Something that’s cropped up in my Twitter feed a lot recently is the assignment of gender to items for purchase, notably magazines and children’s toys. I’m largely against this practice, and responses to that stance have roughly fallen into one of four categories: I’ve got a daughter, this seriously pisses me off, and I agree with you; I just agree with you anyway; I disagree and assigning items by gender in stores is necessary; it doesn’t matter and you are an idiot-face who should get a life.

I’d like to address the last two of those points. I strongly believe gender stereotyping does matter, because it leads to a prescriptive society, one where we’re conditioning both children and adults regarding what’s “not for you”. From a young age, we see a sea of pink for girls and blue for boys; girls are presented with saccharine kitchen equipment made from plastic, whereas boys are offered science kits. As for adults, I today saw a photo from Tesco that faced the following magazines in a section indented for men: The Economist; Private Eye; New Scientist. I’ve seen similar myself in a number of stores (and not just Tesco, although it’s a common offender, even in stores with plenty of shelf space), with the women’s section mostly including things to do with fashion, houses and gardens.

As noted, this kind of behaviour impacts on society, by aligning genders with certain tasks and expectations. The result leads to terribly sad stories: a girl who says she wishes she was a boy, so she could one day go into space; a designer recounting how when she visited a local school, none of the girls had considered going into a technical career, because it just hadn’t occurred to them—it was something boys did.

In stores, we should place more emphasis on listing by category and eliminate listing by gender unless absolutely necessary; the counterpoint I’ve heard to that from several parties is item assignment by gender is frequently necessary and, indeed, in direct response to consumer demands. I’d argue it’s in response to consumer habits, which isn’t quite the same thing, and habits are sometimes there to be broken. Sexism still exists in advertising, but not to the extent it once did (“Christmas morning, she’ll be happier with a Hoover”—without irony), and yet consumers still accept (and claim to want) an immediate gender split when searching for certain products, both in stores and online.

Offline, such categorisation makes little sense and also doesn’t expose someone to a full range. With toys, splitting your audience immediately by gender not only restricts said gender to whatever the seller has deemed appropriate for them, but also essentially eradicates happy accidents, where someone might pick something they’d not previously considered, but perhaps within a category that they enjoy. (For example, games and kits are often split by gender, regardless of whether a girl would, say, actually prefer something on a stereotypically male pursuit like football, or a boy would enjoy making jewellery.) With magazines for adults, such a split seems insulting rather than merely ill-considered, with the possible exception of magazines specifically targeted at a single gender—most style/fashion magazines, for example, although those could just as easily be grouped under that category.

Online, things are trickier, because you can’t just turn your head and see a large selection of products that are available—you instead have to start filtering immediately. With toys, most people would consider whether they’re shopping for a boy or a girl and immediately filter based on that. Online stores therefore cater for this, categorising toys accordingly, in order to maximise sales.

There’s an obvious point that people should really gift-search for a child based on the things that child enjoys rather than specifically aiming at its gender, but the biggest offender here remains assumptive categorisation—the aforementioned ‘pink plastic kitchen for girls’ and ‘science kit for boys’. Stores should by all means attempt to make recommendations by gender (or list top toys for boys/girls, based on actual sales figures) if they feel they’ve no option, but they should also take far more care to categorise items as appropriate for boys and girls. At least then, the result is a wider range for all children. This in combination with gender-based lists is imperfect, but it at least moves things on from the equivalent of a default barely different from those vintage sexist adverts and towards something more befitting of a modern and open society where children have equal opportunities, rather than being shoe-horned into whether they’re ‘pink’ or ‘blue’.

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