Textual Analysis: Gender Differences In Children

Words: 1251
Pages: 6

Over the weekend, I went to Walmart to pick up a few items and I decided to browse the toy section. At this particular Walmart, the toy section was not that big at all. I am not sure if the toy section appears smaller to me because I am older now. While I browsed down the isles, I found two products that caught my attention. One toy I decided to pick to analysis is an interactive baby doll for preschool aged children. The other toy for preschool aged children was an interactive Elmo toy. There were definitely gender differences between the products I evaluated. You can see the differences as soon as you look at the packages of the toys.

When I first entered the toy section in the department store, the first thing I noticed was all of the
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The toys for boys had a color theme of red, dark blue, orange, green, and yellow. The color theme for girls was pink, purple, and light blue. Next, the color and designs of the package is how identified the toys for girls and toys for boys. The majority of packages for girls were pink and purple with flowers. For boys, the majority of the packages were red, dark blue, and orange. The toy packages for both tried to have neutral colors like a light blue and dark blue. Furthermore, the designs for the girl toys had smiley faces, butterflies, hearts, and had the word friends on the package. The designs for the boy toys had an action theme. The toys that were for girls dealt with nurturing, cooking, working, and taking care of babies and pets. For instance, girl toys were babies, barbie dolls, kitchen tools, cash registers, and doll houses. On the other hand, the toys for the boys were action figures, cars, building blocks, legos, nurf guns, and …show more content…
I think the purpose of the gender differences was to make sure they market the toy for who they think it is appropriate. The producer of the toy assume that girls would want to play with a baby doll oppose to a boy. Therefore, they market the toy with a girly package so it is more appealing to a young girl. They also added pictures of only girls playing with the baby. This also relates to the gender norm that females are supposed to be the nurturing and caretaker human beings. Doing this exercise really opened up my eyes. I did not realized how deeply divided the toy section appears to be. It symbolize how they want things to be in society and the gender norm for the kids. Many toys does not appear to be versatile for girls and boys. Lastly, I realized that toys are not diverse at all. I personally believe that it should be dolls for every race and religion in every department store. I think it is important for kids to see toys that resemble them, so they do not have to compare themselves to toys that look nothing like