Retailers take to genderless labels
Shoppers now challenging boy-girl separation in toy aisles
Aliceana Belling marched past the rows of pink princess dresses at a Wal-Mart last month and headed straight to the superhero outfits.
She checked out the options for Halloween. Iron Man? Spider-Man? The Hulk?
Then she saw the Captain America suit, shiny shield and all.
“I can fly in the air outside!” Aliceana, 3, said from her home in Fond du Lac, Wis., where she plans to go trick-or-treating as the Marvel Comics superhero this Halloween. “I’m going to save dogs!”
Aliceana and her parents, Brittany and A.J. Belling, make up one of many families that are fed up with the strict princess dresses for girls, action figures for boys, stereotyping that they say still pervades children’s toys, clothes, costumes and other merchandise.
Retailers and manufacturers in the $22 billion toy industry, along with media companies, are starting to heed these concerns. Not only are toy-makers more wary of marketing some items only to boys or only to girls, they and major store chains are creating gender-neutral or androgynous labels and store aisles.
In August, Target announced that it would no longer use signs to label toys for girls and boys in their stores. For the first time this year, the Disney Store is banishing girl and boy designations from its children’s Halloween costumes, labeling all outfits “for kids.” It also has switched to generic tags on lunchboxes, backpacks and other accessories.
Amazon no longer uses gender-based categories for children’s toys. Next spring, Mattel is introducing a line of action figures based on a new franchise, DC Super Hero Girls. And last week, the TV series Supergirl debuted on CBS.
“The gender barriers are breaking down, and both manufacturers and retailers are not labeling toys like they used to,” said Jim Silver, the editor-in-chief of TTPM, a toy-review website. “The industry’s learned that you shouldn’t be labeling for a specific gender. There are so many girls who want to be Iron Man and Captain America, and boys who want to play with Easy-Bake.”
The shift is part of a wider movement in retail to blur gender lines, as society moves beyond stereotypes, and celebrities as varied as Caitlyn Jenner and Jaden Smith put a spotlight on an array of gender identities. In fashion, designers like Rad Hourani are creating androgynous labels, and top-tier designers, from Marc Jacobs to Hermes, are eroding the divide between feminine and masculine clothes.
The rise in popularity of athletic wear and relatively genderless offerings from companies like North Face and Patagonia also have helped spread unisex design. Footwear brands like Converse, Vans or Birkenstock also now market the same styles for men and women. Wearable technology, like smartwatches and activity monitors, has been relatively gender-neutral.
“If a guy wants to go out and buy a woman’s scarf and thinks that’s fashionable, whatever his sexual preference, it’s going to happen,” said Marshal Cohen, chief industry analyst at the New York-based research firm NPD. “This is something where the world jumped way ahead of retail, and now retail is trying to catch up.”
Still, the most significant shifts in gender categorizing — and certainly the most debated — have been in children’s merchandise. The shifts stem from a growing recognition, first among niche outlets and now among mainstream companies, of the role many traditional toys, clothes and costumes have played in reinforcing gender stereotyping. Experts have linked the items to all manner of gender disparities, including gaps in boys’ and girls’ self-confidence levels and career choices.
Parents have taken to social media to protest retailers’ overly girly offerings, or to show off their children defying gender norms. Last year, Lands’ End introduced a line of sciencethemed shirts for girls after a New Jersey mother, Lisa Ryder, posted an open letter on the brand’s Facebook page calling out its boy-only science collection.
Target’s move to remove gender labels from its toy section came after Abi Bechtel of Ohio took to Twitter to protest a sign on display at the retailer for “Girls’ Building Sets.” Target announced in August that it was removing gender-based signs from its children’s toys and bedding aisles.
The retailer’s online store still labels girls’ and boys’ toys, however, because its data suggest that many shoppers on the site still search for products by gender, according to a spokesman, Molly Snyder. (The site does allow shoppers to search for gender-neutral toys.)
Toys R Us has not categorized girls’ and boys’ toys in its stores for some time, said Richard Barry, the retailer’s global chief merchandising officer. “What we’re seeing is that there are different play patterns that appeal to different kids, and gender lines are not necessarily what drives that,” Barry said.
The retailer’s role-play series — like its Pizza Chef or Cash Register play sets — are popular with girls and boys, he said. (The Toys R Us website continues to designate girls’ and boys’ toys; its Housekeeping and Ironing Board play sets, both in pink, are considered girls’ toys.)
And despite the recent changes, a stroll through the toy section at a Target or a Toys R Us is still a gender-specific experience. At a Target store in Brooklyn, N.Y., there were the Frozen princess dresses, My Little Pony figurines, and the convertible-driving, glitterhaired Barbie dolls in one half of the children’s section. Then there were the separate aisles of Roboraptor robot dinosaurs, Star Wars spaceships and Nerf guns.
Segregation along gender lines in the toy category had deepened over the past decades before the recent pushback, said Elizabeth Sweet, a lecturer in sociology at the University of California. Davis has written extensively on gender stereotypes in children’s toys. She puts much of the blame on the dismantling, in 1984, of restrictions on television programming aimed at children.
Soon after, the top toys, like Transformers, GoBots and My Little Pony, all had their own TV shows. This media franchising, she said, with storybook themes for girls and battles and adventures for boys, still colors much merchandise along gender.
“The pink aisle is still really pink, because the products in the pink aisle are still really pink,” Sweet said.
Brittany Belling, who blogs at The Domestic Geek, complains of the general dearth in female action figures: “Princess Leia is usually missing” from Star Wars merchandise, she said. And she was worried that Aliceana’s Captain America “Muscle” costume, “meant to fit young boys,” she said, would fit awkwardly on her frame.
Belling, for now, is relieved that Aliceana’s superhero costume seems to fit, at least. Aliceana has begged to wear it in the house and yard before Halloween night.
“She’s often been interested in clothes, then they’d turn out to be for boys,” Belling said. “But Captain America, she’s actually pulling that off.”