From tutus to trucks, parents are often struck by the gendered choices made by their children. Gina Rippon, the author of the ‘The Gendered Brain’ asks: “Could these be ‘hardwired’?”
Gina Rippon / Aeon
If anything characterises the 21st-century social signalling of sex differences, it is the increased emphasis on ‘pink for girls and blue for boys’, with female ‘pinkification’ probably carrying the most strident message. Clothes, toys, birthday cards, wrapping paper, party invitations, computers, phones, bedrooms, bicycles – you name it, the marketing people seem prepared to ‘pinkify’ it. The ‘pink problem’, now quite often with a hefty helping of ‘princess’ thrown in, has been the subject of concerned discussion in the past decade or so.
Peggy Orenstein wrote about it in her book Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture (2011), noting that there were more than 25,000 Disney Princess products on the market. The topic of this rampant pinkification has been frequently criticised, in books such as this and many others, so I had thought that I might not have to cover the pink issue again. But unfortunately for us all, this is a whack-a-mole problem and it shows little evidence of disappearing any time soon.
For a talk I was giving recently, I was mining the internet for examples of those dreadful pink ‘It’s a Girl’ cards when I came across something even more jaw-droppingly awful: ‘gender reveal’ parties.
If you haven’t already heard of these, they go something like this: at about 20 weeks into a pregnancy, it is usually possible to tell the sex of the child you are expecting from an ultrasound scan, thus, apparently, triggering the need for an expensive party. There are two versions, and both are a marketing dream. In version 1, you decide to remain in ignorance, and instruct your ultrasound technician to put the exciting news in a sealed envelope and send it to your gender-reveal party organiser of choice. In version 2, you find out for yourself but decide to break the news at the party. You then summon family and friends to the event via invites bearing a question such as ‘A bouncing little “he” or a pretty little “she”?’, ‘Guns or Glitter?’ or ‘Rifles or Ruffles?’
At the party itself, you might be confronted with a white iced cake that can be cut open to reveal blue or pink frosting (it might also be decorated with the words ‘Buck or Doe? Cut to know’). Or there could be a sealed box that, when opened, will release a flotilla of pink or blue helium-filled balloons; a wrapped outfit from your nearest nursery store that will be opened to reveal the pink or blue creation into which you will stuff your newborn; even a piñata that you and your guests can hammer away at until it releases a flood of pink or blue candy. There are guessing games that appear to involve toy ducks (‘Waddle it be?’) or bumblebees (‘What will it bee?’), or some sort of raffle where, on arrival, you put your guess in a jar and win a prize once the reveal is made. Or (the frontrunner for the most tasteless) you are given an ice cube containing a plastic baby, and in a ‘my waters have broken’ race, you try to find the quickest way of melting your ice cube to reveal whether the baby is pink or blue.
So, 20 weeks before little humans even arrive into it, their world is already tucking them firmly into a pink or a blue box. And it is clear from the YouTube videos (yes, I became obsessed) that, in some cases, different values are attached to the pinkness or blueness of the news. Some of the videos show existing siblings watching the excitement of ‘the reveal’ and it’s hard not to wonder what the three little sisters made of the screams of ‘At last!’ that accompanied the cascading blue confetti. Just a harmless bit of fun, maybe, and a marketing triumph, for sure, but it is also a measure of the importance that is attached to these ‘girl’/‘boy’ labels.
Even efforts to level the playing field get swamped in the pink tide – Mattel has produced a STEM Barbie doll to stimulate girls’ interest in becoming scientists. And what is it that our Engineer Barbie can build? A pink washing machine, a pink rotating wardrobe, a pink jewellery carousel.
You might wonder why any of this matters. What it all comes down to is the debate over whether pinkification is signalling a natural biological divide or reflecting a socially constructed coding mechanism. If it is really the sign of a biological imperative, then perhaps it should be respected and supported.
But if we’re looking at a social set-up, then we need to know if the associated binary coding is still serving the two groups well (if it ever did). Are our journeying girl brains helped out by being directed away from construction toys and adventure books, and those of their boy counterparts from cooking sets and dolls’ houses?
Perhaps we should ask whether the power of the pink tide has a biological basis. In 2007, a team of vision scientists suggested that this preference was linked to an ancient need for the female of the species to be an effective ‘berry gatherer’. Responsiveness to pink would ‘facilitate the identification of ripe, yellow fruit or edible red leaves embedded in green foliage’. An extension of this was the suggestion that pinkification is also the basis of empathy – aiding our female caregivers to pick up those subtle changes in skin tone that match emotional states. Bearing in mind that the study, carried out on adults, used a simple forced-choice task involving coloured rectangles, this is quite a stretch, but it clearly struck a chord with the media, who hailed the finding as proof that women were ‘hardwired to prefer pink’.
However, three years later the same team carried out a similar study in four- to five-month-old infants, using eye movements as a measure of their preference for the same coloured rectangles. They found no evidence of sex differences, with all babies preferring the reddish end of the spectrum. This finding was not accompanied by the media flurry that greeted the first one. The study with adults has been cited more than 300 times as support for the notion of ‘biological predispositions’. The study with infants, where no sex differences were found, has been cited 61 times.
Parents will still exclaim that there must be something fundamental about this preference for pink when they find that, despite their best efforts at ‘gender-neutral parenting’ for their daughters, all is swept away by the pink-princess tide. Children as young as three will allocate genders to toy animals based on their colour; pink and purple ones are girl animals, and blue and brown ones are boy animals. Surely, there must be a biological driver behind the emergence of a preference this early and this determined?
But a telling study from the American psychologists Vanessa LoBue and Judy DeLoache tracked more closely just how early this preference emerges. Nearly 200 children, aged seven months to five years, were offered pairs of objects, one of which was always pink. The result was clear: up to the age of about two, neither boys nor girls showed any kind of pink preference. After that point, though, there was quite a dramatic change, with girls showing an above-chance enthusiasm for pink things, whereas boys were actively rejecting them. This became most marked from about three years old onwards. This tallies with the finding that, once children learn gender labels, their behaviour alters to fit in with the portfolio of clues about genders and their differences that they are gradually gathering.
A cognitive-constructionist camp would point to an emerging cognitive schema, where fledgling gender identities latch on to objects and activities that ‘belong’ to their own sex, scanning their environment for the rules of engagement that specify who plays with what. This would suggest a link between the emergence of gender labelling and the emergence of gendered toy choice.
And there are yet other arguments about the consequences of toy preference. If you spend your formative years playing with dolls and tea sets, will that steer you away from the useful skills that playing with construction kits or playing target-based games might bring you? Or might these different activities just be reinforcing your natural abilities, offering you appropriate training opportunities and enhanced talents for the occupational niche that will be yours? Looking particularly at the 21st century, if the toys you play with carry the message that appearance, and quite often sexualised appearance at that, is the defining factor of the group you belong to, does that have different consequences from playing with toys that offer the possibility of heroic action and adventure?
And might any of these consequences be found not only at the behavioural level but also at the brain level? As ever, the causes and consequences issues are entangled. If gendered toy preference is an expression of a biology, then the interpretation tends to be that it is inevitable and shouldn’t be interfered with, and that those who challenge it should be sent away with the mantra ‘Let boys be boys and girls be girls’ ringing in their ears. Specifically for researchers, it would mean that sex differences in toy preference could be a very useful index of sex differences in underlying biology, a genuine brain-behaviour link. On the other hand, if gendered toy preference is actually a measure of different environmental input, it would be possible to measure the different impacts of that input and, perhaps more importantly, the consequences of changing it.
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