I think this advertising says a lot more about our cultural expectations around gender than about marketing practices.

You have to go in with categories already defined if you’re going to study categories in these catalogues. You can’t invent catagories *from* the source material.

I think this sort of thing shows a lot of promise for exposing gender stereotypes in toy catalogues, but this post got it wrong.

Toys r Us: 52% boys
Wal-Mart: 55% boys
Target: 59% boys

Target’s a bit high, but the other two don’t seem that bad. And both Wal-Mart and Target have more girls than boys playing with non-gendered/unisex toys. Which in and of itself might be indicative of what I call the ‘pants theory’ (because I don’t know the real term): women get to wear pants, but men can’t wear a dress because that would make them feminine and feminine is ‘bad’.

We should formulate the hypothesis that the number of boys vs girls portrayed across all catalogs is the same as the number of boys vs girls in the general population, then start collecting data and run the statistical test to see how confident we can be in confirming or rejecting that hypothesis.

Then we aren’t trading complaints about weighting, we’re developing our knowledge in a scientific way. (A priori I’m willing to bet money that we will find out that, averaged across all the catalogs, we will end up statistically rejecting that hypothesis and finding more boys, but I could well be wrong.)

That seems glib, and suspect. I could easily tell just-so stories in the other direction: showing children playing together makes parents more likely to buy a toy, since they want to ensure that their children make friends. Selling items that can be shared ensures that, when Child A visits Child B at B’s house, they both play with the toy, which means that Child A will learn about it and want one of their own. And so forth. I mean, I don’t know that these are true, but they’re just as reasonable-sounding as the statement I cited.

Is there evidence that kids sharing toys results in fewer toys getting sold?

That no girls were shown building anything disappoints me. I know a had a lot of those sorts of toys as a child–aimed at both boys and girls. (I love building things) Legos, knitting, woodworking, etc. The closest thing to crafts I’ve seen marketed lately is stuff like nail decorating >< Which just reinforces why I bought my niece Megablocks for Christmas.

I also think it’s disturbing that she says the girl playing the guitar has her hair ‘messed up’ (even if she does paint that as a good thing); the girl’s hair is not messed up, it is in motion because she’s apparently jumping in the air. This is especially jarring because she mentions racial stereotypes early on in her article, but then immediately acts as if there is something terribly unusual and ‘messy’ with a black child’s hair not being totally motionless. I also think her thoughts on the proportion of dolls were totally out of place in the article; someone needs a lesson in Uncanny Valley. Compare a generic Barbie doll or a doll made to imitate a cartoon (like the Disney Princess dolls shown) to dolls that try to imitate real human beings (easiest example to find would be Twilight promotional dolls made to look like Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart, or dolls made to look like teen stars such as Miley Cyrus or the Olsen twins). Barbie and Cinderella are not realistic, but they are popular and lovable because of their unrealistic generic cuteness; they look kind of like people, but their idealized form always reminds you ‘this is not a person, this is a toy.’ But dolls based on famous people are rarely popular among their target audience (aside from the Twilight dolls, I assume, if only because they continue to be in stores; I don’t know anyone who owns one), and they are unpopular for a reason; they are quite a bit more realistic in proportion, but the fact remains that they will never be real, because they are made of plastic. Those dolls are almost always VERY ugly, even if the person they are supposed to look like is quite attractive. They are not just unattractive to look at, though; they are, for a large portion of the population, downright TERRIFYING. Dolls SHOULD NOT have accurate human proportions because they are not humans. The complaint about ‘Barbie would have to crawl on her hands and knees’ (which, BTW, is totally false; she’d just be really icky looking) is a totally irrational response to dolls, and just an excuse to ignore the real sources of bad self-esteem among young girls for an easy scapegoat.

The more kids share toys, the fewer toys get sold. Gendering toys and optimizing them for individual play are both great ways of nudging families toward buying more different items per child.

When corporations promote ideas and images that *don’t* enhance profitability, that’s when the red flag should be raised on the other agendas.