{"id":64417,"date":"2014-12-13T09:00:40","date_gmt":"2014-12-13T14:00:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=64417"},"modified":"2014-12-21T13:52:03","modified_gmt":"2014-12-21T18:52:03","slug":"chart-of-the-week-gender-segregation-of-toys-continues-to-rise","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2014\/12\/13\/chart-of-the-week-gender-segregation-of-toys-continues-to-rise\/","title":{"rendered":"Chart of the Week: Gender Segregation of Toys Is On the Rise"},"content":{"rendered":"

Some nice news has come out lately that the occasional toy store is taking the words boy<\/em> and girl<\/em> off of their aisle signs — mostly in Sweden, I say half-jokingly — but Google ngrams<\/a>\u00a0suggests that we’re nowhere near backing off of separating\u00a0children’s toys by sex.<\/p>\n

Sociologist Philip Cohen graphed<\/a> the frequency of \u201ctoys for boys\u201d and \u201ctoys for girls” relative\u00a0to \u201ctoys for children.” This is just language, and it’s just American English, but it’s one indication that the consciousness raising efforts of organizations like Let Toys Be Toys<\/a> is still on the margins of mainstream society.<\/p>\n

\"2\"<\/a>
\n<\/a>As you can see from the graph, the extent to which children are\u00a0actively talked about as gendered subjects varies<\/a> over time<\/a>.<\/p>\n

One explanation for why companies\u00a0resist androgynous toys and clothes for children — an arguably adults, too — has to do with money. If parents with a boy and a girl could get away with one set of toys, they wouldn’t need to buy a second. And if they could hand down clothes from girls to boys and vice versa, they would buy less clothes. The same could be said for borrowing and trading between family members and friends.<\/p>\n

It would really cut into the profits of these companies if we believed that all items for children were interchangeable. They work hard to sustain the lie that they are not.<\/p>\n

Cross-posted at Pacific Standard<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\nLisa Wade, PhD<\/a> is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of <\/em>American Hookup<\/a>, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender<\/a>; and a forthcoming introductory text: <\/em>Terrible Magnificent Sociology<\/a>.\u00a0You can follow her on Twitter<\/a> and Instagram<\/a>.<\/em><\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Some nice news has come out lately that the occasional toy store is taking the words boy and girl off of their aisle signs — mostly in Sweden, I say half-jokingly — but Google ngrams\u00a0suggests that we’re nowhere near backing off of separating\u00a0children’s toys by sex. Sociologist Philip Cohen graphed the frequency of \u201ctoys for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":64420,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[223,23384,55,2099,2102,253,1711],"class_list":["post-64417","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-childrenyouth","tag-social-construction-discourselanguage","tag-gender","tag-gender-childrenyouth","tag-gender-history","tag-history","tag-toysgames"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/files\/2014\/10\/25.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64417","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=64417"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64417\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":65470,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64417\/revisions\/65470"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/64420"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=64417"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=64417"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=64417"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}