With firefighter kits for girls and baby dolls for boys, toys are breaking out of the gender ghetto this Christmas thanks to retailers willing to brush aside some hard-to-shift stereotypes.
The latest to chip away at the toy apartheid, French supermarket Super-U, has printed a holiday season catalogue showing boys cradling dolls and girls piloting remote-controlled cars — billed as a first for the country.
“This is not activism,” said Thierry Desouches, the group’s head of external relations. “But it’s about keeping up with changes in society, with the shifting roles of men and women. It’s about breaking down stereotypes: pink and ironing boards for girls, blue and cars for boys, it’s really too narrow.”
French retailer La Grande Recre has also brought in a line of gender-neutral DIY kits, kitchens and cleaning trolleys aimed at boys and girls alike.
Sold in France, Switzerland, Spain, Belgium and Morocco, the toys are packaged in orange, white or purple with no pink or blue in sight.
The line is doing well, with sales of the toy vacuum cleaner up 40 percent in a year, said Franck Mathais, the chain’s sales director.
The French moves bring the country in line with a snowballing trend in Britain and the US.
Last year, a four-year-old US girl named Riley Maida shot to prominence for a YouTube video showing her ranting against the tyranny of princess gear for girls and superhero stuff for boys.
The clip, which went viral, summed up the frustration many families feel with what they perceive as forceful gender stereotyping by toy manufacturers.
In Britain, campaigners have claimed a string of victories in the past year or so.
London’s Harrods this summer unveiled a vast gender-neutral zone organized by theme instead of by sex and in December last year, the Hamleys toy store removed “boy” and “girl” signposts, replacing them with red and white ones.
Britain’s Early Learning Centre (ELC), a leading toy retailer, was targeted in 2009 by a grassroots campaign dubbed “Pinkstinks” denouncing stereotyping in toys.
“Back then, the ELC had a double-page spread on things people do, fireman, policeman etc, which were all boys except for a girl as an old-fashioned nurse,” said Emma Moore, who launched the drive with her sister Abi five years ago. “The next page was all girls in princess dresses.”
Stung into action, the ELC’s Web site now pointedly shows girls playing with construction sets or dressed as firefighters and boys rocking baby dolls.
So how much is really changing?
Haude Constantin-Bienaime runs a day care center in the Paris suburbs that was the first in the country to adopt a policy on gender discrimination.
“Little children will try anything. It’s what we adults offer that influences them, and society is full of gender stereotypes,” she told reporters.
“This is one way to tackle stereotyping,” she said of the retailers’ moves. “But walk into a toy store and there’s still a very clear divide between games for boys and ones for girls.”
“There is movement, but it is fairly superficial,” added Moore, who feels girls have most to lose from the current state of affairs. “Boys get adventure, action, science and discovery. What girls get is very often a dumbed down version of that, or go and sit in front of a mirror.”
“You still see a glut of toys which are about being pretty,” Moore said, with makeup kits targeting toddlers as young as two. “Little girls are encouraged through play to become obsessed with what they look like.”
Pinkstinks uses Twitter and Facebook to name and shame bad practice — and often gets its own way, like recently when British supermarket chain Sainsbury’s removed the “boy” and “girl” tags from doctor’s and beautician’s outfits.
The group has logged messages of support from all over the world, including every country in South America.
“We were first to verbalize what was actually bothering quite a few people,” Moore said. “As a culture, we are obsessed by gender, but it didn’t used to be like this.”
She added: “If you go back 20 or 30 years and look at toy catalogues it’s fascinating, you see pages of toys for children — not for boys and girls.”
Moore, like many campaigners, believes the core driver for splitting the market into his and hers is purely economic: you get to sell twice as much.
“I have no doubt there are differences between boys and girls — I can see it in my children and my nephews. But there is growing evidence that suggests the differences are fairly minute,” she said. “It’s just so boring, apart from being damaging.”
BUSINESS UPDATE: The iPhone assembler said operations outlook is expected to show quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year growth for the second quarter Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) yesterday reported strong growth in sales last month, potentially raising expectations for iPhone sales while artificial intelligence (AI)-related business booms. The company, which assembles the majority of Apple Inc’s smartphones, reported a 19.03 percent rise in monthly sales to NT$510.9 billion (US$15.78 billion), from NT$429.22 billion in the same period last year. On a monthly basis, sales rose 14.16 percent, it said. The company in a statement said that last month’s revenue was a record-breaking April performance. Hon Hai, known also as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), assembles most iPhones, but the company is diversifying its business to
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: The chipmaker last month raised its capital spending by 28 percent for this year to NT$32 billion from a previous estimate of NT$25 billion Contract chipmaker Powerchip Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp (力積電子) yesterday launched a new 12-inch fab, tapping into advanced chip-on-wafer-on-substrate (CoWoS) packaging technology to support rising demand for artificial intelligence (AI) devices. Powerchip is to offer interposers, one of three parts in CoWoS packaging technology, with shipments scheduled for the second half of this year, Powerchip chairman Frank Huang (黃崇仁) told reporters on the sidelines of a fab inauguration ceremony in the Tongluo Science Park (銅鑼科學園區) in Miaoli County yesterday. “We are working with customers to supply CoWoS-related business, utilizing part of this new fab’s capacity,” Huang said, adding that Powerchip intended to bridge
Microsoft Corp yesterday said that it would create Thailand’s first data center region to boost cloud and artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure, promising AI training to more than 100,000 people to develop tech. Bangkok is a key economic player in Southeast Asia, but it has lagged behind Indonesia and Singapore when it comes to the tech industry. Thailand has an “incredible opportunity to build a digital-first, AI-powered future,” Microsoft chairman and chief executive officer Satya Nadella said at an event in Bangkok. Data center regions are physical locations that store computing infrastructure, allowing secure and reliable access to cloud platforms. The global embrace of AI
Qualcomm Inc, the world’s biggest seller of smartphone processors, gave an upbeat forecast for sales and profit in the current period, suggesting demand for handsets is increasing after a two-year slump. Revenue in the three months ended in June will be US$8.8 billion to US$9.6 billion, the company said in a statement Wednesday. Excluding certain items, earnings will be US$2.15 to US$2.35 a share. Analysts had projected sales of US$9.08 billion and earnings of US$2.16 a share. The outlook signals that the smartphone market has begun to bounce back, tracking with Qualcomm’s forecast that demand would gradually recover this year. The San