I've talked with a lot of men lately about gender roles and stereotyping, and if/how those issues come up in their personal and work lives. Most of them have said, after making clear they couldn't speak for all guys, that they see their lives with their spouses and kids as very gender-role balanced.

For the most part in their lives, the wives work and the men share household and kid management (and like to do it). The wives love their jobs and iPods as much as each of them does. The men I talked with all still have the usual masculine traits, but, as well, they seem comfortable 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. If you want to reach more female grill buyers, there is no need go to the extreme of "thinking pink" by representing 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 (by men, women and families). In the same way, consider a television ad for something like chocolate milk, which, like so many food/household product ads today, still reflect the at-home, care-taking parent as a 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 likely better reflect the realities a lot of us experience.

So - why does it take so long for marketing to catch up with gender role changes?

At the Congress of Humanities and Social Sciences, a conference I wish I had attended in Vancouver, B.C. last 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, Ranson's study included a very small sample of Canadian-only households, but - I see similar things happening in the U.S., especially as the findings relate to additional research introduced at the Congress about typical Mother's and Father's Day card depictions. Specifically, the authors of a study on the representations of gender and family work in such cards found that the content developed for those occasions had little relation to what men and women really felt, or how they behaved in their family roles. As Owens 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?"

Perhaps the card-creators are from another planet and not thinking about what their lives are like when they get home each night...

Anyway -

As a marketer, wouldn't you hate to be reaching out to your male and female customers in a similarly irrelevant way? Yikes.

It really isn't surprising that men and women don't so easily break down into this or that particular gender role. In fact, our daily lives are often a lot different than culture and business would have us believe. The thing is, that in order to keep pace with people as consumers, you still have to be able to see them as humans. Thus, research conducted by sociology and psychology academics like those delivering papers in Vancouver is not for their tenure alone, but for your better understanding of people as human beings - before their consuming behavior is considered. Such research will always provide additional insights for comparing, contrasting and enhancing traditional consumer research.

So, mark me down as a big fan of multi-disciplinary study when it comes to marketing. Marketers should have no trouble keeping pace with changing gender-role realities if they keep learning more, and from a wider range of sources, about the "human within" their customers.