Gender-Neutral Toys: Overview
Gender-neutral toys are designed to challenge traditional gender norms by offering children the freedom to play without the constraints of gendered expectations. The launch of the Creatable World line by Mattel in 2019 marked a significant moment in this movement, presenting dolls in neutral packaging with diverse skin tones and clothing options, sparking discussions on how toys communicate cultural messages about gender. The history of children's toys reveals a complex interplay of societal norms, often reinforcing gender roles through marketing and design choices. Over the decades, shifts in perspectives, such as those prompted by second-wave feminism, have influenced toy marketing, with a notable decrease in gendered toys during the 1970s.
In recent years, campaigns like Let Toys Be Toys and movements by retailers such as Target have aimed to remove gender labels and promote inclusivity in toy selection. Surveys indicate a growing acceptance among parents for encouraging cross-gender play, reflecting a broader recognition of diverse gender identities among children. However, the debate continues, with some critics arguing that gender-neutral toys may confuse children about their identities. As societal views on gender evolve, the toy industry is increasingly adapting to reflect changing values, striving to provide a more inclusive environment for all children.
Gender-Neutral Toys: Overview
Introduction
In September 2019, toy manufacturing giant Mattel, the same company that brought the Barbie doll to the world in the late 1950s, announced the release of a gender-neutral line of dolls, available in a variety of skin tones and with long- and short-haired options. These dolls came in culturally defined “neutral” packaging colors—yellow and green—and with a variety of clothing options, including tank tops, skirts, jeans, and shorts. The launch of the Creatable World line made international news, sparking controversy and reviving a debate that continued into the 2020s about how cultural messages about gender are expressed in toys and games, setting gender expectations from the moment a newborn is wrapped in a pink or blue blanket and reinforced when, for example, a boy is given a truck and not a doll, or a girl is exposed to only male doctor or farmer figurines.
Gender messaging in children’s toys has a long and complex history, but the roots of the contemporary debate reflect a schism between those who argue that gender differences are biologically determined and fixed, and those who see gender identity on a spectrum, with stereotypes reinforced by all sorts of cultural cues. Critics have argued that toymakers like Mattel are trying to erase natural differences between genders and so risk confusing children about who they are. Many parents have observed that even with a full spectrum of toys to choose from, their children gravitate strongly toward gendered toys and games, and wonder whether this is an expression of natural inclination or whether cultural messaging about gender norms is just too hard to fight.
Understanding the Discussion
Gender: The outward expression of the internal experience of being male or female, and in some cases both or neither, usually but not always linked to biological characteristics.
Let Toys Be Toys: A UK-based, parent-driven online campaign to discourage retailers from categorizing toys by gender, founded in 2012.
Mattel, Inc.: A toy and entertainment multinational corporation founded in 1944 in the United States and best known for the Hot Wheels, Barbie, Fisher Price, American Girl, Polly Pocket, and Thomas & Friends brands.
Second-wave feminism: A period of women’s rights activism beginning in the 1960s and lasting for about two decades, often associated with the pursuit of the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s.
History
Toys, games, and clothing for children throughout history have often represented and reinforced gender roles and expectations in the dominant culture of their time, and, therefore, these representations change as cultural norms shift. For example, before the twentieth century, pink was more closely associated with red in Western culture, linked with the activity and energy thought to be prominent in boys, though both boys and girls wore pink and blue. A trade publication, The Infants’ Department, suggested in 1918 that “pink being a decided and stronger color is more suitable for the boy,” and even when manufacturers began trying to identify one color with a gender, it was as often blue as pink for girls, and vice versa. Regions and even department stores varied in their recommended color for each gender. According to Valerie Steele, director of the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT), there were a variety of reasons for the twentieth-century gendered assignment of these colors, among them the much-publicized acquisition of two eighteenth-century paintings, Thomas Lawrence’s Pinkie and Thomas Gainesborough’s The Blue Boy in the 1920s by collector Henry Huntington. Though the subjects of these paintings had no connection in real life, Huntington set them up in his California library as a pair, and they have been portrayed as such ever since. These paintings seemed to lend historical credence to the gendered split between the colors, and with advertisers and manufacturers eager to sell twice as many products, the identification stuck.
Despite the acceptance of a gendered color divide, many popular toys in the mid-twentieth century were designed for mixed-gender play—the Slinky, badminton sets, marbles, and jacks, for example. While dolls and kitchen sets were marketed to girls and erector sets to boys from the 1920s through the 1960s, gendered messaging in advertising declined sharply during the second wave of feminism in the 1970s. According to sociologist Elizabeth Sweet, fewer than 2 percent of toys in the 1975 Sears catalog were explicitly gendered, and “there were many ads in the ’70s that actively challenged gender stereotypes—boys were shown playing with domestic toys and girls were shown building and enacting stereotypically masculine roles such as doctor, carpenter, and scientist.”
During the 1980s the tables turned for a variety of reasons. A conservative backlash against feminism and promotion of traditional family and societal gender roles, the deregulation of children’s television advertising, and the publication of pseudoscientific studies of gender differences, such as Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus (1992), contributed to the rise in gendered toys. By 1995 half of the toys in the Sears catalog were gendered. Sweet and others noted that manufacturers were also motivated to gender-code toys to increase sales by splitting the market.
Gender-Neutral Toys Today
The gendered toys of the twenty-first century are different from those common in the first half of the twentieth century. The 1980s antifeminism birthed a strange amalgamation of “girl power” and traditional female stereotypes in the late twentieth century, suggesting that girls could do anything so long as it was compatible with their essential feminine nature, which was to be beautiful, nurturing, and passive. In the 1990s, Sweet asserted, gendered cues arguably became more about representation and color rather than didactic sexism. She dated the hyperfeminine princess and hypermasculine superhero trends of the early twenty-first century to that period.
Beginning around the late 2000s and early 2010s, however, the public began to take note of the increasingly pervasive gendered marketing of children’s products. Many parents in Western countries, as well as some retailers and toy manufacturers, turned away from the rigid gender divide of the recent past. In the United Kingdom in 2012, Let Toys Be Toys launched a campaign to end the promotion of toys based on gender. Play Unlimited, an Australian organization, began promoting No Gender December in 2014 to encourage parents to think past these stereotypes while holiday shopping. In August 2015 American retail giant Target removed gender labels and color-coding for toys, entertainment, and home goods, such as bedding, though the products themselves did not change. Then, in 2017, a Pew Research Center poll found most American parents agreed that children should be encouraged to play with and engage in activities traditionally associated with the other gender, with more feeling girls should be so encouraged more than boys (76 percent to 64 percent); moreover, younger parents were more likely to encourage cross-gender play than older adults. A landmark study published in the Journal of Research on Adolescence in 2019 reported that almost one-quarter of American adolescents had nontraditional sexual and gender identities.
Some companies that typically used gendered marketing, such as Mattel, began to take notice of those trends and statistics and to respond. In addition to Hasbro announcing that it would remove the gendered "Mr." and "Mrs." from its Potato Head toy brand and release a more gender-neutral family pack while continuing to sell its separate Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head toys as before, the year 2021 also saw LEGO announce that, based on self-commissioned surveys, it would be strategizing around its products and marketing moving away from gender stereotypes and biases. That same year, California became the first to pass and sign into law a bill, which went into effect in 2024, requiring department stores with at least five hundred employees to have displays for toys and hygiene products that are gender neutral as well as any traditional gendered displays. Critics of those moves, meanwhile, argued that gender-neutral toys would confuse many children and can eliminate choice, encouraging children to deny their gender identity. For those who believe in innate, biologically determined gender differences, the elimination of gendered toys takes political correctness too far and ignores reality.
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