The Caregiver is the archetype where the gendering of the scheme is most visible, since the caring role has been culturally assigned to women in most of the societies the framework was developed in, and Pearson's own earlier presentations name the figure the Mother. Mark and Pearson's brand application then maps it onto products and services aimed largely at women. Jung's own theory of the Anima and Animus, which posits a contrasexual figure in the unconscious, has itself been extensively criticised for building the gender assumptions of early twentieth-century Europe into a supposedly universal psychic structure, and post-Jungian writers have substantially revised it. A reader meeting the twelve archetypes should know that the scheme carries those assumptions in a diluted form, and that its categories reflect a particular culture rather than a universal psychology.
Post-Jungian scholarship has substantially revised the anima and animus theory the Caregiver's gendering ultimately draws on. The feminist scholar of religion Naomi Goldenberg, in Changing of the Gods (1979), argued that Jungian archetype theory, for all its apparent universality, encodes the specific gender assumptions of the early twentieth-century European milieu in which Jung wrote. The Jungian analyst Andrew Samuels, in Jung and the Post-Jungians (1985), surveys how later analysts within the Jungian tradition itself abandoned or heavily qualified the fixed anima-animus pairing. Both are working revisions from within or adjacent to the Jungian field, not outside attacks, and both predate the twelve-archetype scheme's own 1991 and 2001 publication.
Sources Changing of the Gods: Feminism and the End of Traditional ReligionsNaomi R. Goldenberg with Jung and the Post-JungiansAndrew Samuels