Marketing to Women Must Change with Evolving Role of the Sexes
The Maria Shriver Report, compiled with the Center for American Progress, was released a few weeks ago. It culls decades of research to assess the changing role of the sexes in work and home life. Marketers should pay attention because marketing to women now should take on a new direction.
The report indicated that for the first time in America’s history, women are half of all U.S. workers and mothers are the primary breadwinners or co-breadwinners in nearly two-thirds of American families. This is a dramatic shift from just a generation ago (in 1967 women made up only one-third of all workers). The report went on to say that “quite simply, women as half of all workers changes everything.” We also learn that the battle of the sexes is now replaced by negotiations at the kitchen table to share the load such as household chores. There is evidence that the most stable, high-quality marriages are those where men and women share both paid work and domestic work. This is a shift from generations ago when the most stable marriages were those where husbands specialized in paid work and wives did all the domestic work.
A recent Rockefeller/Time poll of over 3,000 people nationwide in the U.S. takes a broad and deep look at what men and women think of their changing roles in society and their attitudes toward each other as spouses, parents, bosses, and co-workers. The poll results reveal a truce in the battle of the sexes, demonstrating that men and women are in agreement on many of the daily work and family issues.
In Canada, the same trend is occurring. According to Statistics Canada, more Canadian women than men were in paid employment during the first half of 2009. The employment data, published in the August issue of StatsCan’s Perspectives magazine, show women made up an average of 50.6 percent of Canada’s 14 million waged or salaried workers during the first half of this year. That’s an average of 160,000 more women than men.
Most marketers have always been targeting women as influencers. But now, as more and more women take on the primary breadwinners’ role, we should perhaps change our marketing strategy to reflect this evolution?
