Girls Are Caring, Boys Are Violent: How Toys’ Marketing Reinforces Gender Norms
And why its impact on children’s development shouldn’t be dismissed
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One recurring critique of my articles on gender norms and how they’re mostly learned, not innate, comes from parents with young kids.
If these norms are really learned, how come little girls and boys often gravitate to gender-typical toys anyway, even when raised in mostly gender-neutral environments with full freedom to choose their toys?
This is a fair question.
For decades, studies have consistently shown this, too: boys and girls generally prefer playing with toys typically associated with their gender. And it might be indeed baffling to see this. In particular, considering that parents are increasingly aware that outdated pink-and-blue stereotypes don’t always serve us, leading them to adopt more gender-neutral parenting approaches.
Here’s the thing, though. Overall, progress in dismantling gender stereotypes has been painfully slow. And while children today might have more freedom to choose their toys, that doesn’t mean the toy industry — especially its marketing departments — has completely abandoned heavily gendered products and advertising strategies.
In fact, a recent report from the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media highlights that contemporary toy advertisements continue to reinforce rigid ideas about gender.
And that’s hardly the only area where this is the case.
In the not-so-distant past, toys were marketed to either boys or girls, but rarely both. Boys got traditionally ‘masculine’ toys like miniature cars, weapons, toolboxes, action figures, and sports equipment. Meanwhile, girls got dolls, dollhouses, beauty sets and… toy kitchen appliances.
Previous research has also shown that toys were heavily gendered through the use of colour — pink for girls, blue for boys — and that typical boys’ toys encouraged more fantasy play, largely removed from domestic life. In contrast, girls’ toys encouraged play centred on domestic life, including doing household chores and childrearing.
Today, there are at least some toy companies that have decided to move beyond the gender binary and that market their toys as suitable for any gender, like the Danish construction toy brand Lego. Some places, like California, have also introduced laws requiring larger retailers to feature designated sections for gender-neutral toys.
Still, a visit to a toy store or the toys section of a grocery store in most places will make you feel that not much has changed in the past few decades.
That’s also the finding of the latest study on this topic done in collaboration between the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media and two chairs of the first North American Toy Association DEI, Jodi Bondi Norgaard and Laurel Wider, that set out to examine the prevalence of gendered norms and other stereotypes in the toy industry.
To this end, Norgaard and Wider analysed 175 television commercials for toys listed as ‘best selling’ for children ages five through eleven years old by the top three toy retailers — Target, Walmart, and Amazon. Across these advertisements, they collected data on 544 actors — 406 children ages infant through seventeen and 138 adults — and 528 toys, 351 of which child actors directly interacted with in the ad.
The good news is that contemporary toy advertisements show both girls and boys playing with a variety of toys, as opposed to strictly with typically ‘girl’ or ‘boy’ toys. Also, all children are shown playing in a variety of locations.
But this is where the good news ends.
All in all, toy ads haven’t really evolved much over time in terms of the social messages they convey about gender. Most toys still have clearly gendered associations, with dolls being targeted toward girls and cars, sporting equipment and toy weapons targeted toward boys, and only around 23% falling into the gender-neutral category.
In line with previous research, toys marketed to girls were also a whopping 18 times more likely to be shown demonstrating nurturing or domestic skills than toys marketed to boys, whereas the latter were twice as likely to show them in imaginative settings of play and significantly more likely to convey themes of violence and aggression. Overall, 75% of toys that were shown played violently or competitively were played with by boys.
Toy advertising still clearly perpetuates the gender norm that girls should perform domestic and caregiving duties while boys should act aggressively, competitively and even violently. That girls get the realm of domestic life, and boys get the outside world.
What’s more, the study also found that the toy industry’s marketing techniques continue to forge gendered associations in more subtle ways, such as through the use of colour — pink for girls, blue for boys — music, narration — with more imaginative language being used for girls and more aggressive for boys — and even the narrator’s gender or actors’ clothing colours.
In other words, practically everything in toy ads and other marketing materials continues to rely on rigid gender stereotypes.
It might be easy to forget that our world is still heavily gendered.
After all, cross-cultural studies show that we accept this division into two distinct camps — female and male — pretty early on.
One recent study I wrote about last year found that by preschool age — around 3–5 years old — most children already recognise that domestic labour is a woman’s duty and even feel like it’s ‘normal and fair.’ Around the same age, most kids also recognise a constellation of stereotypes about gender and, consequently, start to engage in gender-typical activities and behaviours. By the age of seven, children’s attitudes towards gender are usually already fully formed.
And while toys play a significant role in children’s gender socialisation, it’s just one element out of many telling them which tribe they belong to and what exactly that entails.
Children’s clothes, for instance, are as gendered — if not more — as toys. Girls’ t-shirts frequently include slogans that tell them to ‘always be kind,’ ‘be happy and smile’, and encourage them to ‘stay home.’ Meanwhile, t-shirts for boys feature slogans like ‘explore the world,’ ‘stay wild’ and ‘be unstoppable.’
Even the kinds of animals, characters, or objects girls’ and boys’ clothing sections depict are based on what is deemed feminine or masculine. Girls get animals considered prey and often domesticated — like bunnies, mice, pigs and horses — and foods that are usually sweet, cute-looking or healthy — like ice cream, cupcakes, fruits and smoothies. But boys’ clothing tends to portray wild predators — like dinosaurs, sharks, and lions — and substantial, hearty foods — such as pizza, pasta or bacon-and-eggs.
One gets an infantilising explosion of sweetness and cuteness, with a side of restricted eating to prepare her for a lifetime of chasing unattainable ideals of feminine beauty.
The other gets permission to be curious, adventurous, and wild, with an insatiable hunger for whatever they please.
The media children consume is another prominent example. One recent study used a machine learning method to analyse over 240 popular contemporary books for children ages five and above and found that they are full of gender stereotypes, particularly — although surprisingly — those that portray female protagonists. But media directed at adults — which kids are often exposed to as well — is still gendered, too. Actually, according to a new analysis of over 10,000 globally run ads, gender-stereotypical advertising has only become more prevalent in recent years.
Perhaps most importantly, children also learn about gendered expectations of behaviour, personality qualities and activity interests from their environment — through observation of their parents, older siblings and teachers and interactions with peers. And once these observations about gender start to solidify, their brains will skip any information that doesn’t match those stereotypes. That’s what social psychologists call the ‘attentional bias.’
So unless you’re raising a child in a bubble completely separate from the outside world, there’s very little chance they’ll grow up not understanding what qualities, behaviours and even colours or objects are considered typically ‘girly’ or ‘boyish.’
It’s no wonder so many choose toys, clothes, and interests that align with the tribe they were told, for as long as they can remember, they must do their best to belong to.
But, unfortunately, all of this can profoundly influence their development.
Interestingly, studies that tested children’s toy preferences suggest that while both girls and boys tend to go for more gender-typical toys, boys’ preference is often much stronger than girls’. Girls more often show interest in all sorts of toys, not only those that they’re ‘supposed’ to play with, but boys stick to stereotypically masculine ones.
The recent Geena Davis Institute report found something similar regarding colour. While both girls and boys in toy ads were more frequently shown playing with pink and blue toys, respectively, girls were more likely to be seen with a wider range of colours overall.
This could be because boys are more strongly penalised for behaving in gender-atypical ways.
For a boy, being ‘girly’ is often viewed as an insult.
But for a girl, being ‘boyish’ is typically considered a compliment.
And this, on the other hand, stems from the pervasive notion of female inferiority and the devaluation of all traits and activities associated with femininity.
Still, research shows that both girls’ and boys’ development would be enhanced by playing with a large variety of toys, not just those society and the world of advertising deemed appropriate for them. All children should be encouraged to develop motor, spatial and cognitive skills — which playing with typically masculine toys helps to build — as well as to develop fine motor skills and nurture empathy and compassion — which playing with typically feminine toys helps with.
Toys are simply learning tools that communicate to children how they should move through the world and the kinds of things they might be interested in and aspire to.
However, gendering toys in advertisements limits these options. It also hinders children’s creativity, reinforces stereotypes about girls’ and boys’ interests, and can even have long-term consequences on their lives — from defining what careers to pursue to whose job it is to shoulder most of the domestic and care duties.
If only girls are encouraged to be nurturing and empathetic, and only boys are encouraged to be aggressive and competitive, are we then really surprised our world still reflects this gender binary? That so many girls are indeed, on average, more caring?
And that boys behave more aggressively and sometimes even violently out of fear of expressing any other emotions and having their masculinity questioned before they even know what that word means?
It might be tempting — and infinitely more convenient — to chalk the preference for gender-typical toys, or any other gender-typical behaviour, all up to biological differences.
But the reality is, gender-inclusive products and marketing strategies for toys still tend to be the exception rather than the rule.
And for each message that you can be whoever you want to be, regardless of your gender, there are still at least as many — if not more — messages telling us no, actually — you cannot.
They’re perhaps just more insidious today.
I am so tired of it all, it's incredibly annoying that this continues, and I am so grateful to you for pointing this out. It's horrifying that we continue to be bombarded with all this absurd gendered programming. Clearly, gendered toys or anything gendered, comes from concepts about our differences which we created, and clearly, we all carry some of these characteristics in all of us, from both sides. But why should we impose genders on each other based on our biology? Why not allow people to be individuals? And why the obsession with the differences if it's not to keep one in power over the other? Obviously, this is how patriarchy is maintained, through constant programming & conditioning of our minds beginning right after we're born.
My masters research focuses on some of these topics but I have NEVER thought about gendered clothing, down to the slogans and cute versus hearty food. Good thoughts!