Professor Dunn Gender and Communication Children and Advertisements By: Alexia Molion 4/8/11

While growing up children are placed in many situations where unknowingly they are told to do and wear things that are supposedly of their gender . Why is it that as parents you tell your children that pink is for girls and blue is for boys? Just like when a newborn is just born in the hospital a girl is usually given a pink blanket and a boy is given a blue blanket. We subconsciously place a certain color with boys and girls, even when we try to overcome the biased misconceptions of gender. As much as we all want to look passed these misconceptions it is very hard because it is what we all have grown up with and have learned from society. As we learned in class there are many different ways in which society itself contributes to gender bias. The movie Killing us softly by Jean Killbourne is one example on how advertisements skew the view children have of one another. The women in the advertisements shown in her movie show little girls and boys that women are just objects. It also shows that the most important thing about women is their looks. Also in the movie she talked about a parent magazine from 1999 that showed a boy being active and a girl being passive aggressive, that is one main problem we have with magazines these days. Children will see these magazines and not realize that they are learning from the things they are seeing, but a girl won t be active because she thinks that s what a boy is supposed to be doing. As stated in the book when children are young they sometimes believe gender to be changeable. They don t see gender as being based on anatomy, but as a role that can be changed much like changing a hairstyle. Once children start to see themselves as individuals away from a group that is when they start to notice that

people see them and respond to them as people from a particular sex. (Ivy, Diana K., and Phil Backlund) There are four different theory s that are talked about in the book on how children come to the understanding of their gender and what makes them a girl or boy. The first theory is social learning theory by psychologist Walter Mishcel; this is the theory that says children learn the behaviors of gender through their social contacts, which are mostly their parents and peers. The next theory is the cognitive development theory by Lawrence Kohlberg which states that children figure out their gender roles on their own because their minds are mature, so they figure it out on their own without any external reinforcements. The third theory is the gender schema theory by psychologist Sandra Bem states, once a child learns an appropriate cultural definition of gender, this definition become he key structure around which all other information is organized. The last theory is Gilligan s gender identity development theory by Carol Gilligan, the core identity development rests within the mother-child-relationship. One article I found was Kids Advertising and Gender Roles and I felt that this article showed how advertising could affect children s outlook on gender. There was research conducted in the 1980s that showed how 4-9 year olds were able to see how certain actions were defined by their sex. In defense to this study many campaigners have lobbied by saying that these ads can potentially limit stereotypes along with improper behavior later in life. These studies also showed that boys are often shown being active while girls are more passive. Also the advertisements show girls in domestic settings and boys being active outside. In most

advertisements the voice over was done by a male, which sends the message that males are more dominate. (Kids' Advertising and Gender Roles) The second article Helping children understand gender roles and avoid gender bias talks first about how because of the gender biases it is causing girls and boys to be raised in separate societies, with separate expectations and widely diverging treatment based on gender. It talks about how parents and educators and other adults can help reverse the trend of gender bias by helping children have different interests and skills in a variety of areas. Also by improving their social environment, but first in order to help children you have to understand where children learn gender roles from. Firstly, children learn their gender through socialization. The bias opinion that pink is for girls and blue is for boys begins that social process at an early age. This teaches girls to be passive, dependent, and submissive and teaches boys to be active, independent and dominant. This is done through the way the children are held, spoken to, played with, and dressed at an early age. In the home children are also taught to do things based on their gender, for example girls are told to clean the house, wash the dishes, cook and babysit; while the boys are to do the yard work, shovel snow, and take the garbage out. Also they are reinforced at a young age based on what toys to play with as kids, and parents are guilty of doing this. When looking at certain toys that boy s play with it teaches them, invention, exploration, competition, aggression, etc. While girls toys teach them to be creative, nurturing, emotional, domestic, etc. (Helping Children Understand Gender Roles and Avoid Gender Bias)

After reading the book and the articles, I wanted to observe and find out how children are portrayed in catalogs, children s stores and so on. I looked through different catalogs to see if society is still being bias towards gender. I wanted to see whether or not girls were still portrayed as passive and boys as aggressive. In order to start my observations I looked up online catalogs from different kids stores to see whether or not the catalogs were being gender bias. When I was observing I observed the children in the catalog and looked at how they were acting towards each other and what toys each child was playing with. In the Back to Basics catalog I saw many music related toys that were unisex but it always appeared that the girl would be singing not the boy. Next I found it interesting that there was a toy police car and there was only a boy driving it. When looking at all the construction toys for example a bulldozer, tractor and a crane it was always a boy standing next to those toys. But what I thought was interesting to see and surprised me was a boy and girl playing each other in air hockey and the girl was jumping up excitedly because she had won. That was something that I didn t think I would have seen. Also, I saw a little girl riding a scooter and at first I thought that was okay but then I looked closer and saw that they had her riding the pink scooter while a red one was sitting in the background. Next I looked at a JcPenny ad and a Children s Place ad and saw that everything was not gender bias except for in the JcPenny ad a little girl had her hand over her mouth, which was something we had talked in class about how they tend to make girls put their hands over their mouth in a way of saying shut up , girls shouldn t talk. Also in the Children s Place ad all the girls were smiling but, all the

boys weren t, another thing we talked about in class where it is always expected of girls to smile, or people will think that there is something wrong. I then looked at another toy store to see if they were gender bias in the same aspects as Back to Basics. I looked at Toys R Us and saw that they were pretty much having the toys be unisex for example: boys and girls playing with an ice cream maker, a garden cart with a wheelbarrow etc. Then I looked at the stuff animal section and saw that next to the Tiger stuffed animal was a boy. Also looking at the pretend play section, the girls were the ones at the beauty salon, but they had both boys and girls pretending to be a doctor except the girl was holding a pink doctor set, which shows that pink is for girls in an ad like that. Overall looking at these ads and catalogs I was surprised a little to see that they still had most girls playing with pink things, but I was also surprised to see that a lot of these catalogs showed a variety of the gender playing with different toys. I learned that we as a society still have to work on not being gender bias but catalogs have gotten a lot better over the past years. I did prove the theory that pink is placed with a girl and blue is placed with a boy when determining what color is for who. More of the career-based toys were biased towards boys, and the domestic based toys were advertised towards girls. If there is any possible solution to this problem it has to start with the parents, because as of today children are influenced by gender biases at birth.