Huh? A doctor surely doesn't do the same as a nurse?

The toys are a good example for gendered socialisation. Boys are encouraged to become a doctor, for girls it's okay only to be nurses (not meaning to say their job isn't important!!).

And I'm also aware that women and men are still not treated equally in the world of employment and that this should change.

But really, a doctor doesn't do the same as a nurse! Not at all. Even if he uses the same tools.

i swear that is the same childs body in both pics, with the girls head shopped on.

funny to see this: my doctor is a woman. wonder what she would think of this? also she is a brill dr!

This is bizarre.
But what really worries me is the way that these 'doctor kits' act to normalize for children the medicalization of the body and 'expert' violations thereof (especially the syringe). When such toys encourage children to mimic the practices of the dominant medical regime, these acts become normalized as 'rituals of health' that they will be more inclined to accept (e.g., to coalesce, against their instincts for self-protection, to vaccination). I think this makes it all the more difficult to de-medicalize society and to convey the message to the next generation that the dominant medical system is about gaining profit and producing the submission of bodies to power, not about healing.

The thing in the lower right-hand corner is one of those air pressure cuffs for taking blood pressure. I had a set like this when I was little, and as far as I recall it was neither pink nor aimed specifically at boys or girls.. it was just a medical kit.

My question is: Do the stores that carry these further segregate them by putting the boy one in the "science"/make-believe aisle and the girl one in the girl aisle with all the dolls?

This post should also be tagged with "pink"! All of the 'nurse' stuff is pink!, while the 'doctor' stuff is a neutral white, giving girls the impression that it is only proper for them to always use the 'female' versions of things.

Well I am going to take this as a small improvement from when I was a kid and in preeschool the boys were instructed to make doctor hats and girls were instructed to make nurse hats out of construction paper and I was the weirdo who insisted that girls could be doctors too.

The assumption of "doctor = boy, girl = nurse" is also no longer correct, especially in medicine. At least in North America, medical trainees are now almost 50% female (See http://www.aamc.org/data/facts/applicantmatriculant/table7-fact2009summary-web.pdf). Also, the number of males in nursing is increasing, but I can't find any good statistics on the rates of graduates. Why must these marketing types keep propagating these false stereotypes?

Those are contemporary toys? Oh, for eff's sake. What year is it?

As a female medical student, nurses roles are different from doctors roles, regardless of gender. My mom, a nurse, always described this to me as people working on a team and leading in different ways--for example, a nurse scribe in the ER will record the procedures while a doctor might be the one doing the procedures. There is a significant difference in education required for certification as well. This does not excuse any gender preferences (which still exist, despite the equal number of women admitted to med schools now) nor the gendered inequality in pay. I just thought it was a necessary argument considering that doctors and nurses do not do the same thing nor are they trained to do so.

"...it’s an acknowledgement that when boys and girls do the same job, it gets called something different and, more, better compensated when men do it."

I'm sorry, but I can't see anything in this image to support the second half of your statement. The kits, as you point out, are similar in their components. They appear to be sitting side-by-side on the same shelf (@Kai). The boy and girl are dressed (near-)identically, as other commentators have noted.

The two notable differences, based solely on the images, are colour (pink-blue) and word (nurse-doctor).

I'm not sure how much a child would infer that "when boys and girls do the same job, it gets... better compensated when men do it". That strikes me as a very adult way of understanding the words "nurse" and "doctor". I'd imagine a child would take more meaning from the images of the two children - in terms of 'professional appearance', they are equal.

(Unless you want to talk about the syringe/ penetration/ phallus difference, which is a whole different can of worms.)

The wage gap actually means that even if it was doctor/doctor the woman would be getting paid less. The statistics that state that women are lower paid are based on comparisons of full time workers in the same type of jobs, not comparisons across all jobs.

this really helps

in all fairness, the scissors *are* pink.

Consumer culture is so hyper accelerated now it demands more and more segregation and stereotyping like this though. How else will the toy manufacturers and toy stores convince parents they need to buy two kits, one for their daughter and one for their son.

I notice things that gender specify with color too. I was trying to find a cooking / dishes / baking set for my son to use with his new kitchen (the kitchen is colored purple and pink by the way... but I bought it anyway). All I could find were princess this, and fairy that. I don't care about colors... obviously, I bought the pink and purple kitchen. However, my son doesn't want princesses, fairies and flowers on all his dishes!!! Am I supposed to believe that only girls play in the kitchen and that only girls will cook meals? My son adores baking with me and I hope to raise him to become a self sufficient person who can cook, clean, do laundry etc. I don't need there to be a spiderman dish set (although my son would probably freak for it). But a neutral set would be nice. I will tell you that we did find nice sets available at Ikea. They look like the dishes adults use and he loves them.

This kind of thing always frustrates me. In my doctoral program for child development, one of the things I studied and wrote about was looking at media and what it conveyed about gender. One of the things I was particularly interested in was how "active" and "passive" the different genders were in the advertisements. If you watch again, the girl barely does anything at all-- she nods her head, smiles and barely speaks. The messages are very clear as if subtitles occupy the bottom of the screen. With commercials like this, it's no wonder that toys tend to have segregating messaging as well. Ugh. It's up to us as parents, leaders, and educators to underscore media literacy here-- so that even when these messages are everywhere, our kids can read them and know what's REALLY going on.

All the gendering aside, I find it funny that the kit includes a fake stethoscope that makes noises, when a functioning (if not necessarily medical quality) stethoscope is hardly high-tech and probably cheaper to make.

its said to see how both toys have the same items in them ,but classify differently because of their genders. When I first saw it I thought boys toys/ items are medical supplies that doctors uses..Little did i knew that it classify by gender ,which is unfair. A woman can full a man job, likewise to men.

I dont see in any way how any of these sets can influence a child age 3+ to pick nor avoid any career, i believe individuals and groups of individuals perceive things the way they want especially now in this age most of this generation perceives things in an antagonistic fashion trained to rebel against everything. Jesus says "seek and ye shall find''. If you are seeking for problem you will find one. My daughter has a doctor set and doesn't think she has to be a boy.