Definitely Not a Man's World

As a marketing professor, I tend to look at trends and patterns in the consumer products available in the marketplace. To get a feel for just how much mothers are still associated with caring their families, and how fathers are largely excluded from these kinds of roles, all one has to do is stroll down supermarket aisles.

Now to the women reading this, do not scoff at the notion of a man telling you what it’s like to shop in a supermarket. Remember, I’m a single dad. I shop with a 10-year old and a 6-year old, so I know what “pester power” is like first hand. But women have the advantage (a rather monumental one in my opinion) of knowing that the environment, and damn near every product related to the role of caring for the family has been created for you.

For fathers, the supermarket shelves are an alien place where our particular earth species is not represented or welcomed in any way. Let me validate that last assertion with a little research exercise I conducted a year or so ago. On a trip to the supermarket, I considered all the product categories associated with the role of caregiver. (This excursion did not include the kids. There was no way in hell I was going to deal with pester power, shopping, and conducting a little research at the same time. Is this because, as a man I cannot multi-task?) There were a lot of product categories under this umbrella, but I finally settled on three super categories: cleaning, food preparation, and care of young children. This is central to what the care giver of the house does, though certainly not exhaustive of all the domestic responsibilities it entails. But basically caring for family members involves eliminating dangerous microbes by keeping the household clean, preparing food for the family, and taking care of children.

Within these broad classifications, I then looked only at the front of the package of any product falling into one of these categories and noted whether it featured (a) a woman alone, (b) a woman with a child, (c) a man alone, or (d) a man with a child. Any other package image was deemed irrelevant for my purposes. For example, many of these packages featured, not surprisingly, only children, and in many categories, the majority of the packages were not gendered. I was only interested in the gendered packages, and the percentages reported below reflect that focus. Also, the unit of analysis was the image itself, not the product or the brand. So, for example, it was common for a product line in a given category to feature the same package image on a number of technically different products, for example, different nappy sizes. Such cases only counted once, regardless of how many packages featured the image. It was, however, possible for the same brand to feature different images within the same product line. So a brand might feature three different female images, one for the nappies, one for the nappy wipes, and one for the baby bath wash. This case would count as 3 gendered products, even though they were for the same brand.

The results of this little analysis, I’m afraid, weren’t all that surprising. The cleaning category included laundry products, kitchen cleaners, bathroom cleaners, furniture polish, leather polish, etc., but not personal care products like hand soap, shampoo, or toothpaste. Only things used to clean the house. Of the 14 package images falling into one of the four categories above, 7 featured a woman alone, 6 featured a woman with a child (all laundry products), and 1 featured a man alone. The lone male was depicted on a spray starch product, you know, for ironing cotton clothes to eliminate wrinkles. Now perhaps that lone package was appealing to men as the primary ironers in the household, but I somehow kind of doubt it. Instead, I think the message was far more insidious. The cartoon male on the package was wearing a sharp, indeed nicely ironed, dress shirt. The package, in essence, was telling each housewife to use this product on her husband’s dress shirts, so he’ll look really spiffy in the office, thus getting that promotion that the two of you want so much. Arguably then, all 14 cleaning packages were ‘gendered’ by being aimed at women, and in any case, 13 directly depicted women as the care giver in that domain.

What about child care products? Again, here we have mainly nappies and toddler pull ups, as well as related products like nappy wipes, baby powder, baby oil, baby shampoo, well you get the picture. Once again we get a clean sweep. All 13 products falling into the above categories in fact fell into just one category – women with children. When it comes to caring for young children, supermarket brands are unanimous that this task falls to mothers not fathers. The cooking products were only slightly less skewed. Here the product was either a raw cooking ingredient (e.g., flour, sugar, baking powder), a spice (e.g., cinnamon, oregano, cumin, parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme), or cooking equipment (e.g., blender, slow cooker, toaster, etc.). Twenty cooking products had gendered packaging. Of these, 14 featured a woman only, 3 featured a woman with a child, 1 featured a man only, and 2 featured a man with a child. Interestingly, the 3 packages featuring men were all store brands. Does this mean that retailers are more PC than food manufacturers?