Gender Stereotypes In Toys

You have been invited to your coworkers child’s fifth birthday party. You go to your local toy store, and as you're walking down the aisles you notice how the toys are divided. In one of the aisles you see toys such as ‘The Projects’ Building set, and ‘Housekeeper’ dress up kit which includes dolls with darker complexion. You then go to the next aisle that has “Billion Dollar Ken” doll and “Future Architect” building set whose advertisement displays children with lighter complexion.
In 2012 The New York Times presented a similar scenario (Sweet, 2012), in which they posed the question that if toys were marketed based on race and ethnicity, people would be scandalized, yet today toys are segregated based on gender. Toys play an important role in children’s lives and socialization, especially since children spend time playing with them either by themselves, with peers, and family members (Corsaro 1997; Seiter 1993 as cited in Auster & Mansbach, 2012). Recall the last time you have gone to a toy store, the chance that the toys were not divided by gender would be very low. Most stores divide toys by the “pink aisle” and the “blue aisle”. The “pink aisle” is usually where toys that are …show more content…
By the 1970’s the climax of the feminism’s second-wave and demographic shift due to an increase of women in the labor force and the decline of marriages and fertility rates, made marketing toys based on stereotypes not profitable (Sweet, 2014). Sweet recalls in her research that “In the Sears catalog ads from 1975, less than 2 percent of toys were explicitly marketed to either boys or girls” (Sweet, 2012). Instead toy ads challenged gender stereotypes from 1970s-1990s. For example girls were advertised in building sets while boys were seen in ads with domestic toys (Sweet, 2014). The usual deviation between ‘boy’ toys and ‘girl’ toys in toy marketing was, in comparison to prior years, nearly non