The great gender divide ‐ does it really exist?

Looks at the attitudes of children, parents and marketers to gender‐specific products, and relates this to the efforts of the political correctness lobby to render them obsolete. Finds that marketers have tended to respond to adults rather than the children themselves, and that the 1980s and 1990s were a period when it was thought that gender equality required that young children be treated as though there was no difference between the preferences of boys and girls. Argues instead that gender differences are an important identifying factor for children and that young boys and girls do prefer toys that reflect gender, for instance dolls for girls and guns for boys. Concludes that there are considerable opportunities for marketers and product developers to exploit the demand for gender‐specific products for children under eight.