Pink v blue - are children born with gender preferences?

Hamleys, the country's most famous toy store, has abandoned its traditional separate floors for boys and girls after a campaign on Twitter accused it of operating "gender apartheid". New signs in the store now state what type of toys are sold on each floor, rather than suggesting who should play with them.

The campaign was started by Laura Nelson, a political blogger who writes under the name "Delilah" and who trained as a neuroscientist. She believes that young children's development can be limited if they play with only one sort of toy. She was horrified by the "sea of pink" on the girls' floor at Hamleys, which had fluffy animals, cookery sets and hair and beauty-related toys including a beauty salon called "Tantrum".

The boys' department was all action and adventure, with cars, spaceships, science sets and construction toys. Hamleys did not admit that the dumping of the old signs had anything to do with the campaign, saying the move was entirely coincidental and designed to "improve customer flow".

When I tweeted the link to the story this morning the responses ranged from "hurrah!" to "ridiculous".

But what is the science behind gender and toys? Do boys really prefer blue and girls pink? Would girls always opt for Sylvanian Families over Power Rangers given the choice? Is there evidence for or against the "gender apartheid"?

Pink v blue

Kat Arney, a science journalist who works for Cancer Research UK, investigated the gender of colour in this Radio 4 documentary earlier this year, Fighting the Power of Pink. Her post for the Guardian here provides a brilliant summary of the scientific evidence.

Arney points us towards this 2007 research which showed that in general when asked women tend to identify redder colours as their favourite – a finding reported widely as proof that women prefer pink. In that study Professor Anya Hurlbert from Newcastle University suggested that women might prefer pink as a legacy of their fruit gathering days when the preference helped them identify the berries from the foliage – an idea thoroughly disputed by the Guardian columnist Ben Goldacre here.

Interestingly Goldacre quotes in the same piece newspaper articles from the earlier part of the 20th century in which mothers were encouraged to dress their boys in pink and girls in blue, proof he says that clothing tastes change over time. He writes:

Back in the days when ladies had a home journal (in 1918) the Ladies' Home Journal wrote: "There has been a great diversity of opinion on the subject, but the generally accepted rule is pink for the boy and blue for the girl. The reason is that pink being a more decided and stronger colour is more suitable for the boy, while blue, which is more delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl."

The Sunday Sentinel in 1914 told American mothers: "If you like the colour note on the little one's garments, use pink for the boy and blue for the girl, if you are a follower of convention."

The problem both Goldacre and Arney point out is that studies such as the Newcastle one don't settle the nature v nurture arguments because they ask adults. Are girls born liking pink or are they in some way told to?

The study that asked the youngest children, 120 aged under two, that Arney could identify was conducted by Professor Melissa Hines at Cambridge University and it concluded that if you ask children under the age of two, there is no colour preference, with both sexes preferring pinker tones and both also prefer rounder shapes. It concludes:

The sex similarities in infants' preferences for colours and shapes suggest that any subsequent sex differences in these preferences may arise from socialisation or cognitive gender development rather than inborn factors.

Dolls v cars

Hines's research, the most up to date, did however identify a gendered divide in the preference for toys. Although not a strict rule, boys were more likely to look at cars and girls at dolls. Previous studies have found that this not only relates to the gender of children but their exposure to androgen ("male" hormones) in the womb. This American research even showed that there is a similar gendered preference for toys in monkeys leading some to conclude that children are born with gendered tastes in toys.

However, Hines's research also identified that at the age of 12 months, boys and girls' preference for dolls was similar (57.2% of girls looked at the dolls compared with 56.4% of boys). By 24 months boys had shifted towards the car image (52.7% of girls and 47.9% of boys looked at the doll first). This, Hines suggests, adds evidence to the argument that part of toy taste is acquired rather innate. She writes:

The current study adds to growing evidence that infants younger than two years of age display sex-typed toy preferences, with boys showing more interest than girls do in cars, and girls showing more interest than boys do in dolls. Within sex analyses found that the female preference for dolls over cars begins as early as 12 months of age, whereas boys of this age also prefer dolls to cars. The male preference for cars over dolls, or avoidance of dolls, emerges later, suggesting that socialisation or cognitive development, rather than inborn factors, causes the male avoidance of feminine toys.

I think those figures from the Hines study are also interesting because they are not conclusive – at the age of two the gender divide is still not far off 50/50 - hardly figures to support an entire retail industry's marketing tactics.

I'm going to talk to some of the researchers in this area but does anyone have any other evidence to add to this? Get in touch below the line, email your me at polly.curtis@guardian.co.uk or tweet @pollycurtis.

12.23pm: Dr Qazi Rahman, a psychologist who runs the psychology programme at Queen Mary University of London (which he describes as "strongly biological in its analysis of all aspects of human nature"), has written in with what is a pretty neat summary of the evidence on colour and toy preference. He reaches a similar conclusion to Hines:

I think the literature is erring on the side of no robust sex differences in either adults or children (by "robust" I mean the same finding is replicable) ...  However, there are sex differences in other types of cognitive abilities and psychological behaviours like engaging in rough-and-tumble play, certain types of spatial skills (but not all), and play preferences for objects with moving parts versus those that indicate some kind of individual (eg crudely - trucks versus dolls).  Some say the earliest you can measure these abilities is in almost newly born infants, others say the tests only work at about two years of age and so on. So developing good psychological tests to use in youngsters might be a limitation in some of the science.

I think a good test of these preferences is to examine them in kids of are gender nonconforming at a young age compared to children who are gender conforming.  We know that gay men report have strong gender-nonconforming play interests as children.

Rahman says that while the evidence is pretty conclusive on colour preferences, he thinks it is more strongly weighted in favour of there being some kind of innate preference for certain toys and games amongst boys.

In this Rahman disagrees with the psychologist Cordelia Fine, who argues in her book that almost all aspects of gender is acquired. I've had several messages form readers below the line and by email recommending her book, Delusions of Gender. My colleague Amelia Hill summarised it very well here last year. I've emailed Fine (in Australia) and am hoping I'll be able to speak with her about our specific question later.

I've also been recommended Pink Brain, Blue Brain, by the American neuroscientist Lise Eliot. She argues that any small differences between girls and boys are amplified in their socialisation and hard-wired into their brains this way. This is from the summary on her website:

In the past decade, we've heard a lot about the innate differences between males and females. So we've come to accept that boys can't focus in a classroom and girls are obsessed with relationships: "That's just the way they're built." In Pink Brain, Blue Brain, neuroscientist Lise Eliot turns that thinking on its head. Calling on years of exhaustive research and her own work in the field of neuroplasticity, Eliot argues that infant brains are so malleable that small differences at birth become amplified over time, as parents, teachers, peers — and the culture at large — unwittingly reinforce gender stereotypes. Children themselves exacerbate the differences by playing to their modest strengths. They constantly exercise those "ball-throwing" or "doll-cuddling" circuits, rarely straying from their comfort zones.

There's a fantastic debate going on below the line with plenty of suggestions of good evidence for me to follow. There are two areas I want to follow and wonder if anyone can help find evidence of: have there been international comparisons that might prove, or not, that colour preferences are culturally determined?

Can anyone recommend people - academics of people who work in marketing - who can talk to me about how toy companies market to children?

1.35pm: In the nature v nurture argument about children's preferences for different toys, research in monkeys (mentioned above) has bolstered those who believe we're born with feminine or masculine preferences and mystified sceptics. American researchers in this paper (pdf), showed that monkeys have similar instincts to those observed in small children. The abstract of paper says:

We compared the interactions of 34 rhesus monkeys, living within a 135 monkey troop, with human wheeled toys and plush toys. Male monkeys, like boys, showed consistent and strong preferences for wheeled toys, while female monkeys, like girls, showed greater variability in preferences. Thus, the magnitude of preference for wheeled over plush toys differed significantly between males and females. The similarities to human findings demonstrate that such preferences can develop without explicit gendered socialisation. We offer the hypothesis that toy preferences reflect hormonally influenced behavioural and cognitive biases which are sculpted by social processes into the sex differences seen in monkeys and humans.

Dr Stuart Basten, from the department of social policy and intervention at the University of Oxford has just sent in his paper analysing toy preference and gender, which reaches a similar conclusion (pdf).

As in most of the working papers in the series, the over-riding conclusion of this piece is that both biological and social processes play a crucial role in shaping children's interactions with toys which, in turn, has been found to significantly impact upon an individual's gendered scheme and progression.

Basten also includes this picture from the monkey study, which I quite like.

Monkeys playing with toys in 2009 Hines study

 

2.16pm: I asked earlier whether anyone knew of any international evidence that different boys and girls in different cultures have different tastes in colours and toys. I was interested because I'm always struck when I visit my daughter's cousins in Sweden that children's clothing in particular is much less gendered than in England. Babies tend to wear more uni-sex bright patterns than pale pink and blues. Dr Rahman (see above) came back with this small study which showed differences between British born and Chinese born men and women. It says:

We find robust sex differences in hue preference: the average female strongly prefers pinks and lilacs, while the average male has less marked preferences; both 'dislike' yellow - greens. These differences are more marked for the UK-born sub-sample (36 females; 27 males) than for the China-born one (18 females; 19 males). UK males prefer darker and less saturated colours, while UK females prefer brighter and more saturated colours. In the China-born sub-sample, both sexes prefer brighter colours, and the males prefer more saturated colours.

(Unsaturated colours are "pure" colours; for example, an unsaturated red would be a stop sign and a saturated one might be a burgundy.)

The study is small, and the Chinese born cohort were actually students at British universities, so the study is perhaps a bit limited. But it does suggest that there are cultural differences between countries as well as over time (earlier we mentioned the fact that in the early 20th century the blue/pink trend was reversed).

2.53pm: I've not been able to make contact with Cordelia Fine, who wrote the book Delusions of Gender, which so many of you have recommended to me via Twitter, email and below the line.

From what I can see she didn't specifically look at the issues of colour and toy choice, but more broadly at arguments that men and women are hardwired to have different personality traits. According to the various reviews and interviews with her about the book, she systematically picks apart the existing science about the brain to dispel what she believes is a growing assumption that men and women are wired differently from birth. She argues that almost all of our characteristics are learnt. She said in an interview with the Guardian last year:

There are sex differences in the brain. There are also large sex differences in who does what and who achieves what. It would make sense if these facts were connected in some way, and perhaps they are. But when we follow the trail of contemporary science we discover a surprising number of gaps, assumptions, inconsistencies, poor methodologies and leaps of faith.

The article went on:

Fine agrees that there are differences between men and women's brains. The male brain is, on average, about 8% larger. A small group of cells in the hypothalamus is bigger in men. However, "it's not known what this little group of cells does," she says. "It may have a physiological rather than psychological function."

As for other claimed differences, she argues, there might be "engineering" reasons for larger brains to be arranged differently from smaller brains.

She also points out that, because of the brain's plasticity in responding to the world around it, differences in male and female brains can't just be chalked up to congenital biological differences. "The circuits of your brain are a product of your physical, social and cultural environment, your behaviour and your thoughts," she says. "Gender as a social phenomenon is part of our neural circuitry."

3.09pm:

Verdict

There is no scientific evidence that boys prefer blue and girls prefer pink. Up until the early 20th century the trend was the opposite and baby boys were dressed in pink and girls in blue. There are also some - small - studies suggesting that adults of different cultures have different tastes in colours. It's clear that colour preference is learnt rather than innate.

There is some evidence that boys are in some way hardwired to express an early interest in "rough and tumble" games and toys with moving parts and girls to prefer dolls and role-play games, but this is not conclusive because the studies are often in babies and small toddlers and therefore inevitably difficult to analyse. The differences that have been found are also often not very big. At two years, for example, 52.7% of girls in one study chose to look at a dolls face over a car, compared with 47.9%; not a huge variation.

Those who argue that there is some sort of genetic or hormonal trigger that sets a gender divide in toy preference cite studies that show that girls who are overexposed to male hormones in the womb are more likely to like "boys' toys" and others that show monkeys of different sexes following similar patterns to children. This area is fiercely contested. However, even those who argue that there are innate factors emphasis that these are small and amplified by the characteristics children acquire from birth, which in turn differentiate and shape children's brains so that boys' and girls' brains might well look different.

3.34pm: We haven't in this blog been able to question any of the marketing techniques that might exploit - or some suggest help create - social norms about colour and choices in toys. My colleague Jon Henley wrote a very good feature on this subject in 2009, in which he was able to look more at the marketing practices. It includes the first reference that I can find in this context to the "gender apartheid" in children's toys. It was adopted by Ed Mayo of Co-operatives UK, former head of the National Consumer Council and co-author of Consumer Kids: How Big Business Is Grooming Our Children for Profit. Mayo was quoted as saying:

It's staggering, the extent to which parents are now having to trade off their own values against the commercial interest of companies. Today's marketing assigns simple and very separate roles to boys and girls, and whips up peer pressure to police the difference.

The feature goes on:

All this happened, Mayo argues, "with the emergence of a children's market, and the need to differentiate between boys and girls: the need to make more money, basically. This isn't something that's genetically hard-wired, it's culturally created, and therefore it should be open to question." The children's market has now reached the stage, he says, where "it's no exaggeration to talk of a gender apartheid."

My colleague Jane Martinson, the Guardian's women's editor, has also blogged on this here pointing out the Early Learning Centre doctor's costume labelled as being for boys on the Ocado website.

Earlier this year the government's Bailey review of the commercialisation and sexualisation of childhood looked briefly at the issue of gender stereotyping. The full report (pdf) says that gender stereotyping was raised regularly as a concern among parents. It draws on previous government research which found "no strong evidence that gender stereotyping in marketing or products influences children's behaviour significantly, relative to other factors" and concludes that retailers are simply responding to demand:

There is a popularly held view that girls and boys play with stereotypical toys because they learn to see this as appropriate for their sex. This is contested territory: others argue there is greater evidence now of there being innate gender differences so that a desire to play with one kind of toy over another is at least as much about biological drivers as with socialisation and has to do with a normal, healthy development of gender identity (Buckingham, Willett, Bragg and Russell, 2010). What is not in doubt is that the commercial world provides plenty of reinforcement of gender stereotypes and is likely to do so for as long as there is customer demand.

It's worth reading this blog (scroll down to the entry Sexualisation and Gender stereotyping? One response to the Bailey review) by Meg Barker, an Open University psychologist, in which she questions both this conclusion and the review's decision to prioritise the sexualisation of children's merchandising over the whole issue of gender despite both being raised as a concern of parents. Thanks to @AlisonAfra for recommending this blog via twitter.

Below the line @trefusis makes the case that the gender factor helps expand the children's market:

Of course, if we adhere to gender categories with toys and colour of accessories, then parents whose second child is a different gender from the first can be sold a whole new set of things. It makes business sense for shops to promote gender apartheid - in fact, the more difficult it is to find neutral things, the better. They don't want us to be able to hand things down.

I think the whole role of marketing to children, including the claims made in the Bailey report, might be a good subject for Reality check to return to.

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