How the toys you buy your kids can limit their future career options
· Thoughts
Bernard Goldstein and Jack Oldham got it right back in 1979 when they said: “Like so many other things taken for granted, work-related perceptions, beliefs and values are acquired gradually through the learning process.” They were talking about children and work, and how children are socialised to imagine certain futures, depending on their gender, race, ability level and socio-economic status.
From their earliest days, children are learning as they watch their parents and caregivers, as they read books and watch cartoons, and as they play with their toys. Often, this activity touches on the work grown-ups do everyday – toddlers move toy trucks around a sandpit, dress up as princesses and superheroes, or read books about visiting the doctor – and all of this ‘playing pretend’ helps them form ideas about their own future pathway.
But if you asked many parents or primary teachers they would tell you that children are too young to be learning about careers. “Let kids be kids” they say, “leave all that stuff for later on”.
Which brings me to the topic of today’s edition of Pondering Careers – should we just ‘let them play’ and not worry about the stereotypes we’re building, or should we actually be thinking deeply about this?
Because I’m probably trying to do too much and trying to be kinder to myself, rather than my usual word-fest this edition will simply be a collection of work that has already been completed and peer-reviewed on the topic.
I’m not going to lie, this is sobering reading. We have a very long way to go, and often movement that appears to be in the right direction actually masks further entrenchment of stereotypes. There’s also a huge gender lens here, which will certainly alienate some people who would like to pretend the gender pay gap doesn’t still exist. That’s why I think it’s so important that we turn to the research to investigate how good intentions sometimes go astray, and to ponder what needs to change when it comes to how we talk about jobs and work with younger children.
As Stephanie Reich, Rebecca Black, and Tammie Foliaki found in their study, Constructing Difference: Lego® Set Narratives Promote Stereotypic Gender Roles and Play, there’s a lot we need to think about.
…boys are encouraged to “investigate,” “explore,” “build,” and “repair” whereas girls are enticed to “relax,” “primp,” “hang out,” “shop,” and “work on your tan.” Instead of placing imaginary play in a “high-tech laboratory,” “space shuttle,” or “coast guard boat,” as it typically is located in the series marketed to boys (i.e., City), female players are encouraged to enact stories in “bakeries,” “malls,” and “beauty salons.”
Want a bit more background first?
A few weeks ago Chris Webb shared a deep-dive into the current state of play for childhood career development, which I highly recommend as a great starting point if you’re new to the topic, and I’ve also written down my own ideas on the way children build career awareness throughout childhood here.
Paul Hartung, Erik Porfeli, and Fred Vondracek conducted a really detailed review in 2005 that covers a lot of the theory, and which explains that children start to solidify their ideas about work and what it actually is towards the end of primary school. Col McGowan has since done some great work in developing scales to measure career development progression which is also worth a read. And for an understanding of the trends check out Child career development: present and future trends by Mark Watson, Laura Nota and Mary McMahon.
Side note: I don’t quote Gottfredson, read this if you want to learn more about why.
There was a flurry of research into childhood career development about ten years ago, but not a huge amount of movement since – searching through the past 5 years of Australian Journal for Career Development shows a grand total of 1 article published (the one from Col’s scales). There are four results for the International Journal for Educational and Vocational Guidance (once again, one of them is Col’s work). In other words, I don’t have a whole heap to share with you directly related to childhood career development from the last five years (but wouldn’t it be nice if we could change that…)
For more information and a comprehensive background on the role of gender-typing in children’s toys and media, check out Lisa Dinella and Erica Weisgram’s introduction to their special issue here. They talk about how toys and media have a significant impact on children as they develop, and that adults are the ones deciding which messages are conveyed to which children. As they explain, “It is possible that these themes reflect the preferences of boys and girls and that toy companies are giving their customers what they desire. However, it is also possible that toy companies are prescribing stereotypes and leading children to accept or reject these themes by using explicit labels, gender-typed colors, and/or male and female models on their packaging, all of which can affect children’s interest (Yeung and Wong 2018; Spinner et al. 2018). These two possibilities are not mutually exclusive and, in fact, they can be a cycle in that children’s interests are prescribed by toy companies and, in the development of future toys, these interests can shape gender-stereotyped toy development.”
…a cycle in that children’s interests are prescribed by toy companies and, in the development of future toys, these interests can shape gender-stereotyped toy development.
Rather than go on about it myself, I’ve collected some of the research I often reference in my own work. Hopefully, this will help you build your knowledge on the topic and enrich your own understanding of how decisions made by adults for very small children limit their future careers.
General/Overarching Research
The Gendered Marketing of Children’s Toys: An Integrative Review and De-gendering Agenda
Sagheer, S., Gurrieri, L., & Aleti, T. (2025). Marketing Theory.
This is a brand new comprehensive review that synthesises decades of research on how gendered marketing socialises children. The framework it introduces shows that children enter the marketplace already embedded in gender structures, and are then socialised further through gendered products, prices, places, and promotions.
One finding I hadn’t come across before; gendered pricing means boys can actually buy more toys than girls for the same budget. The gendered retail spaces and advertising are doing their work before children even begin to consciously form career ideas.
Gender-Typing of Children’s Toys: Causes, Consequences, and Correlates
Dinella, L. M., & Weisgram, E. S. (2018). Sex Roles, 79, 253–259.
This is the introduction to a special issue on gendered toy play I mentioned earlier, and it pulls together a lot of threads. By 12.5 months, infants already show gendered play patterns, and the strongest predictor of these patterns is what toys are already in their homes. Parents are choosing toys based on their own childhood experiences, and this creates a cycle; adults select stereotyped toys, which narrow children’s play, which narrows their skill development, which narrows their future opportunities.
Toys
Liu, J. (2020). Infancy, 25(5), 593–617.
Liu tested infants as young as 6 months to see when gendered toy preferences actually start showing up, and the answer is really early, but not for the reasons you might think. At around 15 months, boys showed no preference between dolls and cars, which challenges the idea that these preferences are just ‘natural’.
What actually predicted gendered toy choices? The toys already in the home, and parental attitudes. In other words, the adults are making the first move here; we’re shaping preferences before children can even articulate what they like.
Harrop, C., Jones, D. R., Sasson, N. J., Zheng, S., Nowell, S. W., & Parish-Morris, J. (2020). Autism Research, 13(5), 763–776.
This one used eye-tracking to measure where children looked when shown scenes of people playing with toys. Both autistic and typically developing children paid significantly more attention to actors and toys that were gender-consistent with their own sex.
Interestingly, both groups looked more closely at faces when a male actor was playing with a ‘female’ toy, suggesting they were actively monitoring and policing gender norms. School-aged children are already watching for ‘violations’ of who plays with what, and by extension, who does what kind of work. These cultural rules run deep.
Lipowska, K., & Łada-Maśko, A. B. (2021). Children, 8(9), 744.
This surveyed over 500 Polish parents about their awareness of gendered toy displays and their own attitudes. Over 90% noticed that shops arranged toys by gender. The paper makes the point that toy displays tell toddlers that men have professions while women have hobbies, and that the social role of men is about heroism and danger while women’s roles involve caring and appearance. Even in a more conservative cultural context, most parents were actually more liberal in their attitudes than the shops; the marketplace itself was encoding narrow career messages before parents could intervene, and limiting the choices parents can make.
Constructing Difference: Lego® Set Narratives Promote Stereotypic Gender Roles and Play
Reich, S. M., Black, R. W., & Foliaki, T. (2018). Sex Roles, 79(5–6), 285–298.
I referenced this one in my intro, and it deserves a closer look. This study directly compared the play narratives in Lego City sets (boys) and Lego Friends sets (girls). Lego City encouraged boys to enact skilled professions, heroism, and expertise. Lego Friends encouraged girls to focus on hobbies, domesticity, caring for others, socialising, being amateurs, and striving for beauty.
As a huge Lego fan, this one made me sad but also didn’t surprise me. I used to get frustrated when the kids were little and I would buy a new set that would only have one female pirate or soldier, so I’d fish out some of the feminine hair pieces and skirts from my old sets to throw into the mix.
The occupation gap is explicit; boys are shown as firefighters, police, and astronauts, while girls are apprentices and hobbyists. Given that Lego reaches generations of children globally, these narratives have real consequences for how children construct gendered ideas about what’s possible for them.
Media
Wright, J. C., Huston, A. C., Truglio, R., Fitch, M., Smith, E., & Piemyat, S. (1995). Child Development, 66(6), 1706–1718.
This is from 1995, but it’s a landmark piece and still holds up. The researchers tested primary-aged children on their understanding of two jobs – police officer and nurse – as seen on TV versus in real life. Kids could actually tell the difference between what they saw on screen and what they knew to be true, which is reassuring.
Children who were more likely to believe that TV was realistic had real-world career ideas that closely mirrored what they saw on screen, and the heavy TV watchers who thought it was realistic were the most likely to aspire to jobs they’d seen on television. It’s one of the first studies to directly link what kids watch to what they want to be.
Playing Princess: Preschool Girls’ Interpretations of Gender Stereotypes in Disney Princess Media
Golden, J. C., & Jacoby, J. W. (2018). Sex Roles, 79, 299–313.
If you’ve ever watched a group of preschoolers ‘play princess’, this study will ring true. The researchers observed 31 girls aged 3-6 during princess-themed pretend play, and what they found was that when the kids were asked how they pretended to be a princess, they could only describe what they wore – not what they did. The play was entirely about appearance, not action or agency.
These girls owned an average of 13 Disney Princess products each, and could name all 11 princesses. The characters are functioning as role models, but the roles being modelled are radically narrow; beauty and passivity, rather than competence or aspiration.
Sugar Coating Cartoons for Girls: Gender Stereotypical Themes and the Use of Food in Toy-Tied Media
Setten, E., & Cornwell, T. B. (2025). Journal of Consumer Affairs.
This study analysed over 1,000 hours of toy-tied media – the promotional cartoons designed to sell toy brands – and found massive gender differences. Sweets appeared eight times more frequently in girls’ content than boys’, used to signal nurturance and domesticity.
Boys’ content was dominated by violence and action. For viewers aged six and under, sweet food references were five times more common than in content for older children. The cartoons designed to sell toys to the youngest children are encoding very clear occupational messages; girls are homemakers and nurturers, boys are adventurers and agents.
Saarenmaa, L. (2024). European Journal of Cultural Studies, 27(2), 215–231.
This one analyses the Lego Friends TV series (from 2012 onwards), and it’s really relevant to how children form ideas about work. The series shows the Friends in after-school workplaces where work is always a pleasure, tangled up with their individual identities and passions. Sounds lovely, except that work is also consistently chaotic and insecure, and success requires friendship networks rather than skills or qualifications.
It functions as an early socialiser into both gendered occupational roles (baking, party planning, fashion) and a neoliberal work ethic where passion and social capital substitute for job security; and this messaging is being absorbed by kindy kids.
Books & Magazines
Gender Stereotypes in Young Children’s Magazines
Spinner, L., Cameron, L., & Tenenbaum, H. R. (2022). Mass Communication and Society, 25(5).
This study analysed over 100 UK children’s magazine covers and 42 full issues. The findings are stark; in boys’ magazines, jobs appeared more frequently than any other theme, while in girls’ magazines it was fashion, food, and home.
Girls’ magazines contained no speaking characters on their front covers. Educational activities were highlighted far more often in boys’ magazines, and girls’ readers were instructed to seek adult help significantly more often than boys. The researchers described these as ‘archaic messages’ that stifle girls’ aspirations while encouraging boys to think about future goals.
Content Analysis and Gender Stereotypes in Children’s Books
Taylor, F. (2003). Teaching Sociology, 31(3), 300–311.
This one makes the point that learning to read is itself part of the socialisation process; as children decode words, they are simultaneously decoding cultural scripts about who women and men are and what they do.
Taylor uses a structured content analysis of popular series like Dr. Seuss and the Berenstain Bears to show that gender ideology is embedded in the books children encounter from the very earliest stages of literacy. The literature review traces a consistent pattern from a landmark 1972 study through to replications in the 1990s; across decades, female characters in children’s books failed to express any career goals, female role models were missing, and male characters were portrayed as more independent. Women were associated with the household; men with production-oriented tools and the wider world. What children read shapes what they believe is possible for themselves.
Gender in Twentieth-Century Children’s Books: Patterns of Disparity in Titles and Central Characters
McCabe, J., Fairchild, E., Grauerholz, L., Pescosolido, B. A., & Tope, D. (2011). Gender & Society, 25(2), 197–226.
This is the big one. McCabe and colleagues analysed 5,618 children’s book titles published across the entire twentieth century in the United States, covering Caldecott Award winners, Little Golden Books, and books listed in the Children’s Catalog.
Males appeared nearly twice as often as females in book titles, and 1.6 times as often as central characters. In no series and by no measure were females represented more frequently than males.
The authors frame this as ‘symbolic annihilation’; the near-erasure of girls and women from the cultural landscape of childhood literature actively denies their importance and reinforces the gender hierarchy. The pattern isn’t static either – disparities worsened during the 1930s to 1960s (between waves of feminist activism) and moderated somewhat after, tying children’s book content directly to broader social politics. The stories children absorb from their earliest years present a world in which male characters are the protagonists and adventurers; this shapes children’s understanding of whose career stories get told.
Pownall, M., Heflick, N. (2023). Sex Roles, 89, 758–773.
If you’ve ever read the Mr. Men and Little Miss books, this one will make you look at them differently. Across three studies, the researchers analysed all 81 books in the Roger Hargreaves series and found that male characters were significantly more adventurous and active, while female characters were more domestic and passive.
I remember having these books as a kid with the same back cover – Mum used to say I was Little Miss Shy.
Books with female leads were also more likely to include male secondary characters. In one clever study, participants were able to categorise character traits by gender even when they didn’t know the character’s name or book title; the stereotype encoding is so consistent it operates below conscious awareness. Perhaps the most interesting finding was that parents actually preferred counter-stereotypical books to read to their daughters, but in practice the books that dominate the market encode the opposite. The numerical dominance of active male characters and passive female characters contributes to children’s understanding of which occupational roles belong to whom.
Fashion
Lapierre M.A., Ashtaputre A., Stevens Aubrey J. (2022). Young Consumers, 23(3), 432–457.
This is a fascinating one; a content analysis of 866 children’s t-shirts from 11 US retailers. Boys’ shirts featured active themes, dominance, and aggression; girls’ shirts emphasised social belonging, shyness, and attention-seeking. But here’s the part that really got me – higher-priced shirts were less likely to reinforce stereotypes, which means lower-income children are more intensively exposed to the most stereotyped messages. It’s the first study I’ve seen that examines the gendered messages literally worn on children’s bodies, every single day.
What’s missing from this picture?
This work is mainly about gender, maybe that’s a reflection on its relevance in career development, or maybe it’s more of a reflection that at least gender stereotypes are being spoken about. It’s harder to find literature on the influence of racial stereotypes on childhood career development, or on the lack of representation for diverse people including LGBTQIA+ and people with a disability. We also need to think more about socio-economic status, how it influences how we raise our children and the toys and media they are exposed to, and what ideas SES reinforces about what’s possible.
We Need Diverse Books is on a mission here – they’re a NFP that sponsors the publication of diverse books and then donates these titles so they can reach a wider audience. The Women’s Brick Initiative also have a petition asking for diverse skin tones in lego body parts; right now 89% are yellow or white/beige:
It’s not enough to know about the gender-based impacts of stereotypes within the materials we supply to our babies and toddlers; we need to be thinking deeply about the full picture.
I’m keen to do more in this area, so if you have ideas or want to work together please reach out.