Barbie may limit your career

When I asked whether my nephews would take some pink hangers among the white ones, I was surprised at the response. They don’t do pink. At the tender ages of four and six, they understood: Pink is for girls.  

They like toys that go fast. They like to build things with real tools. When he was three, my youngest nephew wanted to sleep with a hammer. Not a play hammer, either – his dad’s actual hammer. 

I didn’t share the same obsession with construction tools like my nephew, but I had an endless supply of Lego, space ships, and cars. And I was betting on the Saskatchewan Roughriders by grade four (no real money at stake, just my prepubescent pride). 

Having raised a daughter, I understand that her interests will never quite be the same as mine. I can’t get her to watch football for longer than five minutes and her interest in vehicles is limited to the car we own, not the car I dream of owning (a Porsche, of course). Granted, she shares my disinterest in farming and construction and my interest in science fiction (live long and prosper).

Not all interests fit into a neat gender box, but there are some that we come to expect in younger children. And when a child bucks the trend, it grabs our attention. A couple years ago, my dad was pleasantly surprised to see one of my nieces playing with some toy tractors at their house. It went on for a few minutes as normal, but then the vehicles started talking to one another. She gave them personalities and they began to form relationships. It’s just the way girls are, we assumed. Or is it? 

In her book, Gender and Our Brains, Gina Rippon suggests children are more aware of social signals than we give them credit for. “Gender signaling is in place even before our little humans arrive and their very earliest experiences will be of color-coded signposts,” she writes. 

The association of pink with girls is the most obvious social construct of a colour that “belongs” to a particular gender. Pink is no more feminine than blue is masculine (at a certain age, boys lose the baby blue).

And kids are particularly sensitive to social cues from parents, grandparents, and society in general. As a family, we talked a lot about my nephew sleeping with a hammer, but I doubt we would have been quite as vocal if he slept with a doll or (gulp) a Barbie. Not that there’s anything wrong with that... We just might keep it on the lowdown. Call it a stage, if you will. 

Interestingly, playing with Barbie might actually be more damaging than we think. Not for boys, necessarily, but for girls. Those deeply embedded stereotypes (even though some of the liberated Barbies now design washing machines) can actually limit the careers of young women. One study showed that women who had played with Barbie Fashion Dolls were less likely to choose male-dominated careers than those who had played with gender-neutral toys. 

Rippon demonstrates through solid research how society’s expectations steer us through childhood and beyond, into our career. For women, it often leads to the “soft” sciences, administration and communications. For men, it’s the “hard” sciences, politics, and basically, whatever they want to do. 

Men don’t face the same hurdles as women, particularly within the STEM fields (science, technology, engineering and math). The research Rippon unearths on this topic is revealing. To offer one example, an experiment was conducted where the same application for a laboratory manager, one with a man’s name and one with a woman’s, was sent to evaluators at high-ranking universities throughout the U.S. The same application got a different reaction from evaluators (both women and men), depending on whether it was “John” or “Jennifer” applying. Jennifer was more likely described as “likeable” and “pleasant,” while John was described as “competent” and “more hirable.” Guess who tended to get offered the job? Same application, different results.

The evidence is clear that women, in their ability to do any kind of science, math or engineering, are on equal grounds with men. It’s the social constructs, much like with systemic racism, that limits them.

Back in the 1800s, some (allegedly) intelligent men suggested women were inferior, similar to “children and savages” in their mental faculties, in large part because their brains were physically smaller then those of men. We find this offensive now, but in another fifty years we may look back at today’s gender bias with similar disgust. 

So let your children (and grandchildren) play with the toys they want, and encourage them to try ones they don’t – whether pink, blue or rainbow coloured. But if it all possible – boy or girl – try to stay away from the Barbies.