If a girl grows up playing with Barbie dolls, is she less likely to opt for a career in science? Or does the fact a boy spends his days playing with LEGO mean he’s more likely to become an engineer? The influence toys have on our children’s interests and career aspirations has long been a source of debate and concern, with a growing number believing that traditional girls’ and boys’ toys are perpetuating outdated gender roles and even putting girls off ‘masculine’ careers in Stem from an early age. Similarly, boys may be deterred from going into typically female careers like nursing or teaching.
While the debate about the gendered marketing of toys has been raging since the 1970s, it has recently been thrown back into centre stage with teachers, politicians, and parent-led campaign groups all voicing their concerns about the limiting effects of the ‘pink aisle’.
But just how much can toys really influence our children’s thinking and is Barbie really to blame for the lack of women going into Stem careers?
For many, the idea that toys are to blame for the lack of female engineers seems far fetched. Critics point to the fact that girls and boys can be seen to head in different directions from an early age, their taste in toys, in school subjects and careers simply reflect natural differences and skills that are hard-wired in the brain.
However, Professor Gina Rippon, a leading neuroscientist from Aston University, has lately spoken out against this long-standing view, stating there’s no significant difference between the brains of either sex in terms of structure and function. Rather, it’s experiences, attitudes and expectations that can change the “plastic” brain on a physical level, causing its wiring to alter. These factors, Rippon explains, can mean girls will tend to gravitate towards the fields of communication, people skills and the arts, while boys are more likely to become scientists and engineers.
“We’re stuck in the 19th century model of the vacuum-packed brain, the idea that we’re born with a brain that gives us certain skills and behaviours,” says Rippon. “The brain doesn’t develop in a vacuum. What we now know is that the brain is much more affected by stereotypes and attitudes in the environment, and that doesn’t just change the person’s behaviour – it changes how their brain works.”
An example often used to demonstrate gender difference is spatial ability – with boys said to be naturally better at understanding the spatial relationships between different objects. However, Rippon explains that if girls are exposed to the tile-matching puzzle game Tetris at an early age, their brain wiring changes and their spatial ability improves. “There’s strong evidence that the experience of manipulating objects, either in reality such as playing with LEGO and construction toys, or virtually, via video games, is positively associated with spatial cognition skills such as mental rotation. This can mean that, with practice in spatial skills, you will develop to perform better in interests and subjects that involve these – such as Stem subjects – and, hence, might be more likely to choose them at school.”
While the link with ‘doll playing’ is more tenuous, says Rippon, if it results in less exposure to problem solving and spatial skills, then reduced interest in school subjects or jobs using those skills could follow. “Also, the ‘caring and tending’ aspect can reinforce stereotyped preferences and choices underpinning later career decisions,” Rippon adds. She’s quick to stress that “tending and caring careers” are by no means poor career choices, but women’s access to alternatives shouldn’t be denied because of the lack of relevant skills gained in early life.
In 2011 Dr Laura Nelson came to a similar conclusion when researching how gender impacts on career choice. She began to question the persistent and significant gender imbalance in certain careers. Why was it that 80% of UK politicians are male or just 7% of engineers are female? After months of trawling through research and studies into gender difference and stereotypes, she found no universal scientific consensus that men and women are born with different cognitive skills. Nelson says: “I began
to question the assumptions about men and women I’d subconsciously adopted over the years such as ‘men are more suited to leadership’ and ‘women are generally better communicators’.”
Nelson explains that these beliefs are adopted from an early age, stating that children simply learn to believe widely accepted opinions as fact. “We absorb other people’s beliefs about our futures, what we are destined to do, what we can and can’t do – and make them our own.”
So it was of great concern that on a trip to toy store Hamleys to buy her niece a gift, she discovered the store layout segregated its toys by gender. On one floor were all the toys for girls, including dolls, prams and animals – most of which were pink. In contrast, the boys’ floor was full of science, construction and problem-solving toys, with blue signs marking them out as ‘toys for boys’. Nelson felt that these sort of signs were sending out restrictive messages to children that could influence their thoughts and behaviour in later life.
“It was so stark, and the toys were so different,” she says. “For me, it symbolised everything I had been learning and reading about gender stereotypes that went far deeper than simply gendered toys.”
In late 2011 Nelson began a campaign to ask Hamleys to remove its gendered signs and end the gender segregation of its toys. The campaign gained enormous media attention and public support and resulted in the store eventually removing their signs and changing their layout. Like dominos falling, other big chain stores, including Harrods ultimately followed suit.
There was an inevitable (and impassioned) backlash to the campaign, but Nelson says this was shortlived.
“I wasn’t saying anyone was wrong, only ‘Let’s be more open minded about this‘ and ‘Let’s consider that we’re limiting our girls and boys and men and women’. Retailers couldn’t argue with the idea of giving people more opportunities.”
The success of Nelson’s campaign helped bring the debate back into the limelight and has seen new campaigns spring up to carry on the work she began – the Let Toys Be Toys social media campaign, founded in 2012 perhaps being the most prominent. This calls on retailers to take down the gendered signs in stores and on their websites, and has since succeeded in getting major stores such as Boots, Marks & Spencer, Debenhams and Toys R Us to subsequently follow suit
with varying degrees of success.
More recently, it has created a Let Books Be Books petition that asks publishers to stop labelling story and activity books by gender with Usborne Books and Parragon publishers already on board. Only time will tell if this campaign will have as much impact on attitudes.
Tessa Trabue, a campaigner for Let Toys Be Toys, explains why she feels this
is an important mission: “Labels impose limits on children. By putting up a sign saying ‘these dolls are for girls’ or ‘these science books are for boys’ you’re limiting 50% of children from accessing them.” This is worrying, she says, because it sets limits on their imagination and prevents them from developing a well-rounded skills base. “If girls aren’t exposed to toys that are going to help them learn or lay the foundation for skills like construction, maths or science, how are they able to discover that these areas might be of interest to them?” she asks.
Of course, parents can choose to ignore the shop signs and give their children access to a wide selection of toys and books. However, Trabue explains, it’s common for children to self-police and ensure their peers are conforming to the gender rules they pick up from wider society – for example ‘pink is for girls’ or ‘toy cars are for boys’. As a result, children will tend to stick to the kind of toys and books, or activities and behaviours deemed appropriate for their gender.
Trabue admits that children pick up these gender stereotypes from a variety of sources. “But it really doesn’t help to have them reinforced in the shops, either for the children or the parents,” she says.
To date, the Let Toys Be Toys campaign has been successful in getting a large percentage of shops to remove gendered signs. According to its 2013 survey, there has been a 60% reduction in the use of Girls and Boys signs in shops compared with 2012, dropping from 50% of shops to just 20%. However, while the signs may be disappearing, those being marketed as toys for girls are still made visible in segregated ‘pink aisles’. Trabue explains: “You can take down the signs and organise the toys by type, but if most of the packaging or the toys themselves are pink, they are effectively being sign-posted as being only for girls.”
Eventually, the campaign hopes that pink will return to simply being a colour and not a gender signpost, says Trabue, but when young girls and boys still believe ‘pink means for girls and blue for boys’ there’s a need to see toys and their packaging being made in a variety of colours to stop stereotyping.
Let Toys Be Toys will be targeting toy manufacturers early next year, and calls for an end to using pink and blue to indicate whether a toy is for either gender. Other issues may focus on the imagery used on the packaging, encouraging manufacturers to show images of both sexes of children playing with the toys.
Trabue stresses that they aren’t necessarily saying that if girls swap Barbie dolls for LEGO bricks that they will suddenly all develop a passion for engineering, but surely it can only be a positive thing to give all children the chance to develop a wider range of interests and abilities. “The labels just need to come off and then the children can pick up the subjects and careers that interest them most,” she says.
"Heavily gendered toys affected my thinking"
US engineer Debbie Sterling believes that the heavily gendered marketing of toys such as LEGO and other construction toys meant she grew up believing a career in engineering wasn’t for her. She’s now on a mission to disrupt the pink aisle in toy stores and offer girls their own range of engineering and construction toys in the hope to broaden their horizons from an earlier age. Sterling’s interactive toy company GoldieBlox has developed a book series and range of accompanying construction sets to get girls building in the context of a narrative. The stories feature Goldie, a girl inventor who solves problems by building simple machines.
Sterling says: “Play and, perhaps more importantly, storytelling is essential to how children not only learn about the world around them, but also how they learn about themselves. We believe in the idea that ‘if they can see it, they can be it,’ and that’s why I created Goldie, the girl inventor. She’s an accessible role model who isn’t perfect and teaches kids that it’s fine to fail as long as you keep trying and don’t give up.”
While this approach may appear to counteract the arguments of the Let Toys Be Toys campaign, her aims for the company remain remarkably similar. “I created GoldieBlox to introduce engineering concepts to girls at an early age, provide them with more options, and spawn a movement to disrupt pink toy aisles everywhere,” Sterling says. “I believe there are millions of girls out there who are already engineers, but don’t know it yet.”
GoldieBlox can now be found ‘disrupting the pink aisle’ in John Lewis and Hamleys, and at amazon.co.uk.