The authors of this study on what you’d think would be a quiet, unassuming business, found that the cards developed for those gender-specific occasions had little relation to what men and women really felt, or how they behaved in their family roles. As Owens also wrote in her National Post piece:
The egalitarian ideals of shared parenting — and sharing other forms of family work –are not being given as much attention in popular culture today," conclude the researchers, Alison Thomas of Douglas College and Elizabeth Dennis, of University College of the Fraser Valley.
"This has implications for the pace of change: If men’s involvement in the home is so frequently minimized and/or ridiculed, while women’s is praised, how much encouragement is there for people to take seriously the possibility of sharing family work more fairly?"
The card-creators must be living on another planet and not thinking about what their lives are like when they get home.
As a marketer, wouldn’t you hate to be reaching out to your male and female customers in a similarly irrelevant way? Is it possible that you are no longer connecting with the men in your market because you are doing a bit of overkill with fast-paced career/provider messages? Or, could you possibly be irritating more women than you think with your "women are the singular caregivers and they do absolutely everything for their families" approach?
Men and women don’t tend to so easily break down into this or that particular gender role. In fact, our daily lives are a lot different than culture and business would seem to have them be. To keep pace with people as consumers, you have to also be able to see them as humans. The research conducted by sociology and psychology academics is not for their tenure alone, because it can provide incredible additional insights to intermix with traditional "consumer" research.
Learn more, and from more sources, about the "humans within" your male and female customers, and you’ll have no trouble keeping pace with how to market to changing gender-role realities.
