Gender Stereotypes In Advertising On Children

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In today's society, choosing the "right" toys for your kids is a very important thing. People believe that car toys are for boy and barbies are for girls. But what happens when kids are the ones who decide which toys are for boys and girls? In this paper, it is going to be discussed the effects of commercials on children's perceptions of gender appropriate toy use and how manipulative TV commercials can be on children.
For over three decades, there have been an average of 40 thousand commercials advertising what the right toys for boys and girls are. "Girls and boys are often portrayed in stereotyped roles in commercials for children, and this has not changed dramatically over time. Commercials present gender stereotypes through overt factors, …show more content…

The two commercials that they decided to use for the "all boys" commercial was the Harry Potter Legos and Playmobil Airport Set. It is explained that they specifically chose the Harry Potter Legos due to the equal gender appeal of the Harry Potter books. In addition, there were two non-toy commercials added to the experiment. The Chuckie Cheese restaurant and Lucky Charms cereal commercial as well as two public service announcements for the Center for Disease Control's "Verb" campaign and National PTA. They decided to use those commercials due to the equal gender representation. Only commercials that involved toys were manipulated and in order to create what they called the nontraditional commercials, they had to place girls' faces on top of the boys' faces. Finally, in the control group there were two nontoy neutral commercials of two beverages (Sunny Delight and Capri Sun) which became replaced by two toy commercials. All of those methods seem to be qualitative methods and not …show more content…

And 2) How would the results change if they did that experiment this year (2017)? This research would be very important because, for the first question, it would help explain a lot why the kids made that decision. Was it all based on the commercial or also based on how those kids were raised? And it would help with comparing and contrasting the results of the same experiment done many years later. It would be very interesting to compare both and to see if TV commercials still influence kids the way they did back in the day or to see if the commercials actually changed more to a neutral gender and kids nowadays don't have to worry that much about which toys are for which

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