• by Sean Hargrave , Staff Writer, September 6, 2017

You can kind of feel sorry for Clarks. It's the high street store we all go to before school starts up again so we can join in the parental scrum of people taking a ticket to have kids' feet measured while boxes of shoes are ferried back and forth. It's the store we all trust to get our children in the right shoes with still a bit of room for growth. It's also at the forefront of the gender stereotyping row.

It has probably been coming up with whimsical names for its shoe ranges for years unchallenged, but this summer something has changed. Calling a range for girls "Dolly Babe" while boys get offered "Leader" shoes came at just the wrong time. The fact that Scotland's First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon, was among the first to announce her incredulity at the range name choices underlines that both the British PM and Scottish First Minister are women -- and let's not forget Theresa May is being kept in power by the DUP, led by Arlene Foster. Might be worth mentioning here that the main Welsh independence party, Plaid Cymru, is also female-led. 

The top FMCG brands, such as Unilever, have already committed themselves to erase gender stereotypes from their advertising over the next couple of years, following announcements at Cannes this spring. More recently, John Lewis announced that it was ceasing to categorise children's clothes as boys and girls. Today the director general of the BBC promised action to ensure the gender pay gap is closed, following a damning report that revealed two-thirds of the corporation's top earners are male. 

So companies like Clarks are probably no more guilty this year of gender stereotyping than they were last year, or many more before. It's just that the game has changed. 

In research published today in Campaign, three in four parents blame brands for stereotypes in their clothing, shoes and toy ranges and two in three think that old-fashioned guidelines, such as pink for a girl and blue for a boy, are now outdated and should be dropped. 

This is a debate that has been bubbling under the surface for quite a while, but now action is being taken. Not only is John Lewis going to be a poster star for children's clothes that are not labelled by gender but it's fellow member of the co-operative movement, The Co-Op, is now refusing to pass on VAT on tampons. It is instead paying what many see as an unfair tax itself by offering a 5% discount on its range.

I truly think, then, that when 2017 is looked back upon, one of the fundamental developments that affects marketing and advertising will be the start of the gender debate turning from talk into action. 

You can think of this whatever you will, but any responsible marketer will need to know it is happening. It's not just a discussion about whether girls should wear blue and only mums should appear on television ads concerned that their toilet smells or a neighbour will think they haven't hoovered very well. We're now seeing action.

if you cast your mind back to those iconic 50s and 60s ads advocating smoking and only ever portrayed a wife as being there to provide a clean home for her husband, I think you'll get an idea of how our kids will one day look back at the ads that surround us daily today. There is a long way to go, and the major brands taking out stereotypes in their advertising are not promising major progress until 2020, but we are most definitely at the start of something fundamental.