Now, you may not have
noticed, but there’s been a backlash against all things pink – not the colour
per se, but the fact it is getting to be nigh-on impossible to buy toys,
clothing, or just about anything for children without being steered towards the
kind of gender-colour stereotyping that would make Barbie proud.
Where once you had Lego bricks and the freedom of your imagination, now even
construction toys are gender specific. Earlier this week, for example, LiteBrix brought out a range of construction toys with flashing lights – for boys,
a space trooper robot; for girls, a fashion runway.
Now, I'm sure that many kids, girls and boys, would be very happy playing with
the choices presented to them. What I object to is that it has got to the stage
where virtually everything – from teethers and toddler bath toys upwards – are
sign-posted pink for girls or baby blue for boys – and never the twain shall
meet.
So it will come as a relief to some that Tesco has announced it is going to be
removing all reference to gender on its online toys pages.
A Tesco spokesperson told The Grocer: “To help customers easily search through
the range of toys that we offer, we categorise our toys in a number of ways
including by price, age range and gender.
“We’ve recently carried out a review to understand what customers find useful,
and as a result we’ll no longer be categorising toys by gender as we’ve found
customers are not using this as a way to search.”
Parent lobby group Let Toys Be Toys, which successfully complained to Tesco in
May that a chemistry set was being marketed as a boy’s toy – effectively
stifling potential Baroness Greenfields or Marie Curies from the very start –
said it was “really pleased to see that Tesco are moving in the right direction
on an issue that is becoming increasingly important to customers”.
“However, we're just as concerned with in-store signs – if not more so, as
they're more visible to children,” it added.
Tesco admitted the change was likely to take some time to complete and made no
mention of its policy in-store. However, given that there is a (pink) kitchen
aimed at small children advertised with the words “after she has finished
cooking, she can wash up the pots in the sink”, any move seems to me to be
decades late. (Although to be fair, this seems to be the manufacturer’s
description, not just the retailer’s.)
This does bring me to a chicken/egg conundrum – do manufacturers and retailers
go pink because kids demand it, or do kids like it because it is what is
marketed at them?
As a child growing up in the 1980s, who alternated between spending time
hanging upside down on a rope strung across the garden, climbing trees, and
playing with cars with my sister, to spending hours badly sewing clothes for my
favourite doll and covering myself and everything around me in glitter, I have
to admit, I find it a shame that kids have to be channelled down a well-worn
path rather than being allowed to forge their own.
But at least when it comes to exploring, Dora’s already out there.
This article was first published in The Grocer's Daily Bread newsletter
