Walking down the toy aisle, there’s a pink side and a blue side, and nobody thinks twice about it. The truth is the children’s toy market is gendered, and overwhelmingly so, locking children into societal gender prisons (Francis, 2010). The gendered toy market (GTM) lures unsuspecting children into the idea of gender norms and maintains them up until the children decide that they identify as masculine or feminine by choice, relieving the toys of their job as enforcers of the perception that everyone must conform to a gender. The current state of the GTM is constant ethical controversy on whether the harms of the children leisure market are enough to constitute a change toward a more unisex and gender-neutral market state. The harms that this paper will discuss, constituted by seemingly harmless toys, however, might be enough to push for a shift away from gender norming and toward optimal development of toys and even equality.

The current state of the American children’s toy market is gendered, and forces children to conform to the idea that they must either be like a boy or be like a girl. From Melbourne’s School of Psychological Sciences, Cordelia Fine, and co-author Emma Rush from the Centre for Applied Philosophy & Public Ethics (CAPPE), and School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Charles Sturt University, write more about the ethics of the gendered toy marketing debate. In the discussion portion of the paper, the analysis concludes that the “GTM misrepresents the overlapping and malleable toy interests of boys and girls in male-typed and female-typed toys as distinct and fixed. Existing data also suggest that GTM increases stereotype-consistent toy preferences, in line with self-socialisation models and data showing that increasing the psychological saliency of a social category increases stereotyping and prejudice” (Fine and Rush 18). Thus, the nature of the GTM as it stands solidifies the idea of being of the “right gender” and locks children into gender prisons that they continue to live in. Gender prisons are societal bounds that force everybody to think that they must be either masculine or feminine, otherwise they are betraying what is established as “right” by society. The toy industry assumes gender to be a true concept and aims to solidify it. An ethically inept goal. Becky Francis, from a paper published through the Oxford Review of Education, further backed this claim with the conclusion that “boys and girls are being inculcated to different gendered worlds due to their distinctive gendered consumption of toys and leisure resources; indeed, that these entertainment resources facilitate the production and reproduction of gender (difference and inequality) […] [Gender] is not thus the product of choice, but the forcible citation of a norm” (Francis, 2010). The reinforcing and reproduction of inequalities in any sense is ethically wrong under any moral framework, especially if it is deliberately done. If the toy market is to stay this gendered, it takes away the freedom to identify without the confinement of gender walls, as well as optimally develop, creating gender gaps, or “Gender differences in certain fields and skills” (Lipowska and Lada-Masko, 2021). Authors Lipowska and Lada-Masko, from the Department of Psychology at the University of Amsterdam, and the Institute of Psychology at the University of Gdańsk respectively, provide a paper that concludes that “providing categorizing labels such as “for girls” and “for boys” prematurely sets boundaries between the children to whom the toy is and is not marketed; hence, it can lead to the exclusion of one gender” (Lipowska and Lada-Masko, 2021). A study on the dangers of gender-based toys from Michigan State University, to further back the claim of gender gaps, finds that “masculine toys [are] associated with large motor development and spatial skills, while play with feminine toys [are] associated with developing fine motor skills (fingers), language and social skills” (Trautner, 2023). The continued gendering of toys bolster gender norms that have a profound impact on cognitive development. If children grow up under the influence that boys must play with action figures while girls must play with dolls, they will find themselves with those disadvantages later in their lifetime. Not even needing to go into the specifics in the science of brain development, any harm from gendering toys should be seen as an ethical violation of rights and should constitute a change. The ethical consequences of the GTM build inroads to understanding how consumptions of societal constructs in the form of products can affect human life as a whole.

The idea still floats in the air, though, that the gendering of the toy market isn’t bad. While none of the cited sources disagree with the fact that gendering is harmful, some would argue that it isn’t enough to institute change in the toy industry. From a paper published in the Springer Journal, a leading international scholarly peer-reviewed journal and publishing company, authors Raag and Rackliff argue that, while toys might be gendered, they aren’t the reason that the idea of gendering is being driven forward. The paper cites a study that found that “a large frequency of boys, relative to a small frequency of girls reported that fathers’ reactions to cross-gender-typed play would be negative is consistent with findings that boys receive more negative consequences to cross-gender-typed behaviors than girls do” (Raag and Rackliff, 1998). The findings are interesting, mostly because this would mean that girls are less susceptible to gendering if it isn’t as enforced while growing up. And if it’s true that parents are driving forces in gendering children, then the finding would also support that gendering the toy market isn’t ethically wrong, but rather a smart marketing move. This is especially apparent since the parents’ drive to push for gender norms are independent of the toy market, since “In the 1970s, few toys targeted a specific gender and 70 percent of toys had no gender-specific labels at all” (Trautner 23).  Furthermore, the finding is backed up by another paper from Springer Journals. Authors Cherney and London write that “girls' interest in play with gender-stereotyped toys decreased as they grew older” (Cherney and London, 2006). In agreeance with Raag and Rackliff, Cherney and London conclude that girls end up less gendered than boys. Drawing from that conclusion, the cause of boys becoming extremely gendered can be attributed to parenting, making the relevance of the toy industry not as strong as in a world where this isn’t the case.

Most research on this topic doesn’t dispute that gendering is real and a threat, but questions arise when the focus is on the children’s toy market. Fine, Rush, and Trautner come to the consensus that the GTM is a bad thing. It results in gender prisons that force people to conform to the idea of societal gender norms, as well as suboptimal cognitive development, and it all starts from toys as a child. Toys being engineered and marketed toward individual genders should warrant a need for a change in the market given the fact that they’re harmful. But the debate is around whether they’re the ones causing the harm. The papers from Cherney, London, Raag, and Rackliff bring a convincing analysis that concludes that parents drive gender norms forward, not toys. But in order for there to be gendered activities to conform to, there first have to be the toys. If parents are truly driving their children toward gendered activities, then one would think that getting rid of those gendered activities should change the mindset of the parents too. As Fine and Rush put it, if the topic was the racial toy market, where there are different toys for black and white children, most people wouldn’t be happy with the response that the toy market is only a small contributor to racism so it shouldn’t be changed. Ethically, gendering is wrong, and any attempts at expanding it should be stopped. It’s just a matter of where it comes from.