As a psychologist with a strong commitment to promoting gender equality, I’ve found myself re-thinking traditional parenting habits and imagining how these innovative conversations will affect the way we look at parenting. Between “gender neutral parenting” and “the Google manifesto,” there’s a recent ongoing conversation about defying traditional gender roles we can’t ignore. With powerful influencers as role models, […]
The hope is that by encouraging gender-neutral toys, children can pursue their interests without criticism. We all know the drill. Blue is for boys, pink is for girls. Boys should play with cars, climb trees, and roll in the mud. Girls should play with dolls (but never action figures!), put on tea parties, and pretend […]
The words we use and the stories we tell in our games and books and movies are important because they not only reveal how we see our world, but they also show how our world could be. In the pantheon of the greatest “classic” video games of all time, males are abundantly overrepresented as the […]
Toy manufacturers and games developers are profiting from the creation of discriminatory imagined worlds where the segregation, objectification, and erasure of women is being mass produced for fun. In 2014, Hasbro, one of the world’s largest and most influential toy makers, was named one of the World’s Most Ethical Companies®, recognized for going “beyond making […]
Toy ads would have us believe that all girls are happy and love sunshine and cupcakes, while boys are active and busy building and smashing things. When was the last time you sat and watched cartoons on a Saturday morning? Recently, I snuggled in bed with my husband and 9-year-old daughter to watch some ‘toons. […]
A white, thin, blonde-haired doll is hardly groundbreaking. I want to like GoldieBlox, the relatively new toy company for girls, whose goal is “to get girls building” and “to help level the playing field in every sense of the phrase.” I really do, but their advertising keeps giving me mixed messages. Even as the mother of […]
