#melissa atkins wardy

“At no point during the 20th century did toy marketing resemble what it’s become today. What we see happening is way more extreme than even periods in our history when gender inequality was at its greatest levels”

These are the words of Elizabeth Sweet, a doctoral candidate who studies gender and toys at the University of California.

Sweet has studied the marketing of children’s toys during the 20th century and her research has shown that today we gender toys more than ever before:

“In my research on toy advertisements, I found that even when gendered marketing was most pronounced in the 20th century, roughly half of toys were still being advertised in a gender-neutral manner. This is a stark difference from what we see today, as businesses categorize toys in a way that more narrowly forces kids into boxes. For example, a recent study by sociologists Carol AusterandClaire Mansbach found that all toys sold on the Disney Store’s website were explicitly categorized as being “for boys” or “for girls”—there was no “for boys and girls” option, even though a handful of toys could be found on both lists.  

In the Sears catalog ads from 1975, less than 2 percent of toys were explicitly marketed to either boys or girls. More importantly, there were many ads in the ‘70s that actively challenged gender stereotypes—boys were shown playing with domestic toys and girls were shown building and enacting stereotypically masculine roles such as doctor, carpenter, and scientist.”

“During the 1980s, gender-neutral advertising receded, and by 1995, gendered toys made up roughly half of the Sears catalog’s offerings—the same proportion as during the interwar years.”

“Gendered toy marketing divides a child’s ability to learn about the world based on gender constructions that are culturally determined. When all of the marketing consistently revolves around gender, it teaches our kids to look at the opposite sex as a different species, because in order to market gendered toys, you have to point out the difference and not the similarities.”

However, we don’t all realise that gender constructions are culturally determined. According to Elizabeth Sweet.

“While the public generally supports the idea that we should have gender equality, polls reveal an increase in the number of people who believe that essential gender differences exist.”

It must be difficult to live as a free individual in a society that believes you are biologically programmed to like a certain type of toy.