A2 MEDIA STUDIES - MEXICAN STEREOTPYES

 

How are Mexicans stereotyped in this stand-up comedy routine?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0TloTG27ZhM







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FEMALES IN THE MEDIA NOT BEING REPRESENTED AS MUCH AS THEIR MALE COUNTER-PARTS - FROM THE GUARDIAN

The power of the media: putting women in the frame

'Stereotype threat' is responsible for knocking the self-confidence of women and girls, but role models can turn the trend on its head

The way women are represented in the media is damaging their ambition. Photograph: Apex News and Pictures Agency/Alamy

"Is there a Men's Room?" This is a question we've been asked more times than I'd care to count since founding The Women's Room, the database of female experts for the media. The implication, of course, is that women are everywhere and there is no problem with their representation. Unfortunately, this is not the case.

Of all the opinion articles published in the UK national press from July 2011 to June 2012, only 26% were by a woman. Over the same period, the highest proportion of female journalists appeared in the Daily Mail entertainment section, where they wrote 81% of all articles; the lowest proportion was also in the Daily Mail, with only 4% of the paper's sports coverage being written by a woman.

In 2011, women comprised just 16.6% of the Today programme's guests, rising to a majestic 18.5% in 2012. Assuming a constant rate of change, this would mean that we can expect to see gender parity in about 13 years.

But of course we can't assume the same rate of change. We need only look at the figures for female national newspaper editors (despite rising from 9.1% to 17.4% between 2003 and 2006, this has now declined to 5%), to see that linear progress is by no means guaranteed.

Leaving aside the assumption that working-class women can't be experts, the compelling evidence from studies on role models suggests that having women in the public eye matters.

A 2004 study found that the presence of a female MP results in greater turnout among women, while a 2001 study from the US found that a female senator or candidate for Senate increased women's ability to name one senator from 51% to 79%, taking them above the figure for men.

Numerous studies on "stereotype threat" show that female students do worse in maths tests when reminded of their gender – but, when presented with a female role model, often outperform men. Stereotype threat is also likely to be behind the figures that show female faculty members have a significant impact on female students' course choices – particularly in traditionally "male" subjects, such as maths, statistics and geology.

The evidence about role models is not all positive. In a 2007 survey of 3,200 young women, more than half of 16- to 25-year-olds and a quarter of 10- to 15-year-olds said the media made them feel that being pretty and thin was the most important thing. This is not surprising when considered in the context of the 1999 study that found that of all photos judged not relevant to a story – what in the business is called a "lift" – 80% featured a young woman.

In 1976, the late Baroness Thatcher, then opposition leader, opened a speech by parodying the inevitable media reporting of her "red chiffon evening gown, softly made up face, and fair hair gently waved". It is shameful that nearly 40 years later another such pre-emptive preamble is far from unimaginable.

In the 21st century, with women already represented in a wide variety of disciplines and industries, we should be able to celebrate women for what they do, not what they wear. The media need to catch up with reality – and we at The Women's Room hope that our database will help them do that.

Caroline Criado-Perez is co-founder of The Women's Room, a database of female experts set up to encourage the media to represent women fairly.

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AS MEDIA STUDIES - DOVE REAL WOMEN SKETCHES

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HOMEWORK FOR TUESDAY, 6TH MAY 2014

For the lesson on Tuesday, 6th May 2014.

To analyse in detail the texts on pages 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 35 and 46 of the booklet.

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10 OF THE SCARIEST ADVERTS - FROM YOUTUBE

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AS MEDIA STUDIES - LARA CROFT AND THE REPRESENTATION OF FEMALES IN VIDEO GAMES - INTERESTING CHARLIE BROOKER ARTICLE FROM THE GUARDIAN ONLINE

Sometimes it's hard to be a woman. Especially when you're made out of pixels

Women in games tend to be saucy background-dressing or yelping damsels in distress

Lara Croft: a pixellated wet dream?

In the early 80s, the arcade game Pac-Man was twice as popular as oxygen. People couldn't get enough of the haunted yellow disc with the runaway pill addiction and soon clamoured for a sequel. Namco, the Japanese creator, was working on a followup called Super Pac-Man, but this was taking too long for US distributor Midway's liking. So it bought an unofficial modification of the original game, changed the graphics a bit and released it as Ms. Pac-Man: possibly the first female lead character in a video game.

I say "possibly" because no one knows what gender the shooty-bang thing you controlled in Space Invaders was because it didn't have stubble or knockers to define itself by. But then nor did Ms Pac-Man, whose name was confusing: at the time the prefix "Ms" was a clear nod to feminist independence, whereas the surname "Pac-Man" – not "Pac-Woman" – screamed of subjugation to the patriarchy. This intense paradox often caused gender studies students who encountered the Ms. Pac-Man cabinet to suffer such cognitive dissonance they fell to the ground, fitting and flapping like panicking fish. Arcade owners had to shove sticks with rags tied round them into their mouths to stop them chewing their own tongues off and distracting people from their game of Q-Bert.

"Pac-Man was the first commercial video game to involve large numbers of women as players – it expanded our customer base and made Pac-Man a hit," claimed a Midway spokesman at the time. "Now we're producing this new game Ms. Pac-Man as our way of thanking all those lady arcaders who have played and enjoyed Pac-Man."

Thanks, men! But was the game itself a compliment? Pac-Man himself had no visible gender-specific features, presumably because his penis and testicles had been chafed away by years of sliding around on the floor of the maze – which explains why he was constantly necking painkillers. Yet Ms. Pac-Man had to wear lipstick, a beauty mark, and a great big girly bow on her head. Despite being a limbless yellow disc, we were expected to find her "sexy". Some men will screw anything.

As well as being superior to the original game, this "female-friendly" incarnation actually had a story. Between levels, a series of simple animations turned Ms Pac-Man into a rom-com. In "Act 1", her and Pac-Man meet. In "Act 2", they take turns chasing each other. Finally, in "Act 3", a stork flies across the screen and drops a baby Pac-Person in front of them. You can find this patronising or charming or both, but the startling thing is this: 30 years on, the depiction of Ms. Pac-Man in those basic cut scenes is actually more progressive than the depiction of the vast majority of female game characters today.

Last month the creators of the game Hitman drew widespread criticism for a grisly promotional trailer that showed the main (male) character slaughtering a group of S&M killer nuns. Since this was merely the logical conclusion of a deeply boring trend for rubberised female assassins that's been going on since the 1990s, some gamers were surprised by the outcry, and became indignant and defensive, as though someone had just walked in and caught them masturbating to the same goat porn they'd been innocently enjoying for decades, and judging them and making them feel bad.

When they're not 7ft-tall high-heeled dominatrix killers, women in games tend to be saucy background-dressing or yelping damsels in distress. A rare exception is Lara Croft, the female star of Tomb Raider, who – in Pac-Man terms – is Ms. Indiana Jones. But whoops. Last week the forthcoming big-budget Tomb Raiderreboot made headlines after its executive producer apparently told the gaming site Kotaku that players would feel an urge to "protect" Lara after she faces a series of ghastly trials including an encounter in which she kills a would-be rapist. The subsequent outcry necessitated a speedy clarification from the developers about precisely what kind of game they're making.

The irony about the Tomb Raider fiasco is that when you actually look at what's been revealed of the new game thus far, the creators' intention is clearly to transform Lara Croft from a heavily armed big-titted wank-fantasy into a grittier and more plausible heroine. It's an "origin" story in which an inexperienced 21-year-old Lara crashlands on a remote island and has to fight the elements as well as the baddies in order to survive. Whether it's essentially I Spit on Your Grave in pixels remains to be seen, but the "new" Lara looks less stereotypical than 99% of female game characters.

But then, some people cling to those stereotypes as if their goolies depend on it. Last week, a female culture critic trying to raise funds on the Kickstarter website for a series of short films exploring the stereotypical treatment of women in games was subjected to a bewildering level of harassment from a peculiarly angry slice of the gaming community. As well as trying to have her Kickstarter account frozen or banned, they subjected her to a barrage of abuse that must have felt like running face-first into a muckspreader.

"Fucking hypocrite slut," quipped one gallant observer. "I hope you get cancer," chortled another. To be fair, it's probably not the notion that games misrepresent the sexes that enrages them. They probably shout this sort of abuse at anything female.

I say "shout". I mean "type". And not in person. Whenever there's an actual woman in the room, they stare intensely at their shoes, internally composing their next devastating online riposte to uppity vaginakind. "WHY MUST THEY TORMENT AND BEWITCH ME SO?", they think, in tearstained capitals. Just as rubberised assassins represent a tiny proportion of women, these idiotic pebbledicks represent a tiny proportion of men. The trouble for the games industry is that on some level it believes it has to pander to these monumental bellwastes. It doesn't, and it'll only gain widespread acceptance when it learns to ignore them. In 30 years, it's scarcely improved on Ms. Pac-Man. Time to push forward.

• The standfirst on this article was amended on 17 June. The original standfirst didn't reflect the article. This has been corrected

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AS MEDIA STUDIES - ELIZABETH DAY'S ARTICLE

Renault's sexist advert drives me absolutely mad

The car company's efforts to sell its products demean all of us

A scene from the advertisement for the Renault Clio.

What do you look for when you're buying a car? Value for money? Good mileage per gallon? A competitive engine spec and a low emissions rate? Possibly all of the above. What you probably don't look for as standard is a button on the dashboard that, when you press it, takes you right back to the sexual objectification of the 1970s.

The marketers of Renault Clio, it seems, think rather differently. Last week, a viral advert promoting the car was banned by the Advertising Standards Authority after a complaint that it objectified women. The YouTube clip depicts an unsuspecting man taking a test drive. At one point, the driver is encouraged by the car salesman to press a throbbing red "va va voom" button, handily situated just above the air conditioning.

The button causes a painted backdrop of Paris to fall in front of the windscreen. Passers-by start talking about baguettes and black coffee. Then, out of nowhere, the car is surrounded by scantily clad female dancers in frilly underwear and black stockings. The camera zooms in on pert bottoms and plump breasts jiggling suggestively in slow-mo. The driver's jaw drops. He says: "Crikey", blows his cheeks out and snorts with excited laughter while sitting back to enjoy the show.

Renault denied the ad was sexist, insisting it had been "a humorous parody". As proof of its conscience, it quickly produced a similar ad featuring semi-naked men, thereby completely misunderstanding the entire concept of sexism [see footnote].

Here's a handy recap: men still hold a disproportionately high number of powerful positions in politics and business, so sexism is an institutional problem. The world remains fundamentally unequal for women. That's why it's not particularly "humorous" or "fun" to portray them as erotic props to help you sell things. That's why you need to think a bit harder about how you represent women in advertising and that's why you should choose camera angles that show their heads as well as their breasts. Not a lot to ask.

Trying to flog a car with half-dressed men is not proof of right-on egalitarianism, any more than if the producers of The Black and White Minstrel Show had decided to tackle racism by screening a one-off special featuring black men with white faces.

I could, perhaps, have chosen to ignore the stupidity of the Renault advert (hardly anyone saw it, after all, and there was only one complaint to the ASA) [see footnote]. But then Blurred Lines, a feelgood pop song with a catchy bassline by American R&B singer Robin Thicke, climbed back up to No 1 in the UK charts. This meant that we were all treated, yet again, to Thicke's eye-poppingly misogynist video, which features women in a state of undress being handled like fleshy mannequins: their hair is played with, their bottoms are slapped, they are ordered to "get up, get down" and they mutely do as they're told. None of them speaks.

Thicke (surely one of the best examples of nominative determinism since Rich Ricci became the head of investment banking at Barclays) wanders around fully dressed inspecting the goods. In one scene, a pouting blonde lights his cigarette. Thicke inhales, then blows smoke in her face so that she coughs. If Charles Saatchi had done that to Nigella Lawson at a restaurant table, some people would see it as abuse.

The lyrics to Blurred Lines are directed to an anonymous "good girl" and include the promise to "give you something big enough to tear your ass in two" and "[to] smack that ass and pull your hair for you". What a guy.

It's not that I lack a sense of humour. It's not that I don't think women shouldn't be allowed to celebrate their own sexuality or subvert social expectations. You can be a feminist who wears lipstick. But it feels like we've tipped past the point of self-awareness. The Renault ad and the Robin Thicke video are not ironic or edgy. They're demeaning – and if this is "va va voom", then, frankly, I'd rather do without.

Copy Margaret Rhodes and show some birth control

My girl crush of the week comes quite straightforwardly in the splendid form of 88-year-old Margaret Rhodes. The Queen's first cousin was recently asked by an American news station whether she was excited about the imminent arrival of a new heir to the throne.

"Not terribly," she replied. Warming to her theme, she pointed out with admirable precision that, "Well, you know, everybody has babies. And it's lovely, but I don't get wildly excited about it."

Having lived through nine decades of so many royal births, deaths, marriages, divorces and toe-suckings, it is quite clearly going to take more than the miracle of new life to stir Mrs Rhodes's interest.

When it was pointed out to her that the baby would one day be king or queen and that the birth would be a fairly historic event, Mrs Rhodes replied: "Yes, all right. I'm prepared to be excited."

It was rather refreshing, in the midst of all the hype surrounding the Duchess of Cambridge's pregnancy, to have some sang-froid injected into proceedings. And I do feel that "prepared to be excited" is an eminently sensible state of mind when it comes to other people's babies.

Now that so many parents upload cutesy pictures of their newborn offspring online, I wonder if there should be a Facebook option for people such as Mrs Rhodes who don't want to over-commit emotionally.

Instead of the breathless ubiquity of the "Like" thumbs-up, we could introduce the "Prepared To Be Excited" button and display it alongside a stiff-upper lip emoticon.

The real problem with this weather is that it's so noisy

It was fairly exciting when we reached "level 3" of the heatwave. It made me feel we'd all been playing a giant computer game, collecting Super Mushrooms and launching fireballs at our enemies until we were rewarded with the ultimate prize of blazing temperatures and a high pollen count.

But now that we're all working and sleeping with the windows open, muttering about Argos running out of fans, everything seems to have got considerably noisier.

Living in a city as I do, eardrums are under constant assault. I wake up to the screams of other people's children splashing in paddling pools. I make breakfast accompanied by the screech of sirens as paramedics rush to treat another case of heat exhaustion. I sit at my desk to the soundtrack of clattering scaffolding being erected by builders whose radio is tuned constantly to Magic FM. And I live below the Heathrow flight path, so any time I venture out into the garden, all the other sounds will be obliterated by the roar of an overhead jet engine.

We get used to noise. But in modern life, there is so much more of it. Our gadgetry has increased the volume of daily life – from the teenager playing a tinny rendition of Justin Bieber on her smartphone to the announcements on public transport.

A study last week found that "super-fast" hand-dryers had the same impact on the human ear as a road drill at close range.

I've always hated those hand-dryers, with their smug ergonomic design and their patronising instructions for use ("Move hand up and down" – no, really?). They are the ultimate modern nonsense: a solution for a problem that doesn't exist. We already have an invention that can dry hands quickly, effectively and – best of all – silently. It's called a towel.

• This footnote was appended on 23 July 2013: Renault has asked us to make clear that both videos were made and released simultaneously, and that the combined viewing figures for both videos is 5 million, rather than "hardly anyone".

AS MEDIA STUDIES - GENDER AND REPRESENTATION - THE BANNED RENAULT CLIO ADVERT

Why was this advert banned?

Read Elizabeth Day's article in the Guardian online.



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YAY INDEED!

AS MEDIA STUDIES - GENDER - EXCELLENT ARTICLE FROM THE GUARDIAN

The fightback against gendered toys

Do all girls really want to play with dolls and tea sets? Do all boys want guns and trucks? Of course not. Then why are toymakers so aggressive in marketing these stereotypes?

Cars and girls … the Hollywood pedal car – one of Hamleys' most-wanted toys for Christmas 2013. Photograph: London News Pictures/Rex Features

Three years ago, while she was on maternity leave, Ros Ball and her partner, James, began a diary of their children's lives. Their daughter Josie was three and their son Clem three months old. They wanted to record the moments when their children were made aware of gender stereotypes; when they were directed towards a view of the world in which girls and boys inhabit separate, rigid spheres of pink and blue – the first sphere passive, pretty and gentle, the second aggressive, active and strong.

The results were tweeted under the title Baby Gender Diary, and Ball, a broadcast journalist who lives in London, couldn't believe how much there was to write about. On the first day, they went to a pantomime with a toy stall, where Josie's older male cousins directed her straight towards the sort of item supposedly beloved of small girls: a fluffy pink tiara. One of these boys then chose a flashing torch, in pink, for himself, to which the stallholder responded: "Shall I get you that in blue?" The boy, aged about five, readily agreed to the swap.

The next day, when Josie was shown around the nursery she would be attending, a table covered in cars was described specifically as "the boys' corner". Not long afterwards, Ball saw two different children's TV programmes, in quick succession, featuring male characters who were deeply embarrassed to be seen wearing the colour pink.

Ball was inspired to start the project after reading There's a Good Girl by the German lawyer and writer Marianne Grabrucker. The book was an international bestseller when first published in the 80s, and charts the gender stereotypes Grabrucker's daughter Anneli was subject to, starting from her birth in August 1981. At the time Grabrucker was keeping the diary, these stereotypes were under attack, and seemed likely to weaken in future or even sputter out entirely. Second-wave feminists of the 60s and 70s had analysed gender roles and kickstarted a trend for non-sexist parenting, built on a determination to bring up children free to embrace what interested them – be it maths, construction and cars for girls, or fashion, dolls and cookery for boys.

In the years since, there has been obvious progress towards gender equality in the adult world. Many more women have moved into the workplace and public life, many men have taken on a greater share of domestic chores, and gay and transgender people have fought strongly, often successfully, for greater rights and visibility. Yet when it comes to the world of children – the toys they play with and the clothes they wear – stereotypes have never been so defined, or rigidly enforced. Pink and blue have triumphed in the toy market, and there are often serious social penalties for children who breach the divide. The rise of highly gendered toys is a result of capitalism, but it also suggests a deep, subconscious unease with the advances of the past few decades.

Over the past few years, people across the world have begun questioning this culture. In the US, for instance, a high-school student called Antonia Ayres-Brown wrote this week about a campaign she has pursued since 2008, when she was 11, to stop McDonald's handing out their Happy Meal toys on the basis of gender. She recently received a letter from the company's chief diversity officer, stating: "It is McDonald's intention and goal that each customer who desires a Happy Meal toy be provided the toy of his or her choice, without any classification of the toy as a 'boy' or 'girl' toy."

In Durham, UK, Tricia Lowther has been working equally hard. Her six-year-old daughter, Marianne, loved the Pixar film Cars when she first saw it, and in the supermarket one day, when Lowther was buying juice cartons, "it was a choice between cars and princesses, and I got her the Cars ones, sure she'd like them". Instead, Marianne hid the cartons. When Lowther asked what was the matter, the answer was: "It's boyish." "I said: 'But you like cars, don't you?' And she said: 'I do, but I don't want anyone to know.'"

The association of blue with boys and pink with girls is a comparatively recent phenomenon. Photograph: Alamy

Lowther is part of the campaign Let Toys Be Toys, which began towards the end of 2012 as the result of a thread on parenting website Mumsnet about the explicit gendering of toys. In the space of a year the campaign has convinced 12 major retailers, including Boots, Toys R Us and Marks and Spencer, to remove "girls" and "boys" signage on toy displays. Lowther says she hopes the shops will start categorising products by subject and interest rather than gender. Last month, the campaign expanded to include the Let Books Be Books project, backed by children's laureate Malorie Blackman, poet laureate Carol Ann Duffyand the author Philip Pullman. This asks publishers to stop labelling books as specifically for boys and girls because, as Pullman has said: "No publisher should announce on the cover of any book the sort of readers the book would prefer. Let the readers decide for themselves."

In Australia last year, inspired by Let Toys Be Toys, Thea Hughes and Julie Huberman began the Play Unlimited campaign, and quickly convinced Toys R Us to drop the boys' and girls' categories on its website. When I speak to Hughes, she has just launched a new online petition to stop gender stereotypes being marketed to kids more broadly. Her awareness of the issue deepened when her son Harper, now four and a half, was born. There was heartache, she says, in seeing people's reactions to his love of pink and wearing dresses. "I could see him starting to become aware that he's being judged, and that he's unable to make the choices he'd like to make, because of the social pressure. At such a young age, it's just so sad."

A trip to Hamleys in London at the start of the Easter weekend highlights the problem. In 2011, a campaign by the neuroscientist Laura Nelson led to the UK's biggest toy-shop taking down the signs denoting that one floor was for boys and another for girls. But stereotypes still abound. On the first floor, featuring toys for young children, there's a display of dressing-up outfits, the top rail presumably marketed to girls, the bottom one to boys. There's a bridal gown for three- to six-year-olds, for instance, complete with a fake corsage. As parents and children consider it, Beyoncé booms in the background: "If you like it then you should have put a ring on it." The other costumes on the top rail are a pink cowgirl outfit, a pink waitress costume, a pink and purple superhero costume and a "hair stylist" tabard, in pink with purple trim, complete with plastic comb, mirror, scissors and hairdryer. The boys have two options: blue police-officer outfit and blue superhero costume.

Up another floor and there's no need for a "girls" sign. A woman behind me on the escalator says to her daughter, "I think this might be the girlie floor. It looks a bit girlie, doesn't it?" There are pink cleaning sets, cooking utensils and hairstyling kits. The Barbie display features construction sets for a ballet studio, a fashion boutique, an ice-cream cart and a luxury mansion. Next to it is the Disney Princess stand. When US writer Peggy Orenstein analysed princess culture in her 2011 book Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture, she noted that there were 26,000 Disney Princess products on the market, and that the franchise was the largest in the world for girls aged two to six – all dreaming of their future prince. The range epitomises the heightened fantasy femininity sold to girls today. A couple of floors up, on what seems to be the boys' floor, Scalextric sets are stacked next to Hornby toys, Airfix models and a host of remote-controlled cars.

The justification for this kind of gender segregation is usually that it's natural and traditional – that it's always existed. In fact, the connection of blue with boys and pink with girls is relatively recent, as fashion historian Jo B Paolettinotes in her book Pink and Blue: Telling the Boys from the Girls in America. Paoletti writes that, in the Victorian era, both boy and girl babies were dressed in white gowns and there was no attempt to signal a child's gender. In the first half of the 20th century, rules began emerging for pink and blue, but they were loose, with some seeing blue as a girl's colour because of its association with the Virgin Mary. The rules often had nothing to do with gender. "I've seen paper dolls up through the 1920s and 30s," says Paoletti, "where the pattern was blue for blue-eyed children, and pink for brown-eyed children. There were lots and lots of little brown-eyed boys who got pink presents for their first birthday."

A boy with his sister's doll. Photograph: Tom Gautier Photography/Getty Images/Fototrove

By the 50s, pink had become strongly associated with femininity, but boys still often wore it, while by the 70s, the two colours certainly didn't dominate the toy market. Paoletti writes that during the heyday of unisex parenting, which lasted from 1965 to 1985, "pink was so strongly associated with traditional femininity that it was vehemently rejected by feminist parents for their daughters' clothing. At the height of the trend (the mid-1970s), Sears catalogues" – mainstream shopping catalogues in the US – "carried no pink clothing for toddlers, and only a few pink items for babies."

This pattern is clear in the UK too. In the Argos catalogue for 1976, primary colours, particularly red and yellow, adorn the toy pages – most of the bikes are red, as is the packaging for a Spirograph. The toy typewriter is yellow. There are gendered products on offer, such as a Girls' World head, for applying makeup, but the packaging is a very long way from the pink, glittering fantasy femininity of today.

One obvious reason for the triumph of pink and blue is that segmenting the toy market brings greater profits by making it harder for parents to pass down items between siblings of a different sex. If your daughter has a pink bike with streamers on the handlebars, and those elements are understood as distinctly feminine, then you're far less likely to hand it on to your son. Instead, you'll probably buy another.

Elizabeth Sweet, a researcher at the University of California, Davis, who has analysed the changing shape of the toy market, says the growth of marketing generally has also been influential. In the US, regulations around TV advertisingto children were stripped away in 1984. "And so immediately thereafter," she says, "all of the toys began to have shows associated with them, and the ties between the toy industry and the entertainment industry became virtually indecipherable. So you have the Transformers movies, the My Little Pony movies, and these entertainment lines were often developed according to gender, right? I think that relates to the fact – and toymakers know this – that young children are very receptive to gender stereotypes at that developmental stage where they're forming their own gender identity, so two and three years old. Toymakers have certainly exploited that."

Young children are ripe for this kind of exploitation. When they are between the ages "of about three and five-ish – give or take, depending on the child", says Paoletti, "they understand what gender is, and what their gender identity is. They understand that they're a boy or a girl, and that that's a very important thing. But they don't understand that this is necessarily permanent. They really do think that a little girl who gets her hair cut is now a boy, and a boy who wears a dress is now a girl, which is a very, very scary thing. So if you market toys to them and say, 'Here's the boy one, and here's the girl one,' out of sheer self-preservation of their identity, they're likely to pick the one that's appropriate to their sex."

Sweet suspects another culprit in the gendered, highly sexist toy market is the male dominance at the top of toy and advertising companies, and in Pink and Blue, Paoletti suggests another intriguing idea: that the rise of ultrasounds during pregnancy has contributed to the triumph of gendered colour codes. Before this technology, parents tended to buy neutral colours when preparing for the birth of a child. With many now discovering their baby's sex before birth – and that being the only information they have about what their child might be like – products are bought on that basis. "People like to categorise things," says Paoletti, "and it's just fun to say, 'We're going to have a little girl!' and run out and get something girlie. I don't think anybody anticipated that there would now be two kingdoms of pink and blue, with a big wall between them, that children are not supposed to cross."

A toy tiara. Photograph: Alamy

But that has certainly been the case. In the US, in the last few months, there have been two separate stories of boys being bullied for their love of My Little Pony. In March, for instance, it was reported that nine-year-old Grayson Bruce had been told not to bring his My Little Pony bag to school in North Carolina because it was a trigger for the bullying he was experiencing, which has included punching, pushing and name-calling. (His school has since reversed that decision.) Earlier this month, the mother of 11-year-old Michael Morones, also of North Carolina, spoke about his recent suicide attempt, which has left him in a persistent vegetative state. The reasons for self-harm are always complicated, but Morones had experienced problems with bullying. He tried to kill himself the evening he told his mother: "I am so tired of people at school calling me gay because I like My Little Pony."

Boys are especially stigmatised for crossing the gender aisle in toys and clothes – a fact that seems to arise from a deep misogyny, homophobia and transphobia: a suspicion of any boy who embraces femininity, which is considered synonymous with weakness and subordination. The campaigners and parents who are fighting for more gender equality in the toy market are well aware of this, and there's a move away from the specific negativity towards femininity and pink that has sometimes characterised the debate.

The other problem with gendered toys, of course, is the way they limit children's interests. Chi Onwurah, MP for Newcastle upon Tyne Central, called a parliamentary debate on gender-specific toy marketing earlier this year after one of her constituents, a woman scientist, wrote to her about the products for little girls she saw each day on the way to work: pink flowers, fairies and princesses. Onwurah worked for decades in the engineering sector herself, and believes the limiting of children by gender stereotypes is a serious economic issue. When she began her engineering degree, 12% of her peers were women – 30 years later, that proportion is down to 8%. "We have some big economic problems," she says, "and one is a huge skills shortage in engineering and technology. There are thousands of jobs going unfilled, and in addition a lot of our engineers are in their 50s and retiring in the next five years. At the same time we have the lowest proportion in Europe of women who are professional engineers."

If girls are given the constant message that science, technology and construction are not for them, this is unlikely to improve. Onwurah grew up playing with a yellow pogo stick and riding on a red bike, and her favourite present when she was nine was a microscope. "Toys are so important and formative," she says, "and for me this is about the jobs of the future, about what happens in 10 or 15 years' time. We can't go on with a segregated society."

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