Efforts to promote women’s sport are being undermined by a lack of birthday cards featuring female footballers, a group of MPs has claimed.
They are urging manufacturers and retailers to sell more cards celebrating female football players to inspire young women to take up sport.
Liberal Democrat MP Helen Maguire tabled a motion in the House of Commons to raise her concerns and call for action.
She told the BBC the industry was “not moving with the times” and should do more to promote gender equality in sport.
A greetings card manufacturer said more cards featuring female football stars would be appearing in stores soon, due to consumer demand.
Maguire said she decided to table an Early Day Motion in the Commons after trying to buy a birthday card for her office manager “who is a massive football fan”.
“I looked at the girls’ section and there were no sporty ones. The only ones I could find were in the male section,” she told BBC News.
The MP for Epsom and Ewell said she “ended up buying a card with a male footballer on it”.
Her EDM has been signed by 12 other MPs, including fellow Lib Dems, two Green Party MPs and the DUP’s Jim Shannon.
Asked if the motion was a good use of taxpayers’ money, particularly when it was easy to buy cards featuring women footballers online, she said MPs needed to keep promoting women’s sport.
“Hopefully it will help teenage girls to recognise that sport is a good thing,” she added.
Daniel Prince, managing director of Danilo Promotions, which manufactures officially licensed greetings cards and calendars for football clubs, said they were keen to promote women’s sport.
“The rise in female football has obviously created consumer demand, and on the back of the success of our female football calendars we are further developing our card range.
“More cards featuring female football stars will be appearing in a major high street retailer later this year.”
Maguire’s EDM says “the under-representation of female athletes” in greetings cards and other products “undermines efforts to promote gender equality in sports” and urges companies to “inspire the next generation of female athletes”.
EDMs are used by MPs to draw attention to issues, and they are never debated and rarely lead to new laws.
MPs table thousands of EDMs every year on a vast range of subjects, although some have argued the cost of printing and processing them cannot be justified.