Victor Locke, (student number) Essays - Gender, Biology, Identity

Victor Locke, (student number) Essays - Gender, Biology, Identity Victor Locke, (student number) Course number, and section Are girls at a disadvantage later in life because of the toys they play with when they're young? This is what the article, "How Today's Toys May Be Harming Your Daughter," by Natasha Daly in the January 2017 issue of National Geographic, explores. (https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2017/01/gender-toys-departments-piece/) The theory is that because girls don't play with building toys and complex puzzles as much as boys do, they don't develop the skills that are required for good jobs in STEM fields or gain any desire to. This article and others like it raise a key question: are toy manufacturers a primary contributor to this phenomenon, or are they simply reflecting society at large? The article looks at how toys have been marketed over time. According to a study by Elizabeth Sweet, who researched Sears catalogs from the 1920s through the 2000s, toys were marketed along traditional gender roles up until the 1970s, with homemaking toys for girls and building and war toys for boys. Then a change happened, as the second wave of feminism questioned traditional roles, resulting in toy marketing becoming more gender neutral. It changed back again in the 1980s. The author credits deregulation making it easier for toy companies to reach children directly, but this also coincided with the rise of conservatism in the Reagan era. Today, some companies like Target are eliminating the "pink" and "blue" aisles and using more gender neutral marketing techniques. Throughout the article, the author suggests that the way toy companies market toys is leading to differences in the way boys and girls develop logics and spatial abilities. And it implies that this is particularly bad f or girls. But how truly influential are toy companies in determining what toys children play with? Are they shaping social behavior, or are they merely reflecting it? Or is it both? Studies have shown that children start to learn about gender from birth by receiving unconscious cues from their parents (pg. 105) during the sensorimotor stage (pg.97). "Male and female adults usually handle infants differently," and things like women's perfume and clothing signal that men and women smell and dress differently (pg. 105). By the time a child is two, they know what it means to be a girl or a boy, and by age 5, during the preoperational stage (pg. 98), they know that their gender will not change (pg. 105). Of all the factors influencing gender identity, family, peers and society's "rules" in general play the central role. This can be seen in a 1986 study by Vanda Lucia Zammuner (pg. 106), who found that children generally preferred toys associated with their own gender, particularly in societies like Italy that have strong ideals about gender roles. Even when parents try to ignore traditional gender roles, it can be difficult to change children's preferences. This was found in research done by June Stathan, who studied parents who consciously tried to raise their children in a nonsexist way. While they were partly successful in getting their children to play with gender-neutral toys, it was much more difficult than they thought it would be. Girls preferred "girl" toys and the boys played with "boy" toys. In other words, "existing patterns of gender learning" were "difficult to combat (pg 107). Their early socialization was too hard to overcome. What role toy marketing played in this result is unknown. There are many sociological theories about how children develop gender identity. Sigmund Freud said that gender identity is based on a biological difference - whether or not they have a penis (pg 99). Nancy Chodorov argued that gender identity comes from "the infant's attachment to their parents from an early age," with particular emphasis on the dominant influence of the mother (pg 100). And according to George Herbert Mead, "infants and young children develop as social beings by imitating the actions of those around them" (pg 97). This idea of children playing an active role in their socialization was furthered by Jean Piaget (pg 97), who said that children actively "select and interpret what they see, hear, and feel." What all of this suggests is that gender roles are shaped by many factors, but probably most important among them