Gender-specific toys accurately cater to their demographic

The argument

The argument reverses the usual direction of causation. Critics of gendered toys hold that the toy industry teaches children what their gender requires; this position holds that the industry is responding to differences already there. Its starting premise is that girls and boys are different, and differ in ways showing up in play before any marketing reaches them. Proponents hold that boys naturally gravitate towards play fostering movement and aggression, while girls prefer more sedentary and appearance-focused activities. On this account these tendencies are inherent to each sex rather than instilled, which is why they are said to appear consistently rather than tracking whatever a given decade's advertising happens to promote. From that premise the conclusion about the industry follows. Toymakers are commercial enterprises; they make what sells, and what sells is what children reach for. If boys and girls reach for systematically different things, then producing systematically different toys is simply an accurate reading of the market. The industry does not cater to unfair stereotypes about girls and boys on this view — it profits from differences it did not create and could not have created, since a preference an advertiser invented would not persist across markets and generations the way these are said to. That is what makes the proposed remedy objectionable to proponents. Requiring manufacturers to produce gender-neutral toys treats them as the source of a pattern they merely observed. It imposes a cost on firms for a state of affairs not of their making, and does so without addressing the underlying preferences, which would remain whatever the product range looked like. The result would be toys matching fewer children's actual inclinations, sold by companies penalised for having previously matched them. So the position is that gendered toys are accurate rather than prescriptive. They cater to their demographic because the demographic is real — and a market serving an existing difference is doing something different from a market manufacturing one.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Humans are diverse creatures. It is foolish to assume that all children conform perfectly to narrow gender stereotypes. By marketing highly gendered toys, toy manufacturers make children who do not practice these stereotypes feel limited to playing with only certain toys.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] The innateness claim is stated far more confidently than the evidence supports. Average differences in play preference are found, they are modest relative to the variation within each group, and they emerge over the first years of life in step with the toys, clothing and adult responses children receive — which is the pattern socialisation predicts. [Rejecting P2] Marketing does not merely track preferences; it shapes them. Toy catalogues were markedly less gendered in earlier decades than they later became, and colour coding by sex is a twentieth-century commercial convention rather than a discovery about children. [Rejecting C] The conclusion treats an average as a rule. Even granting a real central tendency, gendered marketing tells every child which toys are meant for them, which bears hardest on the children furthest from the average — and nothing about what manufacturers ought to do follows from the bare existence of a pattern.