Gender Biased Toys Essay

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Too Many Gender Biased Toys Picture this: A little girl walks into Toys R Us and wants a new Nerf gun. There’s the bright pink bow and arrow NERF toys in the section labeled “girls”, but she doesn’t want those. To get the original NERF guns, she needs to walk to the section labeled “boys”. This makes her feel embarrassed about having to go in the “boys” section and the label makes her think she’s not allowed to get the toy she wants because she doesn’t know any better. This little girl ends up going home with a toy she didn’t want because of a color and a label. It’s often hard to find any gender neutral toys around toy stores and these gender biased toys are becoming a problem. Toy companies are becoming much too biased toward a certain gender whom which they want to aim their product towards. An article published by the Associated Press, “Asleep at the switch? ‘Force Awakens’ heroine missing from toy line”, explains how toy stores were lacking a certain female character from a group of action figures and is said to be because of bias toward a certain gender. An article published by NAEYC and written by Professor Blakemore, titled “What the Research Says: Gender-Typed Toys”, classifies toys into different categories and explains how gender-biased toys are in certain categories. These articles show that toy stores promote a toy biased towards a certain group based on color, …show more content…

“We found that girls’ toys were associated with physical attractiveness, nurturing, and domestic skill, whereas boys’ toys were rated as violent, competitive, exciting, and somewhat dangerous.” This shows that if a girl nowadays wanted a violent, competitive, exciting, and somewhat dangerous toy, then she would feel she can’t go in the “boys” section and can’t get the toy. This goes for boys, too, but the other way

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