Gary Pope, director of UK- and South Africa-based consultancy Kids Industries, argues that the idea of pink toys for girls and blue toys for boys may soon be a thing of the past.

For millennia, since the emergence of our distant relative homo erectus nearly two million years ago, men and women have had defined roles.

As civilisation crystalised and writing became the first mass medium 5,000 years ago, stereotypes became embedded. And that’s the way it stayed until the Suffragette movement started to shift perspectives 100 years ago. It’s been a relatively quick journey since then and we still have a way to go, but maybe, just maybe, we’re not far from achieving gender equality.

And it’s the next generation that could take us over the line, if this one allows them. We wanted to get under the skin of this. Will parents allow their children to behave in ways they naturally want to or will they continue to prescribe gender-aligned media and toys? We wanted to find out what children and parents really thought about the gender archetypes society foists upon us. We had a hunch there was a little common sense underneath all the bluster and we wanted to know for sure.

So in late 2014, Kids Industries conducted a large research study taking in the views of the 2,200 respondents, on both sides of the Atlantic, and supported by the thinking of 56 academics from the four corners of the world.

I hope you’re sitting down. We found that, overwhelmingly, girls prefer nurturing toys and content while boys like action-orientated toys and content. But we also found evidence that, even in the minds of the children themselves, gender is a spectrum. Some boys want to play with feminine toys, some girls want to play with masculine toys, and all should have the opportunity to do so.

Those of a more liberal disposition might say we should let the children decide what toys they want to play with. Imagine that, self-directed play! However, right now parents remain the gatekeepers, and the research suggests they don’t seem able to avoid reinforcing the stereotypes.

We know that society is the way it is; we know mum shops in different ways for her son compared with her daughter. Yet dads are even more guarded than mums. They are made uncomfortable by talk of boys wearing dresses and playing with dolls. The stats show dads are more concerned about their boys exploring dimensions perceived as feminine, than their girls engaging in ‘boyish’ activities.

But, slowly, tradition is being broken. This is the digital age.

The tablet, it turns out, is gender-neutral. Wonderfully, it especially enables boys to try apps that – if they were real toys – would be off limits. The boys enjoyed playing Toca Boca Hair Salon. However, when we showed those same boys a Girls World mannequin head, they were resoundingly against playing with it. Boys don’t feel exposed by this type of tablet play, whereas playing with the head of an oversize doll was seen as wrong.

Here’s a simple proposition: if you could double your potential consumer or viewer base, would you want to? It seems simple enough, but we don’t. Because the media eco-system is gender-aligned, we think immediately where the TVC will be placed before understanding how the child will engage with the toy. It’s always boy or girl, Disney XD or Disney.

At least, that is part of it – but not all. Times are changing. Around 93% of parents – that’s 1,866 of the 2,000 we spoke to, quantitatively – and 100% of those we spoke to qualitatively told us that they shop by category, not by gender. Gender labeling isn’t a non-issue, though. Ask parents if they’d buy a pink kitchen for their boys and 87% say no. But suggest a ‘gender-neutral’ kitchen and 85% would.

Around 74% of our respondents felt that retail marketing efforts influenced their behaviours. And 73% would like to see all packaging in gender-neutral colours – so if we can market neutrally, why haven’t more retailers taken down the boy/girl directional signage? Have sales of toys been detrimentally affected by the recent change of tack at retail? No.

So yes, girls prefer nurturing, while boys like action. That’s not the argument. What the movements for change are suggesting is that if a girl wants to play with something that is usually played with by a boy she should be able to, and vice versa. Where’s the problem then?

There isn’t one.