Blog #6: Gender Stereotyping

      Have you ever looked at a little kids toy ad and noticed the color and the products that they are promoting.  Nine times out of ten there are pink and purple toys for girls and blue and green toys for boys.  The type of toys are also different.  Girls are encouraged to play with dolls, and playhouses, and cooking equipment while men are encouraged to play with guns, and action figures and trucks and cars.  Parents want their boys to play with "manly" toys while girls are suppose to play with "girlie" toys.
     As you can see in the top ad the colors are switched.  The girl in the pink is playing with toys that are bleu and vice versa.  This is trying to show how boys and girls are gendered from the day that they are born.  This picture came from an ad in the New York Times in an article that talks about gender stereotyped toys.  Elizabeth Sweet says in the articles, "But by 1995, the gendered advertising of toys had crept back to midcentury levels, and it’s even more extreme today. In fact, finding a toy that is not marketed either explicitly or subtly (through use of color, for example) by gender has become incredibly difficult".  This shows how toys are made specially for genders  Toy makers know that they should make legos and building blocks in blue and green and make dollhouses and cooking equipment in pink and purple.  The article also talks about hard it is to find some gendered toys in the opposite colors.  If you take a minute to think about a toy store like Toys R Us or even Target, you can tell what aisle will have what just by the colors of it.  It is very unlikely to find gender neutral colored aisle.  By making the stores these way, it is just promoting gender stereotyping because it is unlikely that a girl and her mom are going to walk down the blue and green aisle.

    Gender stereotyping also occurs in job occupations.  I am sure the majority of the population know that a lot of women get paid less that a man even when they have the same occupation.  In the nurse ad it shows how unlikely it is to be a nurse when you are a man and if you want to become a male nurse you have to be able to stand up to the stereotypes and judgements.  Gender stereotyping can also occur in sports like the clip that I have above.  This is from the movie "Sandlot" that is about a group of guys who play pickup baseball games.  This quote, "You play baseball like a GIRL" was said to the opposing team in order to insult them.
      As you can see gender stereotyping is everywhere.  It is in sports, TV, ads, jobs, and much more and I think that we are a long way away from seeing it disappear.  Being a sociology major I don't believe in a specific gender stereotype.  I don't see how our society has made it okay for little girls to only play with dolls and playhouses and for boys to play with guns and cars.  And if we see a young child playing with the opposite toy, especially a boy, we automatically make assumptions about them.