My encounter with Cath Kidston's dinosaurs showed me everyday sexism is alive and well

My experience struck a chord with people because it is part of a surprisingly stubborn trend

Part of the Cath Kidston range

The floral-print accessories and furnishings retailer Cath Kidston takes great care to describe its dinosaur water bottle in a gender-neutral way – at least, it does online.

On the internet it’s just a “kids’ drinking bottle” for keeping “little ones” hydrated. But when I went into one of its stores recently and asked a shop assistant if I could buy a kids water bottle, she immediately asked: “Is it for a boy or girl?”

I was taken aback. “Erm, does it matter?”

“Yes, because some have dinosaurs on them.”

“Right, so what difference does that make?” I asked.

She looked puzzled.

“Some dinosaurs were female,” I pointed out. There was a pause. “Maybe,” she replied politely in a tone that suggested she was unconvinced. Perhaps she thought I was so obsessed with equality I was making up a load of nonsense about female dinosaurs for my own nefarious purposes.

I left the shop feeling irritated and frustrated. At the same time, there was no doubt in my mind that the store assistant had good intentions. She was probably only trying to save me time and direct me to the right part of the store: for reasons I can only guess at, all the bags and bottles which had dinosaur prints were kept separately from all the bags and bottles with unicorn and rainbow prints.

However, I think it’s a shame that she wasn’t trained to simply ask: does your child like dinosaurs?

Why did gender have to come into it? It’s a water bottle. It should not matter whether a girl or a boy drinks from it.

I tweeted about my experience because I wanted to know I was not alone in feeling this way. It’s sad that a fully-grown woman in 2019 would look at a water bottle with a dinosaur print on it and think: no one will want to buy this for a little girl. Why not? My seven year-old daughter was very happy with it when I gave it to her.

It’s a gorgeous bottle and Cath Kidston should be proud to sell it to girls, and equally proud to sell unicorn and rainbow bottles to boys.

Within minutes, the tweet went viral and soon thousands of people had liked it. I’ve written over 14,000 tweets since I started using Twitter and nothing like that had ever happened to me before. I think my experience struck a chord with people because, as many of the responses show, this is not really about one store or one shop assistant. This is part of a surprisingly stubborn trend and a wider issue. Why are assumptions still being made about a young child’s interests based on their gender?

As well as being a mum, I’m a freelance journalist. I recently wrote an article where I analysed the gender balance of the top 100 bestselling children’s picture books. I read all 100 books and found that 73% of the time, animals in these books were identified as male. When the book did have a female animal, she tended to be a small, vulnerable creature like a bird, cat or insect.

Males, on the other hand, were typically embodied as powerful, wild and dangerous beasts like bears, tigers – and dinosaurs. This pattern has also been observed on children’s clothing. What message does that send out to young boys and girls?

Part of the problem is that some people do not believe that there even is a problem. I had a few responses to my tweet – mainly from men – saying things like “I’m 99.9% sure this never happened” and “you’re making this up”. This trolling continued even after I named the store and tweeted a photo of my daughter holding the water bottle.

Fortunately those voices were in the minority. Overall I was overwhelmed by the supportive tweets I got in response for speaking out (from Cath Kidston too). Many people shared stories of shop assistants behaving in this way, agreed that it is not helpful and most importantly that it’s reasonable to challenge this sort of behaviour.

There are lots of people out there who feel as frustrated as I do with the casual sexism in this encounter. For example, the twitter account LetToysBeToys, regularly calls out retailers and advertisers for segregating toys by gender and has 36,000 followers. A new magazine called Sonshine recently launched and is aimed at parents who want to raise boys for a more equal world.

I too would like my daughter to grow up in a more equal world: a world that respects her freedom to choose... be that unicorn or dinosaur – or both. But last Sunday, when I went into that store, all I wanted at that moment was to buy her a new water bottle. That purchase should not have involved a conversation about her gender and it’s a shame that it did.

After school earlier this week, I asked my daughter for her opinion - why she thought the sales assistant had asked me if I was buying a water bottle for a boy or a girl. “I don’t know,” she said, with a shrug. “Girls can like dinosaurs too.” And then, with those simple, strong, wise and wonderful words, she smiled at me – and filled me with hope for the future.