Boys Will Be Boys, Say Makers of Toys
Toy makers appear willing to aim their boy-oriented toys at girls, but aren’t so eager to depict boys playing with “girl toys,” a pair of researchers say.
Pamela Rosenberg, a sociology professor at Gettysburg College, and her husband, Lawrence, a professor at Millersville University, studied 250 toy catalogue photos that included children.
Half showed toys associated with a specific sex, such as dolls, guns, trucks and kitchen sets. The rest showed neutral toys like puzzles, books, musical instruments and clay.
Of the “gender-specific” toys, 70% were pictured with children who were “culturally appropriate”--boys with guns, girls with dolls. Most of the rest involved girls posing with boy-oriented toys, or mixed-sex groups.
Only two advertisements showed boys with a traditional girl toy: a kitchen set and a toy vacuum cleaner. No boys were pictured with dolls.
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