Why Unicorns Aren’t the Answer

I’ve railed against pinkification, and the ‘gift of pink’ in the past – especially at this time of year when presents, notably toys and clothes, are to the fore for Christmas purchase. I hadn’t realised that books, too, come with gender neatly attached from an early age, not just toys and clothes. Amazon at least wants to direct grandparents like myself to different pages, and different sorts of books, depending on whether your grandchild is born with one X chromosome or two. It’s bad enough that they do it at all, worse when you look at their suggestions. Just as advertisements for toys stress power and battle for boys, magic and love for girls, there is something of a similar divide when it comes to books.  On the front page of suggestions for five year old girls you can find out a surprising amount about unicorns, as well as Fantastically Great Women who Changed the World and also a book about girls who like to fart and short stories to develop ‘girls’ confidence, friendship and happiness’. Quite a lot of the stories on this front page do have female protagonists. The only book I can spot in common in the boys’ and girls’ lists is The Witch’s Cat and The Cooking Catastrophe: A fantastical tale of magic, mischief and mishap! Good that boys are directed towards cooking too, even if only to prove that cooking doesn’t always work out right.
(I’d like to caption this book cover ‘how not to be a girl’ since cuddling a non-existent animal does not appear to me to provide any useful life-skills. It’s not even a very good rendition of a unicorn, which is what it purports to be on the cover of the book.)

However, boys of this same age, also get offered books relating to poo, a detective dog and several joke books.  But, as a scientist, what I find most disturbing is that the boys – but only them – also get offered some books undoubtedly aimed at a kid who wants to learn more about the world around them, with a book on planets and another on discovery. Why are these not deemed suitable for girls? What is it that prompts Amazon to segregate books in this way?

I’d been mulling this topic for a couple of days, without getting beyond writing a few lines, but today’s release of the Fawcett Society’s Report of the Commission on Gender Stereotypes in Early Childhood, Unlimited Potential, really brings home the dangers implicit in such segregation. Their report highlights that booksellers are not particularly bad in the way they segregate their offers (at least not compared with toyshops and clothing, Amazon apart as they specifically mention), but the actual content of the books is more of an issue. A child is, according to the Report, 1.6 times more likely to read a book with a male lead, and seven times more likely to read about a male villain than a female one. I’m not really in favour of encouraging girls to break the law, but a bit of rule-bending never came amiss during growing up, so girls need to know they can do that just as well as the boy next door. Why do we need to divide a messy world so neatly into this binary distinction?

The report spells out many areas in which this divide impacts on child development and growth. This isn’t simply a case of some snotty female scientist on her usual high horse making a fuss, the fact that boys aren’t encouraged to talk about their feelings or cry when they are hurt – morally or physically – would seem directly to feed into the higher suicide rate amongst young men than women. Girls on the other hand, with their steers towards worrying about their bodies more than their brains are the ones to suffer eating disorders as their body changes shape and they start hitting the mating game. These aren’t healthy directions for boys or girls, men or women. Right now, when conditions around the pandemic mean that well-being is more than ever on our lips and in our minds, we should recognize the problems our society creates for all, with their roots starting in the earliest years.

Booksellers are just a bit-player in this context in our society, representing only a small part of the delivery of messages relating to how our young grow up facing the world. The Fawcett Society make it clear the overall responsibilities are shared amongst many. A particular finger is pointed at the Department for Education (DfE) to do more to support practitioners, through training and CPD, to counter stereotypes in the classroom. Teachers are apparently supportive of this, even of there being regulatory oversight to check it happens. Another recommendation is that those professions associated with early years’ care and teaching should have their status raised through appropriate pay, training and qualifications for their workforce. If girls in nurseries weren’t directed to the dolls and boys to the bricks then who knows what changes would be consequent in later years? Story book publishers and educational resources are encouraged to make sure gender stereotypes are not reinforced, with challenges provided in their pages to prevailing norms.

The DfE is also recommended to pilot interventions to see ‘what works’ in countering stereotypes, so that those that do can be rolled out more widely. It certainly isn’t sufficient to focus attention solely on secondary schools – as, for instance, is often done both in the UK and their equivalent in the USA – for instance to try to get more girls into physics. The evidence is that ideas about what is ‘possible’ for girls and boys set in extremely early, as in the study which showed that by age 6-7 girls believe that it’s boys who are ‘really, really smart’ not girls, and consequently they avoid games that require the smarts. Interventions must start early. At home, in the media, through play and, of course, through every interaction with both their parents and other adults, children learn what their place in the world is, or at least seems to need to be.

If we want all our children to develop their full potential, lead rich lives, and feel able to express their emotions, their creativity and their imagination across the full gamut of human endeavour, we need to stop putting them in gender strait-jackets. Our Christmas gifts should reflect our own diversity and our dreams for them to become exactly the person they were born to be, not the one society imposes on them.