Baby Blue and Baby Pink Clothes: The Case Against Gender Stereotyping

Today at the gym I saw adorable twins – a boy and a girl about 10 months old (still crawling and not yet walking). Only the way they were dressed made me see red.

The boy was dressed in blue and the girl was dressed in pink. This gender stereotyping has always driven me crazy. There have been studies done dressing a non-descript baby in one or the other of these colors and recording the different reactions people have to a “boy” baby or a “girl” baby. These studies have shown that gender stereotyping starts at a very early age.

Now I understand that there are differences in genders, important differences. But what shouldn’t be gender-specific is the encouragement young children get to try new experiences. I cringe when a parent says about a toddler – “she’s shy,” thereby reinforcing this behavior. And I strongly suspect that pink or blue clothing on babies and toddlers influences what adults say to these children.

And, yes, if the mother of the twins at the gym had dressed one child in a bright green outfit and another child in a bright yellow outfit, I might not have known the children were boy-girl twins. But did I really need to know that to appreciate how cute they looked together?

When Will Gender Stereotyping Ever End?

My business partner Susie told me that her two-year-old granddaughter doesn’t like Minnie Mouse but likes Mickey Mouse. But the child’s mother is very frustrated because she can’t find any girls’ clothes with Mickey Mouse. All the girls’ clothes have Minnie Mouse.

Luckily I was already exercising on the treadmill so I didn’t have to take out my anger on anything else. “I’ve been fighting this battle for 27 years,” I said to Susie. “And things don’t change.”

This gender stereotyping is so wrong and so pervasive. Years and years ago I wrote to Lego explaining that, if they only showed pictures of boys on the Lego boxes and on the tv commercials, the company would achieve a self-fulfilling prophecy that only boys wanted to play with the Lego block sets.

Of course my letter didn’t make any impact on Lego. And the marketing gurus of Lego continued to address my younger daughter with a boy’s name when she sent for the free Lego offers.

And then Lego brought out pastel-colored Legos targeted at girls, which as I recall bombed. (Who wants to build interesting structures in pastel-colors?) My daughter bought numerous castle sets (she later fenced saber and majored in Medieval/Renaissance literature at college) along with other sets targeted only at boys.

And, yes, I know that Lego and Disney marketing gurus can probably point to studies that “prove” that there aren’t enough girls interested in Mickey Mouse clothes or Lego building kits to warrant changing their “business as usual” models. But I did learn in my statistics class in Wharton’s MBA program that you can set up a survey in a specific way to get a specific result if you understand the mechanics of survey questions.

So there’s no excuse for these gender-stereotyping products except the prejudices (and I do mean prejudices) of the marketing people making the decisions (aided and abetted by their advertising agencies). I do so hope that in the transparent world of Web 2.0 some of these things will finally begin to change.

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