Why are toys still so gendered?

Baggs

And one from Scientific American: blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/taking-sex-differences-in-personality-seriously/

There are loads. It's hardly niche.

But you can still ignore toy (and clothes and shoes and hair-style, etc) gendering.

Personality differences are not the same as choosing toys seen as appropriate to gender.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=nWu44AqF0iI

If carers are busy instilling gender stereotypes from babyhood, what chance to children have of escaping them?

It's a long, long time ago, now, but in the support group I went to as a young mother (for young children from birth to 3yrs) we were very keen to avoid gender stereotyping (this was the '70s) and I don't recall any 'natural' gravitation to girls' or boys' toys from either sex.

And one from Scientific American: blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/taking-sex-differences-in-personality-seriously/

There are loads. It's hardly niche.

But you can still ignore toy (and clothes and shoes and hair-style, etc) gendering.

Here's one from the University of Gothenburg: www.gu.se/en/news/personality-differences-between-the-sexes-are-largest-in-the-most-gender-equal-countries

If you read the book I mention you will see how much we all interact with newborns and babies differently if we're told they are either a boy or a girl. The 'choices' many of you identify girls making may be less choice than an unconscious recognition of direction of steer by adult society. That's what I find so troubling. I wouldn't be at all suprised if GD plays with dinosaurs as if they're friends; that's what my D did when we introduced her to chess with the chess pieces. I don't care if they do that. I do care that marketing makes it clear what is 'expected' by putting boys or girls on the boxes (in case there were any doubt of which was more appropriate) or using that ubiquitous pink as code. I'm just not convinced it's as 'natural' as some of you do.

MaizieD

I'm a bit horrified by the insistence that this 'gendering' of toys is innate.

Two people have cited 'research' which proves it. Perhaps a link to that research would be forthcoming?

Slightly excessive reaction, maiz, though I agree that link(s) would not go amiss.

I'm off to try and find some.....

I'm a bit horrified by the insistence that this 'gendering' of toys is innate.

Two people have cited 'research' which proves it. Perhaps a link to that research would be forthcoming?

Louella12

Interesting experiment carried out with monkeys.

Room filled with toys, dolls, prams, soft toys, guns, cars, trucks, football etc etc

Bunch of monkeys enter the room
Male monkeys went for the trucks and footballs, female monkeys played with the dolls.

I don't think they'd been conditioned.

Maybe it's just nature

I agree. Nature will out.

But this means, of course, that gendering toys (or anything else) is daft.

Which is the OP's point.

luluaugust

You are right it is odd it still happens as we went through all this in the 1970s. However much we as adults feel that every toy should be for everyone small children do seem to go towards the toys designed or offered by manufacturers for each sex. I wonder if your GD will make the dinosaurs into families and play houses with them!! When my children were small they played with each others toys a lot.
Just out of interest I wonder how many female Physicits there are in this country, quite a few I would imagine.

Actually, the seventies proved beyond any doubt that pre-school children if left to decide for themselves, which they were not in the seventies, would as often as not want to play with dolls in pink dresses if they were girls, and with cars and tractors if they were boys.

I knew a girl who aged 17 used her first earnings to buy a pink frilly dress for herself - she had longed for one in 1975 when she was five, and her mother had insisted on blue denim jeans or skirts!

Today more small boys still play with trains, cars, tractors than with dolls and girls left to decide for themselves do tend to want Barbie dressed in pink or lilac.

As long as there is a good variety of toys it doesn’t matter where they are kept the kids will find what they are interested in and yes some girls like cars and dinos and some boys like prams but as long as both there to choose from what matters where they are kept I had a little boy recently in the shop find a really sparkly sequiny toy which he obviously loved no problem The girls don’t often gravitate to the cars and guns but they are there if they want to

I really don’t see a problem just making one for the sake of it
If you put an equal number of ‘girls toys’ and boys toys in a room and let small kids in I bet you the boys would grab the guns and cars and the girls rush to the baby dolls and sparkly unicorns
As long as there are plenty of both and no one is made fun of for choosing the opposite it doesn’t matter a jot

I work with preschoolers……..they sort themselves, girls primarily go for dolly’s and boys for cars and dinosaurs. Kitchen and tea-set equipment I’d say 50 - 50.

most men's clothes and esp underwear in M&S has always been bought by women.

Interesting experiment carried out with monkeys.

Room filled with toys, dolls, prams, soft toys, guns, cars, trucks, football etc etc

Bunch of monkeys enter the room
Male monkeys went for the trucks and footballs, female monkeys played with the dolls.

I don't think they'd been conditioned.

Maybe it's just nature

Ignore it. Get what the child wants.

Pointless to get upset

One can always ignore all the 'gendering' of toys. We did. We ignored it with shoes and clothes too.

The message also comes over as it’s wrong for children to choose the toys they want because they’re gendered.

It also applies to adults reading matter. Read a thread on favourite books on GN and there’s seldom mention of romantic fiction. Do no GNs read them, or just not admit it?
Go to the library, a bookshop or a charity shop and lots of women (and the occasional man) are all choosing that genre.
In a similar way to eazybee’s comment, it would be difficult for boys to choose barbie pink, because of what their peers (often prompted by adult views) might say, but men, even in M&S are offered pink polo shirts and judging by the fact that there was only one S and one XL left yesterday, they must sell well.

Glad you added the rock climbing in brackets eazybee

My children used to play with the same toys but in entirely different ways. Cindy was strung up on the bunk bed by son (rock climbing) and the lego was used to make a bed for the dinosaur and miniature Paddington to share.(daughter.)

Other children exert a huge influence; one boy called my son a 'jessie' for taking Spiderman for a ride in the basket on the front of his tricycle. He was five. Came home, removed the basket and never used it again.

My dd1 was the most un-girly girl imaginable - hated ever having to wear a dress, not remotely interested in dolls, still hardly ever bothers with makeup, etc. (Nothing to do with me, dd2 was/is almost the polar opposite.)

Yet Dd1’s 2 elder dcs are about as stereotypically girl/boy as you can get. It’s nothing she’s done to influence or try to steer them - in their cases it would seem to be innate. From barely 2 Gds was mad for dinosaurs (still is at 7), Gdd at the same age for baby dolls, some time later for Barbies.

In their cases it would seem to be innate.

Interestingly, though, although he’s always been something of human hurricane, Gdd has always been more physically fearless than her brother. At only 5 she would e.g. jump (with dd) 10 feet into pretty cold sea and swim quite a distance to the shore - whereas Gds would say a very firm No Way!

Can't get my proverbials in a twist about this, as things have most definitely moved on since my childhood days, when it was always cowboy outfits for boys, and nurses' uniforms for girls, and let's face it, children still remain gendered whether or not society tries to pretend otherwise. Watching our Grandchildren at play, I'm constantly reminded of that. It's always been part nature, part nurture as far as I'm concerned. Not quiet Venus and Mars perhaps, but still a case of "vive la difference".

Visiting my cousin of the same age I loved to play with his trainset .

Could I have one ?

Girls don't play with those things was the reply .

Later, I overheard my mother telling my grandmother that she thought that I was a lesbian , because I liked wearing trousers and better still jodhpurs plus playing with dogs and riding horses !
I must have been about 13 .
Fortunately by that age I realised that my mother had some extraordinary prejudices and ideas and wasn't upset , but amused .

Aged 15 , I certainly loved dresses and make up .

I tried to avoid the pink for girls and blue for boys when my children were born in the seventies and eighties .

My first granddaughter was born 13 years ago and my daughter took a car load of unworn / unused pink stuff to the local charity shops .
And what did her little girl want ?
Princess dresses and Barbies to my daughter's horror !
She's what my mother would have described as a tomboy .

I buy my grandchildren toys which are neither traditionally boy /girl
biased .

Yes it has got worse, and it's ok saying 'I buy the toy irrespective of the sex it is aimed at' but the message is still there loud and clear.

Yes same here! My boys wanted dinosaurs, trains, cars, light sabres, super hero costumes and in particular Buzz Lightyear. My granddaughter, did play with the trains and dinosaurs which we kept but still wanted dolls and a load of pink paraphernalia/glittery stuff, my grandson wanted cars, cars, cars and when we didn't have the right wellies for him and asked him to wear a pair his sister had grown out of, he stubbornly refused because they had some pink on them .

I just buy toys for my GC don’t worry what gender they are labelled they are just toys.

Personally I think things have got worse. For example we used Early Learning Centre when my kids (and friends' kids) were little. Lovely shop. By the time I became a granny, it had gendered areas in their shops!
Although I think you'll find Amazon will put a lot of the same toys under the heading "Boys' toys" and "Girls' toys", I agree with what you're saying.