Girls play hockey, boys can cook and shop for food.

Gender don’t matter much.

But it does to Fleishman-Hillard, which sucks at public relations.

I’ve had some dealings with the PR behemoth over the past 20 years and always left wondering, why do people keep hiring them?

According to Fleishman-Hillard and TheMotherhood.com, 96 per cent of American mothers plan to make changes to their food-buying habits in 2013, according to some dumb-ass survey.

The low-lights, as reported by Media Post, say moms place higher priority on the opinions of bloggers and peers than that of experts like doctors and dietitians, and that moms use cooking sources such as AllRecipes.com (25%), Pinterest (19%) and FoodNetwork.com (15%).

Moms also rely upon food-based TV programs and the online counterparts of food magazines.

Cooper Munroe, co-founder of TheMotherhood.com, said, “Food brands must evaluate how … to deliver the right messages, mom to mom.”

I have five daughters. I do most of the shopping and food prep; my father has been doing the shopping and prep for decades (although he didn’t start out there); one of my brofriends in Australia is a chef, with a PhD, who took a 40 per cent appointment to help raise his young daughters; we both see a lot of dudes at the places we shop for food.

The argument cuts both ways; by focusing on moms only, the survey geniuses – and the people who pay them – are missing half the market.

The survey folks would figure that out if they ever went to a grocery store.