Gender Stereotyping and Children

It's a given that ads use gender stereotyping in both negative and positive fashions. I personally accept whatever effect it may have on adults, though I think that it is the dichotomy of creating, reinforcing and simply reflecting stereotypes that makes ads so powerful and successful. What I think is more interesting, and more ethically challenging is how ads that gender stereotype affect children. As adults, we should be able to think and fend for ourselves, and in our world ads can be representations of us that we merely agree with or don't, or more or less fail to notice. But children, whose minds are still developing along with their sense of identity relative to the rest of the world, are more affected by advertisements.



Toys like Nerf, Hot Wheels, and action figures are specifically targeted at boys. When have you ever seen a Nerf commercial featuring a girl? Or Hot Wheels? This creates a stark division of interests engrained in children at an earlier age. It is blatant conditioning for the roles they are expected to fulfill later in life. We see this especially when we compare ads targeted at boys, like the one above, to ads for dolls and play kitchen appliances targeted at girls. Ads for products like Nerf and Hot Wheels are loud and aggressive, while ads for toys like Barbie or My Little Pony sing a cute, jovial song, and the girls are smile and giggle a lot, while the boys in their ads run around and yell at each other. The color usage is also usually very different. Colors in ads targeted at boys are bright and loud, while those in the ads targeted at girls use more pastels (pinks, purples, light blues), though they now often use bright colors, those colors still never evoke aggressiveness. You also see way more black in ads targeted at boys, and a lot of white in ads made for girls.



Do these stereotyping techniques always make girls adhere to the baby loving, caretaking stereotype bestowed upon them? No. Do boys always grow up wanting to drive fast cars and join the army? Also no. My concern is more with how gender stereotyping in ads affects how children identify with the world around them. What toys a kid plays with can be determined by many factors other than commercials--what is available at school, what their friends have, and mostly what their parents give them to play with. I identify with the girls who are upset when McDonalds gives them the "girl" toy instead of the "boy" toy. I also know the boys who were upset to the converse dilemma. Girls like us identified as "tomboys," and were not always accepted by our baby doll loving companions. Does gender stereotyping in advertisements contribute to kids becoming outcast for several years in school?




Conversely, there are children's toys whose ads are consistently gender neutral, most notably play doh. However, I would also call the product itself more acceptably gender neutral than barbie vs. batman. It seems that toys that serve as creative stimulus are generally targeted to both sexes.



Here, Barbie did something pretty cool. Here is an ad that just barely features the doll itself, but actually features women as pilots, fire fighters, teachers, doctors, athletes. An ad that says "I can be anything," putting the decision in the hands of the viewer, more like an ad toward an adult. However, I could argue that this is also targeted at the adult, the parent, who is a little less traditional than the other moms and generally wouldn't buy a Barbie for her daughter. I mean hey, it got me.