Seriously, who comes up with this stuff? If you missed this story, the idea is that basically, the trickle-down effect of buying your child ‘gendered’ toys (pink Barbies for girls, Action Man for boys, etc) at an early age means that women are subconsciously shaping up to pick professions that pay less well. And worse, this isn’t some made up non-scientific survey: it’s the view of the Consumer Affairs minister, Jenny Willott.
Research found that low-paying occupations like nursing have an over-representation of women, while men are more likely to be engineers and physicists. Though we can't discount the effect that the influences like toys might have on those formative years, what’s notable about this story is the impact that teachers, parents and others have on shaping career prospects and bolstering confidence in women who may feel like engineering is ‘not for them’ haven’t really been explored.
While a lot of the blame is being left on the doorstep on companies like Marks and Spencer and Debenhams who are apparently becoming more ‘gender-neutral’ in their relentless pushing of brightly coloured toys to impressionable kids, surely a conversation needs to be had around why women feel less inclined to occupy these spaces. Is it really as patronisingly simple as the suggestion that if you buy a seven-year-old girl a make-up set she’s less likely to become a computer engineer?
There is an abunadance of depressing statistics avaiable on this topic - for example, in 2013, only 6% of engineers in the UK were female, and last year’s study from the US which showed that only one fifth of Physics PhD’s were awarded to women. So clearly something needs to change. I’m not saying we should do like the army of knittivists making it their mission to make the urban world more feminine and womb-like by knitting onto lamposts and gates and stuff, but if these stats are true, then the working world certainly needs to become more suitable for and appealing to women.
And maybe less blame should be pointed in the direction of all the parents out there buying their daughters a Barbie. After all, even she was a computer engineer once.
Picture: Getty
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.