The new president of the British Science Association, Dame Athene Donald, has suggested that girls’ toys are reinforcing gender stereotypes. Barbie leads to “passivity – combing the hair of Barbie for instance – not building, imagining or being creative with Lego or Meccano.”
Gender stereotypes are very hard to shift.
Every effort to do so should to an extent be applauded. But my view is that taking Barbies away from little girls will do absolutely nothing to change a much more deep rooted cultural problem.
First it is perfectly possible to build and construct things imaginatively with dolls at the centre of play. When I was a child I was given a dolls house that was pretty much falling down. The interesting thing about playing with it was rebuilding it, and there were no templates to follow of course. So perhaps the point is to offer children of any gender less finished toys to play with.
Suggesting that playing with dolls is in some way second rate for a child’s education reinforces the gender stereotypes. It implies once again the femininity is worse than masculinity. This matters in a world where most senior business roles are taken by men and where an eminent scientist can cause uproar with his comments about gender. Little girls like playing with dolls at certain points of their development. They also in my experience like playing with trains, cars, meccano and plastic building bricks. They sometimes like dressing up as princesses. They sometimes like to dress as Batman or Superman.
What about boys then?
We know they like dressing as Spiderman and playing with bricks. Do we even know if they’d like to dress in pink or play with dolls? Are they normally allowed to? Let’s face it, even in this day and age, it is rare. Why should that be? It can only be because there’s some kind of fear of infection with femininity where in fact we know (don’t we?) that both masculine and feminine values are important for the workplace and that diversity in types of people makes a business stronger.
I quite frequently wear trousers to work. I’ve yet to be in a meeting in London where any of the men present are wearing a dress. What’s going on here? Dresses are really comfortable, especially in the summer heat. For adland folk who were lucky enough to go to Cannes in baking heat this year a smart summer dress was a welcome wardrobe item. What a shame that only half the people present had the opportunity to take advantage of it.
I would like to see some men in skirts in Cannes, although frankly there was way too much comment about certain individuals and their wearing of shorts so I can see why men might not bother to move on from Chinos. More to the point I would agree with Dame Athene that gender stereotyping starts at a very young age. Psychiatrist Anna Fels writes in the HBR that in pre-school boys are given more recognition and their confidence is boosted more than girls. She cites one study where “all 15 of the teachers gave more attention to boys.…They got both more physical and verbal rewards. Boys also received more direction from the teachers and were twice as likely as the girls to get individual instruction on how to do things.”
Snatching Barbies will do nothing. Taking a long hard look at how we treat girls and boys throughout their childhood in this culture is an urgent and necessary step for true gender equality in science and at work.
Understand the rules, then break them.
Friday, September 25th, 2015Last week I was videoed answering a set of questions aimed at giving advice to this year’s delegates at The Media Business Course.
Who know what will survive the edit? In case of harsh editing I will say here that I mentioned the need to follow the money through the planning process in answer to several questions ie never lose sight of the fact that the very point of the plan is to deliver sales for the brand (or of course behaviour change). Challenged to explain how to find a good consumer insight in a few words it was quicker to explain what a bad one was for example, don’t bother with the revelation that teenagers like music or that men like football.
I didn’t give the most powerful advice for winning at this kind of course. No question quite prompted it, or I have only thought of it after filming, so I’ll give it here: Break the rules.
You have to know what the rules are of course in order to break them. But if you do, and you can find a way to break them, then you’ll power ahead. What if the target market is to date only teenage boys? That was true of gaming until Nintendo developed the wonderfully successful Wii Fit. What if underwear advertising only ever runs in women’s magazines? That didn’t stop Wonderbra stopping traffic and step changing the brand with poster advertising.
We’re enjoying an event invented by an outrageous rule breaker.
An event that the Sunday Times has predicted “if it all goes to plan will be the most commercially successful event in the sport’s history”.
The Rugby World Cup.
By some accounts in 1823 a sixteen year old school boy at Rugby School, William Webb Ellis, was meant to be playing football but instead, as a commemorative stone states: “with a fine disregard for the rules of football…first took the ball in his arms and ran with it, thus originating the distinctive feature of the rugby game.” As one source adds “Lucky he didn’t go to a Comprehensive – he’d have got the shoeing of his life.”
Though many people contradict this story, it’s made the name of Webb Ellis last for over a century.
Look for the rules of the category you’re planning in and think about how you could break them. That might be by changing target audience, broadening a niche by attracting a bigger cohort of buyers. It might be by using a medium that no-one else in the category does. It might be by advertising all year round in a seasonal competitive market.
You might break the rules by breaking the rules of the competition. I won a course of this nature by a ruthless disregard of the rules the judges had set. (Note to anyone attending the course: This is high risk. One of our judges wanted to disqualify us, but we talked our way into the win.)
So Media Business Course candidates, look for the rules and then subvert them. Most of your judges will probably have broken a rule or two in their time, and the stories that they could tell of those times would be good to entice out of them at any question time.
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