Great feature in Stella - the Sunday Telegraph magazine today. Unfortunately I can't find it online unless anyone else can. It's by Clover Stroud and the headline is 'Once upon a time…'
Apologies about the length but it is a four-page feature.
It is challenging the whole boy/girl stereotyping/sexism bollox in toys and pretty much echoes everything we have been saying on here and other threads. It includes the Let Toys Be Toys Campaign and Mumsnet quoting Megan Perryman and the impact they are having. Is the author a MNer? It talks about children's films, the skewed casting of girls (research by Dr Stacy Smith, University of California). It also quotes Debbie Sterling the CEO of Goldibox, "a toy company on a mission to inspire the next generation of female engineers".
Too long to c&p but worth getting hold of. Maybe the tide is turning…..
I've posted before that when my daughters were small (late 1960s/1970s) they were never bombarded by pink tat and had clothes in all colours of the rainbow and I wondered what had happened to change things. The article quotes Dr Elizabeth Sweet from the University of California saying that in the American Sears catalogue of 1975 few toys were marketed specifically towards one gender and had pix of boys playing with kitchen sets and girls with building blocks just as I remember in the UK. It was the 1980s when amplification of age and sex differences took hold as a marketing strategy (the article says).
This all leaves me wondering if there was more to it than just marketing, in the UK anyway, as it was in 1970 that the Equal Pay Act became law and 1975 the Sex Discrimination Act was passed.
So was it simply marketing - searching to expand the market by brainwashing children so they could double their sales by labelling boy/girl - or was there a more, perhaps even subconscious subtle agenda i.e. to reverse the unacceptable march of females towards equality by putting us back in our little pink boxes where we ought to be? I do love a good conspiracy theory 
However, the author, who has given her daughter a selection of toys from trucks to to train sets and from dolls to teapots admits she smiles a little more enthusiastically when her daughter kisses her dolly than when she pushes a truck across the floor. "Holding her doll, she looks like a mummy, like me. I am a feminist, yet old habits die hard."
Great article, shame about the ending…..
I've always thought you could be a mum and an engineer and I am a gran brought up in pre-liberation era 