Do girls really prefer to play with dolls?

I have 3dds. Dd1 was into cars and trains and didn’t touch dolls but dtds played with dolls lots and occasionally still do despite being 12. I think the stereotypes are created from some fact but that doesn’t mean every girl does.

I never really played with dolls or barbie and my daughter hasn't either. Maybe it's genetic! My son still has loads of soft toys at 14. 😀

I preferred Action Man because he came with so much better accessories. I particularly remember the jeep with a bazooka that fired rubber tipped projectiles. Didn't somehow make me a boy.

I know my experience isn’t universal but I‘m also not sure how much toy choice says or doesn’t say about children.

I was the little girl that hated Barbie, Sindy, Girls World and Tiny Tears. The dolls I wanted to play with were called action figures (cos god forbid boys would admit they play with dolls too 🙄).

The reason I wanted to play with Action Man, Superman, Captain Kirk, Apollo & Starbuck was because those male characters were in comics or on television shows that I loved and, to my childhood eyes, were having more fun and adventure than the girl dolls who wore pretty outfits, or makeup, or ate paste and then wet their nappy.

I haven’t changed as an adult: I’m still watching scifi instead of Gossip Girl 🤓😬

But none of this 'atypical' behaviour for most girls of my generation made me any less of a woman. In fact, I think it helped to make me feminist from a young age because I was angry at being treated differently to the boys who got the toys they wanted whereas I was stuck with receiving girl toys that I hated but kept being given because I was a girl. I saw the unfairness and I kept seeing it as I grew up. I saw that boys were encouraged to consider adventure and self discovery but the toys given to me were supposed to help 'train' me to be a wife and mother.

I don't think anything in that article is remotely new. Pretty much every point has already been said by many feminists fairly consistently over the years - that children are strongly influenced from a very early age into 'girl things' and 'boy things' (some go as far as to say this happens in the womb). Gina Rippon focused on the plasticity of the brain.

This idea fits neatly into the stereotype that girls prefer to play with dolls, particularly baby dolls, since they are preparing, as any young she-mammal would, to perform the many roles of motherhood. If that all sounds slightly misogynist, you’re not wrong.

That bit made me laugh - why is that misogynist? Why is motherhood such a deeply repulsive concept? 😆

She seems focused on Barbie and uses it interchangeably with dolls, but Barbie is a relatively modern phenomenon. It is a part of American capitalism, cultural influence, middle-class aspirations and affluence that has spread around world, like jeans, sneakers and McDonalds. Dolls are a much, much older concept and have been a part of human history for millennia.

This thinking has even been extended to monkeys, testing whether adorable male baby macaques are somehow led by their penises, like a divining rod, towards a preference for cars over dolls.

I'll admit I'm not an intellectual titan. I'm not a scientist and I probably wouldn't score particularly high on any kind of IQ test.
However, am I the only one able to immediately spot a glaring flaw in this section of the article? Neither the author of the article not the scientists involved in these studies seem to have noticed it. Or at least it's not mentioned in the piece.

Assuming these macaques are not pets that venture out into modern society, monkeys do not know what a car is. They will never drive a car themselves nor see it on a regular basis in their environment. Children, on the hand, will develop an understanding and association with cars - they will see them when taken outside by their parents; they will also see adults driving cars. Therefore a toy car might elicit a deeper interest and fascination in human children than some completely random object that a child is unlikely to have encountered in their life.

It's also not mentioned what kind of doll was used. I'll assume it was a Barbie or something similar. The monkeys may understand it to be a human shaped object.
I find it bizarre that car and doll were chosen for the studies. These objects don't have much, if any, relevance to macaque society. They should have used a realistic baby macaque doll as the female coded toy. I don't know what male macaques would use. I think 'toys' are a human phenomenon, which means the study is kind of stupid to begin with.