'Online toys let boys be boys and girls be drudges '

I don’t see why the categories ,for boys‘ and ‚for girls‘ would be necessary. You could make sections like dolls, vehicles, play kitchens & co.... and easily find stuff this way. As for clothes, similar is possible with categories like skirts, trousers and colors / motives.
And why is the choice so often between dark blue and pink, anyway? God, how I miss the 70‘s!

Why would anyone run a search for "gifts for girls?"
Sometimes it’s the only way to filter searches. Many online shops separate their toys by boys and girls so certain types of toys won’t appear on a toy search done for girls. I was searching for superhero costumes for my daughter and if you just type in superhero costumes you end up with a lot of male superheroes with fake muscles on them and I wanted to specifically find female superheroes. So you specify costumes for girls and they are usually excessively girly with silly tutus or pink versions of supergirl, batgirl, etc. And the problem is the costumes themselves are usually very sexualised as the films are aimed at adolescent boys so there’s not usually any middle ground. Another one is looking for science kits, they will have boys ones and then girls ones that are for making makeup or body lotions for spa days. The retailers themselves list things according to stereotype so if you’re buying things you have to search in both the boy and the girl sections to get a full picture of what’s on offer. Often it won’t even occur to people to look in the ‘other’ section for something. I have older family members who are obsessed with buying my daughters girly things even though they themselves aren’t fussed.

I actually don't mind things being labelled as for girls or boys. It's common sense that either sex can play with any toy and most do, but it's easier to find a certain toy if you know it will be with all the boys stuff or all the girls stuff. Same with clothes, I actually get really annoyed how some places online don't have separate girls and boys departments anymore, it makes it less convenient for me.

Thanks for this exchange, ScipioAfricanus. You've been a peach. Merry Christmas & Happy New Year to you & your loved ones. I bet your son will turn out great, & I hope you enjoy raising him, even when he gets to be a sulky teen prone to giving you constant "side-eye" as we Yanks would say. Parenthood sure is humbling & comical, innit? (That "innit?" is me pretending to be British. I also like to use such expressions as "shirty" & "go spare", which make all my US friends & family laugh at me).

I'm looking forward to our next encounter. Over & out.

No, I admit I did get a little uppity at the use of our Amazon being not a de facto one for the UK, but that’s probably more my own tetchiness about our country becoming more and more idiotic and shut off from itself. Most of the people I know are freaking out about what 2019 will bring - not the usual Christmas rest and good cheer.

I’ve enjoyed thinking about this and discussing it and although I personally think the article is probably innocently different from our searches, I agree with you that journalism has to be questioned and totally should be. The last few years I’ve really stopped feeling able to trust the press and that’s terrifying in democracies like ours.

I hope you have a lovely Christmas - and your son sounds great. Gives me hope that I can raise my son like that even with all the nonsense we have to fight against!

Fair enough, ScipioAfricanus. I hope you're right. I've long read & admired the Times, which you are correct is clearly a UK-based paper, so the error in judgment & reading comprehension here was/is probably mine. I should've realized they meant Amazon.co.uk, not Amazon.com, duh. I think my suspicions were in overdrive in part because, as all the BS about gender, sex &TWAW in the press today shows, journalistic standards have dramatically slipped at once-impeachable sources (or so they seemed way back when) like the NY Times, Washington Post & TIME in the US & Der Spiegel in Europe with its newly-revealed scandal of totally made-up stories.

BTW, I did not mean to suggest that Amazon.co.uk is "a teeny tiny little offshoot" of Amazon.com. The two are simply different, & the only reason the US site is bigger is because the US population is 5-6 times larger than the UK's, & Amazon has had a much bigger impact putting conventional shopping out of business here than in the UK so far. I'm an Anglophile who adores most things British, so the last thing I'd want to do is belittle the country I visit often & I've long wished were my own. If I offended you, I'm genuinely sorry, especially as I have enjoyed our exchange here.

I'm off now to wrap the iron, clothes steamer, toilet brush & cooking utensils I got my 20-something son for Christmas. Just the other day he asked me for pictures of him as a young child pushing his baby doll in her stroller - I think he wanted to show his much younger half-siblings how back in his day boys & girls played with all sorts of toys. Happy holidays!

I’m not sure that’s all entirely fair - the Times is a UK paper and when they say Amazon, most readers would assume Amazon UK - that’s our Amazon. It’s not a teeny tiny little offshoot. We wouldn’t shop from Amazon in the US (Amazon.com) or elsewhere unless we couldn’t get it locally. Sometimes I check reviews on the US site.

If Amazon changed their landing page, I would assume that was done not from caring about gender stereotypes but because they wanted to avert criticism. Perhaps you’re right and they wouldn’t bother. eBay certainly didn’t - their results were consistent with the article, so I don’t see any reason to mistrust it, as there are plausible reasons for the change in Amazon’s results, though I agree that the Amazon results you now get don’t match the article.

Two more things: when I went to Amazon.com & to Amazon.co.uk I did so both signed-in to my accounts & blind. But the results in each instance were basically the same, so my history didn't seem to affect it much. But then I did most of my toy-buying years ago before Amazon took over US retail. As I recall, I spent a small fortune on Brio, Lego, puzzles & kids books...

I also tried to replicate the Times' results by doing various searches on ebay as well, including one for "sexist gifts for girls". I too found the results much more sexist, with lots of pink items, princess stuff & Disney junk. But ebay is a much harder site to draw generalizations from, since the way items are listed & described is largely controlled (I think) by the individual sellers using the site.

Thanks ScipioAfricanus for following up.

I did my searches on a macbook using Safari, but since I was in the USA at the time googling the search terms "gifts for girls Amazon" took me to Amazon.com. And that's where I was sent when I accessed the site directly from my browser without going through Google first.

But Amazon.co.uk, where you searched, is an entirely different & separate site from Amazon.com. If I'm in the UK, I can buy from Amazon.uk.co, but to do so I had to set up a separate account for the UK site specifically. I can look at Amazon.co.uk from the States, but I can't order anything from it.

I doubt Amazon gives a flying eff about us - or the Times, for that matter. A big secret of Amazon's direct-to-consumer retail operations is that they've always lost money & are still unprofitable even today when here in the US they've come close to putting brick 'n' mortar retail out of business entirely. Amazon's biggest business is Amazon Web Services or AWS. AWS is the largest non-governmental operator/provider of cloud computing services in the world, catering to huge multinational corporations, governmental organizations like the CIA &, Pentagon, along with various national governments globally. AWS is what supports all the rest of the Jeff Bezos empire, including Amazon retail. With retail, Bezos has always taken the long view: disrupt the market, dominate retail, & once dominance has been achieved, aim for profitability. So though Bezos as a person (as opposed to a business owner & employer) is in some ways quite woke (as illustrated by his ownership of the Washington Post), I don't think he & his company could give a hoot if some customers or critics castigated Amazon for presenting consumer items in a sexist way. With so few shopping alternatives left, even people who hate Amazon will still shop there regardless.

I think what probably happened in this case is that the Times gave misleading info due to imprecise reporting & sloppy editing. Or so it seems to a nitpicky literalist like me. Instead of saying they searched on Google for "gifts for girls Amazon" they should've said they searched "gifts for girls Amazon.co.uk". Sure, they might've only typed in the single word "Amazon" but they should've made it clear that when someone in the UK enters "Amazon" in the Google search bar, what comes up is not a generic, universal Amazon, but a much smaller site, Amazon.uk.co. The Times, after all, is an internationally-read newspaper. But maybe that's what the Times was trying to convey when it put that second set of quotation marks around the word Amazon in the sentence I found confusing.

When I Googled "gifts for girls Amazon.co.uk" I got what you did. First this:
Amazon.co.uk: Gifts for Girls: Toys & Games
www.amazon.co.uk/Toy-Gifts-for-Girls/b?node=2174085031&tag=mumsnetforum-21&ie=UTF8
Results 1 - 24 of 74 - Online shopping for Gifts for Girls from a great selection at Toys & Games Store.^

Then when I clicked on that link, I also got what you did. Not a list of 74 mostly sexist "girl" toys containing from the get-go a lot of home appliances & household drudgery tools, but an endless number of toys & games of all sorts for all types & ages, none of them categorized in a sexist way.

So there's still something fishy about this story, though I can't pinpoint exactly what it is.

Despite the headline, it’s also not great for boys if they are all getting given walkie talkies and tool kits when some? many? would prefer art kits or toy kitchens or hair sets. It’s all part of the gender stereotyping and narrowing which can diminish all children, and make them feel they aren’t a proper little boy or girl if they don’t conform.

But Let Toys Be Toys are also altering the way advertisers behave - which is great, considering children can’t normally tell the difference between advertising and truth until aged 8 and they are influenced by peers as well as their parents.

Can't get worked up about this, I was determined not to fall into the trap,and am raising my dd to see past this.
She had all those toys as a child and lots of others, they all play a part in their development.
I have family that raise their girls as little princesses, it gets on my nerves but you can't change their minds.
You can only make sure you raise your children to know the difference no matter what the advertisers tell us.

I did the eBay search for girls toys aged 5-7 and that was very gendered - top 10:

1 - Children’s art kit set (array of colours)
2 - Kids kitchen - red and pink ones shown (presumably red not quite girly enough)
3 - Disney sticker art set - glittery - pink or purple and green
4 - Picnic tea play set - pink
5 - Doctors or nurses (yay for doctors!) medical play set - pink (like real lady doctors have)
6 - Vanity hair/beauty play set - purple/pink
7 - Pink hair dryer play set
8 - Nail art play set - pink
9 - Wireless unicorn toy
10 - make your own unicorn figure craft kit

This is all signed in on my app, but I’m the mother of a son who bought him dolls and a kitchen and avoids pink for the kids I buy gifts for (and never buy them from eBay) - so I don’t think it’s affected by my history on it. This certainly bore out the article’s findings for eBay.

Actually, given Google result links don’t update for a while, that they probably were notified by the Times that the article was happening, and that the link states ‘Results 1-24 of 74’ and ‘Gifts for Girls’, but takes me to a different page, if I had to bet on it I would say it is most likely that Amazon altered the way they list the results for this search some time between being told about the article and me and Vegilante doing the search. Just speculation.

I was curious so I’ve had a go. I got this (first photo) result from google which echoes the report - listing 74 results as the article does. But when I clicked through it took me to a landing page (second picture) which offered an array of options including games and I’d have had to click through to ages (both boy and girls) or brand (Mattel, barbie) or type of toys (art, construction etc) to get actual specific toys. There isn’t a ‘girls toys’ section I could take a top 20 from so it does feel a little misleading.

I think that searches appear differently in laptops/phones etc and also I assume (but can’t say for sure) that the results could also be influenced by other things the computer now knows about you so I wouldn’t expect it to be exactly the same. And in my case, I’m signed into my account automatically so that might be a different experience to someone who isn’t or doesn’t have one. Amazon might also have modified it after receiving notification of the article. However, when I clicked through to Amazon it was much more like I would like than I’d expected - opening up the search to a wide array of interest rather than assailing me with pink and unicorns - so that was quite pleasant.

After ScipioAfricanus clarified the point that confused me, I entered gifts for girls Amazon into the Google search bar both without & with quotation marks around the text. None of the links that came up on the first results page in either case are similar to - or anywhere close to - what the Times claims it found. Most of the Amazon pages that appear specify gifts for girls of particular ages, in keeping with the common ways of categorizing that other posters here have pointed out. But interestingly, the youngest age listed on the search results page is 8.

On the search results page for gifts for girls Amazon sans quotation marks, none of the individual results such as "Gifts for A(n) 8 Year Old Girl Amazon.com" & "Gifts for 12 Year Old Girls Amazon.com" show anything like what the Times said they found in their search.

www.amazon.com/slp/gifts-for-a-8-year-old?tag=mumsnetforum-21 girl/5xdwv9feadmg7hq

www.amazon.com/slp/gifts-for-12-year-old-girls/25n4adjgyrua7hm?tag=mumsnetforum-21

I also searched for gifts for toddler girls, 3 year-old girls, 4 year-old girls Amazon both on Google & Amazon directly, & none of the results yielded anything close to what the Times says they found. Not even in the same universe.

I don't think the Times actually did the search they say they did. My hunch is that they took the word of one of the groups they cite. Otherwise why not provide the url to the Amazon page they're speaking of so readers can check it out for themselves?

@ScipioAfricanus - thanks for clarifying that for me. But if that's the case, the Times should've written it as you did, not as they did. Unless, of course, they did their search way back in the old days when quotation marks & + signs were still used in web searches.

Vegilante they mean that the person put into Google ‘gifts for girls Amazon’

Thanks for this. But I am confused by the "research" - if it can be called that - this article is based on, which is described as follows: A search on Google for “gifts for girls” and “Amazon” last week suggested 74 gifts from the online store. Items in the top 20 included a toy washing machine, a pink play kitchen, a wooden set of pots and pans and a toy ironing set.

So did they do this search on Google or on the Amazon website? Searching Google & Amazon are two very different things. (Also, why is the Times in that sentence putting quotation marks around Amazon? Amazon is the official name of the company; it's not a nickname.)

When I did my own search just now on Google for "gifts for girls" I got totally different results than the Times. In fact, the first non-advertiser-sponsored result (after three sponsored ones) that came up was a recent article from Esquire listing 27 items, most of them non-sexist. Yes, there was a makeup kit, a cosmetics case, a purse & a mini waffle iron. But most of the gifts were "empowering" ones that encourage girls to become inventors, architects, artists, animators, electronics whizzes, photographers, plant-growers, home repairers (what used to be called "handymen"), bike riders & basketball players. It's worth a look.

www.esquire.com/lifestyle/g1692/best-girls-gifts/

Still on the same search-results page on Google, an Amazon-sponsored result headlined "Girl Gifts" appeared immediately above the Esquire article. When I clicked on it, I was taken to this:

www.amazon.com/s/?hvptwo&hvnetw=g&keywords=girl+gifts&hvadid=313636410678&index=aps&hvpone&ref=pd_sl_5oein4onps_e&hvpos=1t2&hvdev=c&hvexid&hvqmt=e&tag=mumsnetforum-21&ie=UTF8&hvtargid=kwd-197225305&hvrand=10448180539677968722

The first page of the "gifts for girls" category on Amazon showed 26 items, starting with a "hover soccer game". Many items shown are gender-neutral products needlessly manufactured in pink, such as a hot pink set of walkie-talkies & a pink HD video camera. And some of them are items conventionally considered "girly" such as a pink diary, various jewelry items, a pink shoulder bag with bunny ears, whimsically-decorated knee socks & a "Kids Washable Makeup Set With A Glitter Cosmetic Bag". But most of the items on the first page (again on Amazon not Google) were things like terrariums (three on the first page), cameras of various sorts, gaming accessories & kits for doing arts & crafts. The only home or kitchen appliance shown is an ice machine for making shaved iced & "snoballs". And one of the girlier jewelry items is an expandable (all-age) bangle bracelet that says "You are Braver Stronger Smarter Than You Think", which Amazon labels a "#1 Best Seller".

Page two on the same Amazon link shows more terrariums, arts & crafts, jewelry, & kits for making lip balm, glitter nail art, & chalk pens for hair colouring. But the fourth item is a book "Women in Science: 50 Fearless Pioneers Who Changed the World".

When I went to Amazon directly from my browser (not through Google) & typed in "gifts for girls" in its search bar, the results were even less sexist. The first two items on page one were ad-sponsored, one a mini-drone set for boys & girls, the other a NextX Doctor Kit, ("35 Pieces Pretend Play Toys Kids Electronic Stethoscope Dentist Medical Kit Gifts Boy & Girl Educational Learing Roleplay, Blue"). Other sponsored items on the page include two more drone kits, & a wooden truck car-carrier for young children. The non-sponsored items included mostly arts & crafts kits, a jumbo work surface & storage case for jigsaw puzzles, & a "VTech Kidizoom Smartwatch DX" in purple, along with several items from the Amazon "Gifts for Girls" page accessed via Google such as the glittery makeup case, the pink bunny-ears purse & pink walkie-talkies & cameras. But no jewelry.

I did these searches from where I am the moment, the USA, so I'm wondering if it's possible that searching Google & Amazon from the UK might produce entirely different results. Not to diss the Times, especially when it's doing such good work on on the threats to women's rights posed by transgenderism, but as a former journalist who once worked at an internationally-esteemed publication, I think the real lesson here is don't believe everything reported in the press.

I talked with my cousin about our childhood in the 70‘s and how great it was that there were no toys for girls and toys for boys in our memory, but just toys, when her 8 year old daughter chimed in insisting: ‚But there are some toys for girls only and some for boys only.‘

This is so pervasive that even as a parent you feel kind of poweless, sometimes.

Oops - I mean sentimentality of course

Marguerita

items of bilious sensibility