Kids don’t understand this gender role stereotype. It is induced into their heads by society. (much like religion). Thus it is baseless.

Heck, I like pink. I played with Barbies, plushies and ponies (that is when I was a kid, of course) and I also played with tanks, toy-soldiers, cars, transformers and the like. And back then I didn’t know nor understand this division. (I could write about this all day but I suck at organizing what I write so I’ll stop at this, since my point was made.)

Just yesterday I was thinking about good toys & activities to encourage my daughter’s early interest in math & building. With the help of some friends, I pulled together this whole list of toys, tips & activities that are great for girls. No need for pink & purple LEGO…just regular LEGO!

Toys & Tips To Feed A Girl’s Love Of Building, Math & Science
http://www.skinnyscoop.com/list/eden/toys-tips-to-feed-a-girls-love-of-building-math-science

Experiments on toddlers who have very little lnaguage (i.e. they do not yet talk, so their understanding of language is fairly limited) have shown that there is an innate component to gender preferences. (Socialising effects can be corrected for by having a toddler play in a room with an adult that does not know the child – in half of your experiment you can fool the adult into believing that the child has the opposite from its actual gender, and thus you neutralise any subconscious influence the adult exerts.)

Except that does not neutralize any gender-directed behaviors from the adults in the child’s life outside the experiment. Unless you’re proposing an experiment where babies are raised by people who don’t know their sex, which I kind of doubt!

You’re speaking as if children have to understand the concept of girls versus boys before they can learn what their preferences are supposed to be. This is wrong.

Children learn what they individually are allowed to do or not do, what they are encouraged to do, and for the most part try to comply with the parent’s wishes. When they are pre-verbal, they don’t know that the rule about never being loud is only for girls but the rule about not running into the street is for everyone. They just know what their parents approve and disapprove of.

Once a child becomes verbal, “what is” is the same as “what should be” and their ideas are very fixed and rules are very rigid. But by then they’ve already been quite socialized into sex roles and their little friends have been just as socialized. So girls wearing dresses and playing dolls and tea party is right, because that’s what they see. Boys playing trucks and guns in the dirt is right, because that’s what they see.

This is why you think it’s “just natural” — you learned it long before you could understand it. It is hard to reason oneself out of a conclusion one did not reach through reason.

What makes you think that such experiments have not already been done?

Admittedly, they probably have not been done with these specific kits, but I’m sure if you look diligently, you’ll find plenty of examples.

The most difficult part is correcting for the socialising effect that children are subjected to that enforces gender stereotypes (i.e. such social phenomena as the association of dirt and ruggedness with boys, the stigma that is attached to boys who choose “feminine” pastimes, the association of homemaking and beautifying with girls, and the label “tomboy” applied to girsl who choose “masculine” pastimes).

Experiments on toddlers who have very little lnaguage (i.e. they do not yet talk, so their understanding of language is fairly limited) have shown that there is an innate component to gender preferences. (Socialising effects can be corrected for by having a toddler play in a room with an adult that does not know the child – in half of your experiment you can fool the adult into believing that the child has the opposite from its actual gender, and thus you neutralise any subconscious influence the adult exerts.)

Boys tend to prefer toys that have a mechanical aspect (cars, trains, building blocks and so on) while girls tend to prefer toys that have a social aspect about them (hence dolls and tea-parties). These results are, of course, averages – and there’s plenty of overlap. As far as anyone can tell, there is an innate component to these preferences.

However, society tends to over-emphasise and reinforce the innate average preference, to such extent as forcing girls to grow up in an environment where they and their peers are valued mainly for their attractiveness, and only a little for their achievements; and boys are valued for their robustness and ruggedness, and ostracised if they pursue pastimes that their peers perceive as feminine (and where do their peers get these attitudes from? Their parents).

Heh, I remember visiting a friends’ house when I was young, and being jealous of his sister’s EZ Bake oven. I mean, while my friend and I were using fake plastic hammers and screwdrivers, here was a toy that actually DOES something

Edit: Oh, and rock candy kicks ass! I remember as a kid seeing rock candy in stores and wondering what the hell the point was. The fun part is watching it grow!

You don’t need to buy fancy crystal growth sets. Dental floss and sugar make rock candy, easy to add a little food coloring. And many other things around the house can be crystallized.

Oh, I know that. Lacking a decent chemistry set, that’s exactly what we did do (though we used butcher’s twine instead of dental floss to grow the rock candy). I also did some experiments with the kids comparing sugar and salt, dissolving them in different solutions and such, and in the winter, showed how snow becomes water becomes steam when you heat it and how the volume changes. (Though I did not attempt to measure the volume of the steam.) There are a lot of fun science experiments you can do with stuff around the house. Making a figure out of aluminum foil and floating it on the water, for instance, and then dropping in a little liquid detergent to watch him sink as the surface tension is disrupted. And of course then there’s astronomy — you can do that without any tools at all, as the eyeball is the oldest and most traditional astronomical instrument of all.

But still. Having a chemistry set definitely piqued my interest. The magic set did too. Both sets were, in my opinion, neutrally marketed. Neither had a picture of a child on them at all, and while the chemistry set was blue, so are lots of things. The trend of “boy science” and “girl science” seems to be relatively new, and it’s a bit peculiar to me. Why divide it? And why cover such a small range of sciences? It seems that among buyers and marketers and such, there is a very clear idea of what a “science kit” is, and also a very clear idea of how you sell something for a girl and how you sell something for a boy. There is a growing trend in educational toys, though, and as more stores start having an educational section, so these toys are no longer relegated to the specialty stores, perhaps the perceived need for a division will become less.

Another quick gripe: cooking toys. I love to cook. I had an Easy Bake oven wheN I was a little girl, and I loved that thing. There are a whole bunch of neat cooking toys out there, and although some have the robustness one would normally expect of something sold via TV informercial at a suspiciously large discount, many of them are actually useful. So what’s my problem? I only ever see them in the “girl” section, usually next to the dolls and various pretend cleaning devices. Nobody shopping for a boy would ever even enter that aisle, which is a shame, because I bet boys like cake and ice cream every bit as much as girls do.

It’s a really weird, insidious form of institutionalized sexism at work, I think, that girls are allowed to (and encouraged to) play with boy-targeted toys but boys playing girl-targeted toys are redirected, even by mothers who themselves played with opposite-gendered toys.

True. A tomboy is far more socially accepted than the male counterpart (would the term be “tomgirl”? I don’t know).

@118 – e.g. Cordelia Fine is also debunking this in her book.
fyi in this context you may also/wish to look up soc. stereotype threat.

Or, alternatively, you could do the work to make your own argument against my points.

It’s a really weird, insidious form of institutionalized sexism at work, I think, that girls are allowed to (and encouraged to) play with boy-targeted toys but boys playing girl-targeted toys are redirected, even by mothers who themselves played with opposite-gendered toys.

No one likes a smarty-pants, Nigel

There is almost certainly a hard-wired component to gender preferences, but it is only one factor among several.
Of course, this in no way excuses a society that forces gender stereotypes onto people.

This is the approach I agree with most.

as far as i know its called “socialization”.
no human being is born soc. hardwired; we are born soc. pre-wired for human experiences and independent of sex/gender/body.
contemporary findings in eg. neuroscience re-/confirm this.

And yet toddlers too young to talk (and thus with limited language) show, on average, a distinct bias towards the relevant gender-associated toys.

There is almost certainly a hard-wired component to gender preferences, but it is only one factor among several.

Of course, this in no way excuses a society that forces gender stereotypes onto people.