Having Kids Showed Me Gender Stereotypes Are Still a Real Issue
And why it matters.
“Yes, Grandad might say the odd outdated thing but nearly everyone knows that gender stereotypes are nonsense — it’s one issue that’s pretty much sorted,” said a young man opposite me.
I was at a work event and I was heavily pregnant with my first child. I was trying to see if the buffet was out while appearing to listen intently. Humpty Dumpty was starving. The conversation carried on around me and I wondered if he was right. I didn’t give it much more thought as I saw sausages gliding past and I made my excuses.
Since then I have given it more and more thought. I’ve decided that young man was wrong, all because of my kids.
A year ago I was reading my 4-year-old daughter Amy a book about ballet dancers and one of them was a boy. Amy frowned at me and said, “Mummy, boys don’t do ballet.”
I made a mental note to swap Peppa Pig for Billy Elliott and said “But there’s a boy doing ballet right there in front of you! Your brother could do ballet in a pink top like you if he felt like it.”
She looked at me like I’d just said ‘ice cream is disgusting’: A feasible but outrageous idea. “But boys can’t wear pink.” She said.
“What colors can boys wear?” I asked tentatively.
“Blue. And green, brown and grey. Girls should wear pink, yellow, white, silver and pretty dresses”.
Another time, Amy queried how a character could be female as she was a builder and wearing dungarees.
Not long after that, Amy was watching two characters on the TV standing in front of two presents, one wrapped in blue and the other in pink. The boy chose the blue present (a toy truck) and the narrator said “that’s right, blue is for boys!”. The girl then took the other present (something more ‘girly’). I laughed out loud. Amy looked at me like I was unhinged.
While the kids shoveled in their dinner, my partner and I brought up the TV show. We gently talked about how certain toys, clothes, and jobs are not just for boys, or just for girls. Amy seemed nonplussed. For her, that scene on TV was totally unremarkable, which is the point. She’s not being taught in the normal sense of explicitly being told the ‘rules’. They just get absorbed from TV and books etc without her noticing. Inevitable osmosis.
My partner and I started to notice more little things that were surprising or amusing.
We bought Amy a toy pram for Christmas. My mum came over and saw Amy assiduously strapping in long-suffering Rabbit into the pram. She scowled “Uuugh, why have you bought her a pram? And she has a toy oven too!?”
Around the same time, a friend told me how her colleague’s son loved his toy pram too and he was about to start school. His parents had taken away his pram in case he got picked on at school for having a girl’s toy.
I have sympathy for both my mum and the little boy’s parents. But both are wrong. My mum is re-enforcing the idea that to be ‘just’ a parent or homemaker is less valuable and that the traditionally male roles are more valuable. And the mother of the young boy is telling her son that pram pushing is women’s work. Both ideas are still prevalent and make for a pretty toxic message for both boys and girls.
Despite all of this nonsense, we decided that these were just unusual blips. Generally, things are very different from when we were kids in the 80/90s. Right? Then we watched terrestrial kids’ TV adverts for the first time since the 1980s and my confidence wavered.
So many of the ads were ridiculously gendered; they could be spoofs. The ‘boys’’ ads had Eye of the Tiger type guitar music in the background and little boys in brown and blue being mini action heroes. Words like ‘fight’, ‘be the ultimate’, ‘be a hero’, ‘win’ were used.
The’ girls’’ toys adverts had little girls giggling sweetly with dolls, flowers, and make-up. The music was gentle and the scene doused in smiles, glitter, and pink. Most looked like the contents of a cake decorating shop had fallen onto two child pot-heads. The buzz words were ‘friendship’, being ‘kind’, ‘caring’, ‘beautiful’, ‘pretty’ and ‘happy’.
Around this time, I noticed that high street stores like H&M and Primark have condensed the same messages into clothes. The boys’ clothes had words like ‘power, brave, awesome, monster, rebel, hero, go for it!’ on them. Words on the girls’ clothes included ‘beauty, smile, be happy, dream away, make a wish…’
The messages ‘Boys, be awesome and unemotional!’ and ‘Girls, be pretty and smiley!” are literally sewn into the fabric of their lives. As I grumbled and scowled at various tiny T-shirts in H&M I wondered why my son is not being told it’s great to be kind, open, and caring, and my daughter that it’s great to be brave, bold, and active?
I started googling. I came across brilliant groups like Let Toys Be Toys and Let Clothes be Clothes who echoed my thoughts.
But is this just a first-world-whinge about something not on the list of Important Things to Moan About? Possibly.
Maybe it has no relevance other than being amusingly outdated? Young kids like to categorize. Surely they’ll ignore such categories soon, no harm done?
According to various groups interested in this topic, the answer is a loud NO.
Recently the Fawcett Society issued a report stating that the gender stereotypical messages being fed to our kids limit them and cause harm.
A number of other institutions such as Lifting Limits and genderaction.co.uk say the same thing. Studies and articles on their sites make for interesting reading.
But still, do the little things matter? Who cares if the girls' section sells t-shirts with hearts on rather than sharks you might reasonably ask? I didn’t until I started joining the tiny (pink or blue) dots. It’s not just about T-shirts.
It’s the fact that, to my daughter, seeing a boy doing ballet or a female building a house is ‘wrong’ to her. It’s the fact that she tells me needs to ‘get beautiful’ to have a husband (and her brother doesn’t need to). The point is that gender stereotypes cause and are caused by those small things; clothes, books, TV, adverts, etc. They’re the pixels that make up the bigger picture for our kids. Studies suggest this picture remains a background image in their lives. It can affect their education, confidence, aims, career, and self-perception in negative ways.
In one study the authors looked at how common stereotypes and imagery tend to associate brilliance with men more than women and how this might affect children. At age 5, children do not seem to differentiate between girls and boys being brainy or not. But by age 6 girls put more boys in the ‘really really smart’ category and remove themselves from games intended for the ‘really really smart.’
In another study, here, the authors considered the impact of the pictures of scientists in science textbooks. This study followed previous research on ‘stereotype threat’ in which women perform more poorly in maths and science tasks when aware of negative stereotypes about women in STEM fields (despite the fact that various studies suggest young girls and boys perform equally in subjects such as maths.)
Female 9th and 10th-grade students showed higher comprehension of a chemistry lesson (and scored significantly higher on the comprehension test) when that lesson included images of women scientists than they did when the lesson included images of male scientists. Male students showed the opposite results, performing better when their lesson included stereotype-confirming images of male scientists. When students were exposed to images of both male and female scientists there were no significant differences between male and female students’ comprehension test scores.
The idea that ‘you can’t be what you can’t see’ is something that kids seem to take to heart, whether consciously or subconsciously.
A few years ago, Inspiring the Future (#redraw the balance) got a class of girls and boys to draw a picture of a surgeon, a pilot, and a fire-fighter. In 66 drawings of firefighters, surgeons, and pilots 61 were of men and 5 were of women.
In an analysis of the top 100 selling children’s picture books in 2017 by The Observer and Neilsen, it was found that male characters are twice as likely to take leading roles, often in stereotypically masculine activities, and are given far more speaking parts than females. Lifting Limits makes sensible and interesting points about this too. Visit their site for a video experiment analyzing a bookshelf of kids’ books, here.
OK, so battling gender stereotypes is not up there with curing Covid, cancer, or child poverty but it does still matter.
So what to do?
While there are positive steps being made when it comes to adults, like the recent ban on adverts promoting gender stereotypes, we are talking about kids here. I am so glad to see groups like Lifting Limits push for schools to have comprehensive training on the harm gender stereotypes can cause and the importance of discouraging such stereotyping. Many support these groups but the push needs more government backing.
In the meantime, I’ll just talk to the kids about how gender stereotypes are silly. An incident last summer suggested this might be helping in some tiny way. One day, Amy came home from nursery with the smug breathlessness of a snitch. She told me she overheard a teacher telling the other staff that Ben (Amy’s brother) was wearing girls’ clothes and should be changed. In case you’re curious, he was wearing a pink sunhat and a mauve cardigan over a grey top and trousers. At two years old, I doubt Ben understood anyway, but out of curiosity, I asked another teacher the next day. She said that Amy’s account was all true. Amy was apparently ‘very firm’ (read ‘loud’) in telling the teacher that Ben could ‘wear what he wants and boys can wear pink don’t-you-know’. So perhaps something I’ve said has gone in.
(If you found this vaguely interesting, then go on, give me a clap. If not, message me and be nice, please! Also, click here for my 1-year diary of experiences affected by gender stereotypes.)
