London - What if Santa was a woman - could she do the job? That’s the question an advertising agency posed this week in its annual festive video.
The answer, according to the four to ten-year-olds they asked, was a resounding “No”.
How depressing. Faced with this light-hearted Christmas quiz, the little ones wilted under the pressure of predictable gender stereotypes.
One boy claimed a lady Santa wouldn’t be strong enough to carry the sack (“She would need to go to the gym first”); another said she would “get lost in the sky”.
A little girl said Mrs Claus wouldn’t be able to wrap the presents because her baby would get in the way and, more worryingly, one claimed a woman would fail because she would “just get a headache”.
The one comment that made me most cross, though, was the child who reckoned a woman Santa would be good at “bossing around the elves”.
As I watched the film, made by ad agency Anomaly for the video-sharing website YouTube, I could only imagine these were the children of Top Gear presenters or distant relatives of that patronising idiot Donald Trump.
But they weren’t pint-sized sexists - they were just lovely, normal children, whose default setting appears to be that, when it comes to the “big stuff”, women aren’t up to much.
To be fair, one boy had something positive to say about a female Santa Claus. “She’d be able to do the cooking,” he muttered.
Witnessing this unconscious gender bias among the under-tens made for uncomfortable viewing, no matter how light-hearted the approach.
And, indeed, this clever but simple film was made to underline the point there is a distinct lack of women in powerful roles across the world. No wonder, if this is the attitude of tomorrow’s male bosses.
There is a small glimmer of hope, though: this month, Toys R Us agreed to stop dividing its online shopping site into girls’ and boys’ sections, after pressure from activist groups who argue children can play with what they damn well like, and don’t need to be segregated into pink and blue groups.
My son, aged nine, was a bit confused when I asked him if a female Santa could do the job as well as a man. I could see he thought it was a trick question and, with the eyes of three sisters bearing down on him, he panicked.
“Is Jesus a woman, too?” he responded (his default setting in tricky situations is, like that of all children, to answer a question with a question).
“No, but God might be,” replied my 11-year-old daughter.
I can only hope the filmmakers would have got a different response if they asked more spirited over-tens.
But perhaps the real issue is that everyone seems to be missing the point. Santa is a woman, you fools.
The Christmas to-do list is almost always crafted by the female of the family - and, more often than not, executed by her as well.
Among nearly all the families I know, the weight of buying the Christmas presents usually falls on maternal shoulders.
This makes the little children’s belief that Santa would mess it up if he were a she even more infuriating and unfair.
I know that if a male Santa was similar to a certain dad we know, he’d buy everything on Christmas Eve - recklessly blowing the budget - and everyone would end up sharing a turkey the size of a satsuma on Christmas Day because he would forget to get it until the last minute.
Anyway, enough of my festive feminist ramblings. I am off to shout at some elves.
Daily Mail
* Lorraine Candy is the editor-in-chief of Elle magazine.