Barbie for Boys? The Gendered Tyranny of the Toy Store

“I didn’t encourage my daughter to play with Barbie dolls and dress up in flouncy fairy costumes, but she just gravitated toward them.”

When confronted with the idea that gendered marketing and stereotypes have a substantial impact on children’s play, many parents make claims such as this that suggest that girls have an innate predisposition to acquire pink, glittery toys.

Not only do many parents deny that gender stereotypes shape what kinds of toys children feel allowed to play with, but so too does our Prime Minister. On hearing of the No Gender December campaign, which encourages people to consider what kinds of toys they are buying in the lead-up to Christmas, Tony Abbott dismissed it as “political correctness”. We must, he argued, “let boys be boys, let girls be girls”.

No Gender December, and similar campaigns such as Let Toys Be Toys, nevertheless suggest that the gender stereotyping of toys restricts children’s creativity and development. They also argue that the separation of toys for girls and boys contributes to gender inequality by marking off certain pursuits, careers, and tasks as unsuitable for one gender or the other.

Letting children “be” boys or girls implies that there is a natural set of likes and dislikes for each gender that are unaffected by the culture in which we live. Behind this view is the sense that toy preferences are rooted in biology, such that only girls are drawn toward baby dolls because they are driven to nurture, while boys will be attracted toward active toys such as guns.

There are several problems with this viewpoint. First, to take one type of toy as an example, very young boys seem equally attracted to dolls. Cordelia Fine’s Delusions of Gender refers to a study that measures young children’s reactions to dolls, finding that boys only begin to reject dolls around the age at which they can be taught that dolls are intended only for girls.

If we were able to create an environment in which limiting cultural views about gender were not presented to children through the media, advertising, or enforced by their peers or parents, then in all likelihood many boys would continue to show an interest in dolls beyond infancy, as some still do regardless of these factors. That would truly be letting “boys be boys”.

Indeed, such an attempt to counter the effects of gender segregation in toy stores is already in progress in Sweden.

In 2012, Top Toy, the franchise holder for Toys R Us in Sweden, produced a catalogue with a girl shown deftly working a Nerf gun, a small boy cradling a baby doll, and both a boy and girl playing with a doll’s house. International media reports about the catalogue reacted along predictable lines, suggesting that gendered separation of toys mirrored children’s natural preferences and that the concept of gender neutrality was bizarre and artificial.

Nevertheless, Toys R Us Sweden has only continued to move towards gender neutrality in its stores, with the physical layout being transformed such that typically masculine and feminine toys are intermingled throughout the aisles.

Second, these supposedly “natural” preferences for particular kinds of toys or colours shift according to what our culture believes appropriate for children and what the toy industry finds profitable.
We know, for example, that the “pinkification” of girls’ toys is a relatively recent phenomenon, in part motivated by a desire to improve sales by rendering the most innocuous of toys unusable by siblings of different sexes.

Similarly, where Lego was once imagined as a relatively unisex toy that encouraged creativity and developed fine motor skills, in recent years a separate line intended for girls, which involves less freedom to construct, has become a bestseller.

We place great strength in the idea that the kinds of toys that children play with helps to determine the kind of adults they will become, especially in terms of how appropriately masculine or feminine they will be. Even children know enough to act as “gender police” if a boy or girl attempts to play with a toy outside the accepted items for his or her gender.

The No Gender December campaign notes that:

It’s 2014 – women mow lawns and men push prams but while we’ve moved on, many toy companies haven’t.

Yet some of the main markers of gender inequality refuse to budge in countries including Australia. The majority of housework and childcare is still performed by women, even as more women are in paid employment than ever before. High-paying industries and senior positions within most fields remain dominated by male employees, while feminised occupations, involving caring or working with children, remain low paying.

The segregation of toy aisles is a reflection of a society in which gender inequality is normalised and children are taught to understand that the disparity between male and female social roles is inescapably natural.

While making it easier for girls who want to romp adventurously to do so and for boys who want to show an interest in clothing to play with Barbie won’t single-handedly correct gender inequality, it will help to minimise the internalising of gendered limitations during childhood. It also won’t stop girls being girls or boys being boys.



This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Anecdotal Delusions of Gender

I've begun reading Cordelia Fine's Delusions of Gender, which is an accessible critique of how the neurosciences naturalise gender norms. In the humanities, we're aware of the conception of sex as biological and gender as a cultural construct, with scholars in children's literature on the lookout for how boys and girls are socialised into their genders through books and films. I was, however, unprepared for Fine's book. It pummmels the reader with scientific or psychological study after study to show how these cultural ideas of gender norms can alter the way women perform on maths tests and change the opinions of employers as to a candidate's suitability for a job. Women sometimes have to perform harder to achieve the same thing as a man, but we rarely recognise this. As the book remarks, Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did, only backwards and in high heels.

It was strange timing that I found myself at the local cricket nets just as I was becoming righteously indignant over some of the studies described in Delusions of Gender. I witnessed my own microcosmic example of Fine's thesis in action. A small boy, of perhaps 8-years-old and with prodigious batting and bowling ability, was being coached by his father. The father was no slouch, delivering some very fast balls to the boy, including some with a real cricket ball (which is a particularly hard missile to be hit with, especially as a child). The boy's sister, who was clearly a few years younger, was the enthusiastic retriever of balls, with dedication to speeding up the flow of the practice. Nevertheless, she was repeatedly growled at for getting in the way of the serious business of turning this grade three child into the next Australian opening Test batsman.

I must admit that she was occasionally pemitted a turn to bat with a miniature bat and the odd bowl of the ball, but the attitude of the father showed that he was in no way serious about developing her skills in case he might like to fashion her in to a cricketer to fulfil his seemingly unfulfilled sporting dreams. The real attention and pressure was on the boy to do well, and the father seemed pleased when the little girl made the occasional request to play on the nearby swings instead. Now they could get on with the real business of the day.

To top it all off, and oddly enough, the little girl had thought it necessary to bring along a long blonde wig (somewhat matted) to the cricket nets. I'd seen it sitting on the ground alongside the spare balls and wondered what on earth it was doing there. At a critical point in the practice, she asked if the father might help her to put it on. You can imagine how enthused he was at this prospect, and he begrudgingly delayed the ascent of his son by one minute when he finally plonked it on her head in a haphazard way. When we left the nets as darkness fell (this practice wasn't going to end just because the sun had set), the girl was taking one of her begrudged turns with the bat, with the blonde wig on her head, making the task that little bit more difficult. She would have to do the same as her brother, in one fraction of the practice time, with little fatherly enthusiasm and encouragement and while wearing a wig that sometimes blocked her sight.