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kids

Last week, I read an article about a gender discrimination complaint filed against Toys R Us.  The complaint was launched by a bunch of Swedish 6th graders who found the Toys R Us 2008 Christmas catalogue offensive because it reinforced stereotypical gender roles by featuring boys in active roles and girls in passive ones. According to the class’s teacher, the complaint brought forward by these children is the result of more than 2 years’ work on gender roles.

This story makes me want to jump for joy. To see an example of young people recognizing and trying to actively combat sexism and outdated gender roles gives me hope that today’s youth really can effect change in the world. One of the students even stated that children of either sex should be able to be whoever they want to be even if “guys want to be princesses sometimes.” How could I not swoon?

And then I read the online reader comments that followed the story. And I wanted to cry.

Although I’ve been around the block enough times to know how attached people are to the idea of gender and gender roles, I somehow am repeatedly shocked at how essentialist some people get. Several readers who posted comments seemed to confuse the Swedish children’s complaint as a desire to obliterate sex/gender altogether and homogenize all human beings, and many argued that there is a distinct, innate difference between boys and girls. Seriously, people, it’s the 21st century and you’re still trying to peddle that nonsense?

There’s really too much to address on this topic in a simple blog post, and, frankly, this whole discussion is so old that I can’t believe I’m even writing about it. But after having researched and written many an undergraduate psych paper on gender roles, I do know that an array of reputable psychologists and sociologists have studied gender and gender roles in children and have pretty much determined that gender is largely socially constructed. The types of toys children are given to play with, the types of clothes they’re dressed in, the types of activities they’re encouraged to pursue, and even how adults interact with boy babies versus girl babies: all that stuff makes a mark on a kid.

I don’t think the Swedish kids are calling for a complete erasure of sex and gender. I think the point is that we all need to be more mindful of how boys and girls/men and women are treated and represented and what kinds of expectations we have on each. The point is that difference shouldn’t be based on biological sex. Boys can be princesses and girls can be knights in shining armour. Get over it.

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Frau mit Kind, German Federal ArchiveYou know we all love a good story about mompreneurs, those smart women who climb their way from dirty diaper obscurity to millionaire status. They develop a product all moms need, they do some clever marketing and voila! They’ve made it to Oprah (and believe me, when my daughter was born, I looked down at her and thought, “You’re gonna be my ticket to meeting Oprah”).

Well, it turns out that the reality–at least for some moms–is a bit more dire. The Globe and Mail reported yesterday on some bummer numbers from Statistics Canada. “Highly educated women face a much more severe loss of earning power when they have children compared to mothers with less education,” says the Globe. “Mothers who are highly educated earn less than childless women with similar degrees of education.” How bad is the disparity? “At age 30, hourly earnings of mothers averaged $15.20 in 2004 compared to $18.10 for childless women.”

The explanation from StatsCan is that the more highly educated you are, the more specialized your skills. Leaving the work force to go on mat leave means it’s hard to catch up when you return to work.

But it could be just as likely that when you have kids, you just don’t have the same opportunities to be a workaholic as you were when you were child-free. If your highly-educated self were working in a high-paying job, you would no longer be able to stay at work all hours–and this might force you to leave that lucrative position for something with lower pay, fewer benefits and more flexible hours.

Does that make you think twice about poking holes in the condoms? Or reaching for the Ph.D.?

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