Pink and Blue, Gender and Toys at the end of the Twentieth Century
This project studied children's toys, from educational toys to clearly gender-identified toys like Barbie and supposedly neutral, creative toys like Lego. We examined their presentation in marketing, advertising and packaging, the pictures and images in brochures and on the boxes, and then conducted detailed observations of childrens' use of these toys from kindergarten up. Elementary and middle school age children were also surveyed in interviews and group discussions.
We found that
1. assumptions concerning children's likes and interests on the basis of gender, as they are made by toy companies, are often highly inaccurate. For example, a learning game manufactured by Ravensburg and sold in separate versions for girls and boys aged 4-6, containing subjects such as computers, airplanes, sports, frightening objects seen in the dark, camping items etc. for boys and hairdos, dolls, cookie cutters, and makeup items on the picture sheets for girls, did not match the selections made by children in 12 kindergartens. When we gave children the opportunity to assemble their own sheets from the mix of both boxes, their choices were not correlated with gender. Some sheets failed to interest both boys and girls. Cars, sports, camping and computers interested boys and girls equally, as did cookies and makeup, though in the case of the latter sheet, children in general frequently misidentified the items, taking them for something else.
2. In the case of traditional girl's toys such as Barbie, there is a distinct division among girls, separating them into two groups of approximately equal size. One group enjoys these toys uncritically, the other group is vehemently opposed to them and expresses this with considerable affect. These attitudes transcend parental influence, i.e., girls who profess enormous contempt for Barbie may have mothers who find Barbie appropriate and "sweet", and those who like Barbie may have mothers who ridicule this doll.
3. There is a large group of toys with the potential to appeal to both genders, however, manufacturers choose to target only girls or only boys, aiming the color, the illustrations and the play suggestions so stereotypically at only one gender that it becomes virtually impossible for children of the other gender to play with this toy. Ex.: household toys where the box shows a little girl in a frilly apron. The largest "offender" is Lego, whose toys for children above the age of 6 are aggressively marketed only to boys, showing male children playing with male action figures in male-stereotype play interactions such as shooting, robbing, blowing things up etc., even though the toys themselves (castle, underwater world, spaceship etc.) could just as easily be sold in gender-neutral versions. Interviews with the companies indicate that, having established a loyal buyer group of boys, they fear losing this group if they neutralize their marketing to appeal also to girls.