Generally, I am all for these ridiculous gender division posts, but I would like to defend the divide in book categories (at least partially, sort of..).  Girls and boys should both be getting stories of friendship and stories of adventure, but that is not the case, I think in part because of the audience the books were written for. 
As much as the book collections divide on subject matter, they also divide on the gender of the main character.  In this case, I think it is possible that the girls collections were created with the gender of the main character in mind, rather than just the friendship/adventure binary.  (note that the Carroll, Barrie, and Baum books are more than just "girly friendship" books, but that, because their main cast of characters includes a girl, they get put in the "girls books" section).

If you do happen to be a girl, the girls' collection, while unfortunately excluding boys, allows you to find some of the few main characters in classic children's lit who are also girls.  As someone who was once a young girl reader, I can honestly say that I did enjoy reading books with both boy and girl leads, but that girl leads were especially exciting because I was a girl and they were relatively rare.  This gets into similar problems with movies and gender and boy/man as the default character that everyone is expected to like, which is frustrating.  But what do you do with collections that highlight women? They still uphold the binary, but they also represent a much less common category, so is creating a set that highlights them a problem? I suppose they could have just been mixed together, but that might have been to progressive for our society.  Kind of like boys playing with Barbies.

I'm feeling less like I defended this now.  I'm pretty ok with that.

Um, men and women do have different nutritional needs, much of it stemming from differences in male and female hormones.  The cereal sounds really stupid, but in general, the idea that people are affected hormonally through diet, and men and women have different nutritional needs largely as a result of this, is not a laughing matter.  I find the gendered sprinkles hilarious, especially as they have no nutritional value, and boys and girls have more or less the same nutritional needs until around the age of 10.

But after that, sex does play a significant role in dietary needs and hormonal balance, and let's not forget that cereals are often fortified with various added nutrients.  Leaving out for a moment the fact that food fortification is very controversial, the idea of a sex-specific fortified cereal is not a ridiculous thing at all.

I always find these gendering posts interesting and a little disturbing, however maybe I'm missing something, but nowhere on the yogurt or the computers can I find it actually labeling the products as "for girls" or "for boys".  Surprisingly both seem to be labeled as just general "kids" products.  They don't even have boys or girls pictured using the items. 

I don't mind when there are two versions of something, my problem is always when they are labeled to imply that one is ONLY boys and one is ONLY girls and never the twain shall meet.  These two products seem to actually be doing what we want...yes, there are two versions, but they don't seem to be blatantly gendering them.

On the Barnes & Noble series - The difference between the boys' vs. girls' collection is not just in the content (e.g. adventure vs. heartwarming tales) but the boys' collection is more "mature." I'm not necessarily talking about reading level (because I don't know what the reading levels of these books are, but my guess is that boys' collection seems a few years higher), but the themes involved are much more mature in the boys' collection. Thematically, "Kim," "The Strange Case …", and "'Gulliver's Travels" are much more mature and adult-oriented than themes of "Through the Looking Glass," "The Wind in the Willows," and "The Secret Garden,". I'm not sure what the gender bias is here. Do we think boys' start reading "serious" works at a later age, so the books are more mature? Or is the bias that we think girls aren't yet prepared, intellectually or emotionally, for the more mature offerings of "boy literature," ?  

As a male, I also dislike the idea the boys can only enjoy so-called "boy books." I loved Alice, Through the Looking Glass, and The Secret Garden as a kid. Also, since when is "The Wind in the Willows" a gendered book? That book is a masterpiece of not just "children's literature," but all of english literature. Every child should read that magnificent book, hell every adult should read it if they haven't. It's wonderful. 

It's been a while since I've read those children's classics, but IIRC even the ones for girls with female leads have one or more very prominent male characters (Peter Pan and Hook, Dickon, the Tin Man et al). Wonder what the distribution is like for the boys' books.

Some of these gendered products are not actually gendered.  Implicitly, maybe, but where does it say "this yogurt is for girls/boys," or "Barbie computer for girls, Hot Wheels computer for boys" (though I wish I could see the game titles included in each, not to mention how silly it is to buy a kid in the Hot Wheels/Barbie stage a 600 dollar computer with fairly age-specific decorations on it)?  Simply assuming that anything that has pink on it is for girls, anything with sports on it for boys is just as presumptuous as assuming a boy can't want (or would terribly mind) something colored pink, and a girl can't want something with sports on it.  And that attitude, to me, also criticizes the fact that products are available in a multitude of designs or colors that aren't purely functional.  Yes, in our society, something that is pink is going to be assumed to be "for girls" or "for women" unless there's reason to believe otherwise.  But in many of those cases, pink/flowers/pastel is just one of a handful of optional designs for something.  When I was shopping for linens when I first went to college, the "trendy" color combinations were pink/beige/white and blue/navy/grey, and everything was plaid or floral (in either color combination).  Yes, there was the subtle implication that the blue linens were for boys, the pink linens were for girls....but thank god they were there, because I can't stand the color blue for room decor, and there were very few other inexpensive options.  And I saw plenty of girls in the dorms using the blue linens, and at least one boy using the pink ones.  Usually when things are only available in one color, to avoid scaring away male consumers, they automatically shy away from a lot of colors that are popular among both men and women, towards colors that are either very dark and neutral, or eye-searingly bright (usually black, dark blue, or traffic-cone orange).  First world problems, but when something comes in a variety of options, why is it only a problem if pink or purple items are included?  Some people like pink or purple.  A better question than "why are two different flavors of yogurt sold in different colored packages" or "why were pink and blue inexplicably the most popular and seemingly only options for twin-sized sheets in summer of 2008" is, why do we automatically assume everything pink excludes males, and everything sports related excludes girls when there's no actual text or visual indication that they aren't unisex (for example, the sports yogurt only shows a soccer ball, not a male athlete)?  And why do we condition men to shriek away in fear if something isn't oozing implied masculinity as if they'll die if they even stand next to the pink power tools while purchasing the orange ones?

The book thing, on the other hand, bothers me immensely.  It makes me wonder, are male children ever encouraged to read books with prominent female characters outside of class (and aside from the Scarlet Letter and a few Holocaust memoirs, I recall very few requires books with female protagonists prior to about tenth grade).  When I was in 2nd, 3rd, and 4th grade, our teachers fought tooth and nail to make sure the girls weren't reading too much Babysitter's Club and Nancy Drew, to convince us that we didn't only have to read "girl books," but boys reading exclusively Wishbone or the Hardy Boys were never questioned.  On the one hand, I get that part of it was to "empower" girls, but how can that fully happen if half of school children have never been exposed to the idea that female people can be dynamic characters?  Shunning anything with a fantasy theme or female protagonist is pretty par for the course for school-aged boys, but it doesn't seem to be nearly as much a priority to convince boys to diversify when it comes to reading material

Both of the birthday decorations have a skull and crossbones on, but the girl skull is wearing a sweet little bow.  I'm not sure how or why, since of course it hasn't got any hair.

A certain amount of this stuff looks to me like it's made in China by people with a fairly vague idea of what foreigners want, and playing it safe, in particular the Princess Crayon Set and Truck Crayon set.  The different colour range in each is a nice subtle touch, showing that these products aren't sex-labelled arbitrarily, they are also programming you for the appropriate gender role.  If your little boy prefers the Princess set, then, well, then you know, don't you?  ;-)

Turns out people have genders - surprise!

I dont see the big issue, is it not clear that boys enjoy some things more that girls or need something more than a girl would need it and visa versa? you can clearly see that companies like nerf are triggered toward boys and never show a girl in their advertisements, and the same the other way around for girls. Is this not how our world works? of corse it may seem bad to some people that genders might have certain stereotypes attached to them, but does this really matter THAT much?

have you ever tried giving a 5 year old a pink toy? no? good. now delete this stupid article

Why no spice for the manly cereal? It's not like spice is gendered as female ("Old Spice" aftershave comes to mind) though I guess "spiciness" may be. Or did "The Spice Girls" ruin spice for guys?

And on the packaging, she looks like she's turning to leave with her big bowl of Sexcereal (it's almost as big as her head! That's a LOT of Sexcereal!) to go to a semi-formal cocktail party, or maybe the pose is to show us the great ass she got from eating it (against all odds, considering how big her bowl of carbs is)? But the man looks like he's getting ready to clean out the garage on his day off or something (at least his enormous spoon is erect!).

I agree, with all the problems facing the world and children, the most important issue is to ban selling pink things to girls and blue things to boys! Heaven forbid we expect kids to be smart enough to find their own way or *gasp* actually choose of their own free will to enjoy things their sex has a reputation for enjoying leading to the targeted marketing in the first place. Girls must be ashamed to prefer flowers and pink and boys must be ashamed to like action figures and toy guns. Androgny, its not a choice, its a mandate that must be beaten into everybody whether they like it or not. Hail enlightened equality!

How did I know this article was going to have been written by a woman? You won't be happy until we are all androgynous...

This article (and concept) is ridiculous. Stereotypes are based on truth and that the truth, in this case gendering, applies to the majority of people it is based on. If you happen to be someone who falls outside of a particular stereotype, good for you - there is nothing right or wrong about that.

Boys like fast cars, flames, and the color blue. Girls like flowers, pretty things, and the color pink. Mexican people like tacos. White southern folks like a new cold glass of ice tea.

Get over this politically incorrect nonsense and enjoy your life. Idiots.

I live in Canada and have not yet seen the Sexcereal. Now I'll have to keep an eye out. However, I have seen the Holy Crap! cereal that is so full of nutrients that two bites meets a number of daily nutritional requirements. It's unisex, though, and wildly expensive (because of all those nutrients).

The gendered products debate, especially for children, has been on my mind frequently because my husband and I are expecting our first child. Since we don't know the gender yet, any baby things I've bought so far have been deliberately gender-neutral, which is surprisingly hard to find. I know that should I have a boy and I end up stuffing him into a purple onesie, someone will probably chastise me for it, and if we have a girl, using one of the truck-covered sets of overalls in the bag of stuff leftover from when my brothers and I were little will also get us judged. I do enjoy girly things, but I don't want my children to feel as though they must do/like something simply because of their gender. It's hard to know how to balance all of this out, especially since I don't wish to completely isolated my family from our culture. My poor children are probably going to learn to dialogue about what different things represent quite early.

As they stand now, these "gendered marketing" posts feel like little contrived bubbles of groupthink rather than openings for a more in depth understanding of whats really going on when commercial interests express/reflect/reinforce/construct social norms regarding gender.

If it's beyond Sociological Images' scope to provide some more substantial, informative background to explain why corporate marketing departments find gendered marketing so successful, then at least some links to more substantive analysis would be appreciated.

I do eat a granola mix called "Women's Vitality Mix" from HEB in the USA.  It happens to have several foods that are known to be good for typical women's problems, like a heavy amount of cranberries for the bladder infections that women get in such high numbers.
That said, my husband enjoys the almonds and chocolate chips.

Is this a huge deal, really? If you are a girl who likes soccer, then buy the soccer yogurt. Like barbie? then buy a barbie doll for god's sake, who cares what people think about it. Putting a giant neon sign over the 'issue', like this article does, makes it bigger than it has to be.

So, green is for boys now, I always thought it was a gender neutral color. I guess some companies are really going out of their way to make sure that girls are pink and purple only, and the rest of the color scale is for boys.

yay for gendering!

I often find that products for women are often of lesser quality. Went to the store with my friend the other day, spent half an hour looking for heavy, warm socks to wear in my boots. The reason it took so long is because all the womens socks had words like 'Princess' or bows or glitter thread or lacy fringe, which will rub the shit out of you ankle after away in your boots, but mostly because they sacrificed warmth, for aesthetic appeal. I just wanted warm socks and all the socks that I liked, were mens sock. I finally had to settle on getting the smallest mens size they had. My point being, is that I often find that products directed towards woman, like sweaters, shirts, mittens, socks and other clothing, often is made of cheap, itchy, thin and none to warm materials in order to make it visually appealing and form fitting. I don't think I'd have been so angry if the socks had been warm and comfortable like the mens socks- but they weren't. The same thing happened when I was shopping for gloves earlier this month too.

In Iceland there came an icecream marketed to boys (blue and labeled "icecream for boys") and girls, and also a pink and blue helmets were given out to children but neither girls or boys could choose other colour than targeted one to their gender.

The public was in outrage and only a week after both incidents, the two things were not available anymore. Just shows that if the public takes action it can be possible to take these products out of the market.

Well, at least The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is included in the "for girls" book collection. That book has actually got a lot of action (and it's got violent parts), and Dorothy is a strong female character (especially considering the time it was written).