It’s that time of year, when children everywhere start thinking about what they want for Christmas. If you watch Saturday morning commercials or other advertisements directed toward children, you’ll see a very gendered approach to marketing toys. Even in toy stores, toys are clearly delineated into blue and pink sections.
Want to guess what’s in each section? The pink/girl section is full of doll houses, babies and baby care products, Barbie’s and play cleaning products. The blue/boy section is full of cars and other forms of transportation, sports equipment, and action figures.
What about toys that both boys and girls like to play with, like Lego’s, Lincoln Logs, and other building and craft making equipment? For one thing, unfortunately, these toys are often in the boy aisle. What’s very interesting to me, as the mother of daughters, is that when I do see those products in the “girl” section, they are marketed in a distinctly different way. As an example, I found ads for Moon Sand, a moldable, buildable material. My daughters and the boys their age all like Moon Sand. But, here’s what’s weird about the way that it’s marketed, for boys it’s sold as a way to build new lands and create new things. For girls it’s sold as a way to pretend to be cooking, baking, and playing with dolls. Girls don’t also like to create and build new things? Boys don’t like to bake and play with people figures?
And we have Lego’s Friends Line. In this article in Bloomberg Businessweek, it is clear that Lego’s has done exhaustive work trying to understand what has kept girls from playing with them before and what would make Lego’s more attractive to girls. As my friend, Michele, from Princess Free Zone made clear in her excellent post on this topic, perhaps girls don’t see Lego’s as attractive because since 2005, as stated in the Business Week article, the company has been aiming straight at boys.
Hmm….maybe girls don’t really have to have pastel colored blocks, curvier minifigures, and hair salons to build. Perhaps,they just need to actually see ads featuring girls playing with these toys. Perhaps, girls simply have been shown very clearly one too many times that this product is “for boys.” Perhaps, girls have been so inundated with this idea that everything has to be gendered that they have bought it hook line and sinker.
Girls used to play with Lego’s without there having to be any discernible differences. As this Lego’s ad from the 80’s shows, the company promoted the product to both girls and boys as fun building sets.
In an article interviewing the woman who appeared in this Lego ad in 1981, she stated,
But now, as Dr. Elizabeth Sweet says in her recent article in The Atlantic,
Listen, girls like to build! I interviewed 5 young women at a high school for technology, math, and science who were all in the robotics club and went to competitions with the robots that they had built. I’ve watched elementary, middle and high school aged girls participate in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) and robotics camps. And here’s something you need to know, none of the pieces these girls used to make robots or machines were pastel colored. These girls loved building their robot or machine because they like using their minds to solve problems and create things, just like the boys in their classes, and they didn’t need it to be color coded to enjoy it.
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Great post Dr. Shewmaker! Can’t wait to share with you my indie research on feminist assumptions/presumptions on female-gendered FB page, about gendered toys.
I’d love to see that!
I was watching tv with my 12 year old yesterday and there was a commercial for a car or something and the little girl was going to ballet and the boy was going somewhere else and he said, ” So, no boys do ballet?? And girls always like ballet?” He’s always pointing out gender stereotyping to me. Very funny!
My girls do the same thing! My 9 and 14 year old are especially aware of it because they have interests that are stereotypically “for boys.” My oldest loves math and science and my youngest is into cars, super heroes and wild animals.