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Pink for the girls and blue for the boys. A vacuum cleaner for Marie along with a construction crane for Frank. Princess wallpaper for your girl's room, Ninja Turtles poster for the brother's space. Of course, none of this has anything to do with advertising, but is the consequence of a few hundred thousand years of development. We know this very well because science! That seems absurd, but it seems to be the firm belief of a not small segment of the population. To get us in the mood straight away, it is headed"Ideology, biology and toys - cars for boys - dolls for women". The thesis is not surprising: an allegedly decades-old"feud between gender research and biologists and psychologists." When sex research is usually dismissed as"ideological" and one indicates a line between gender studies and"real" science, so to speak, I guess that the study was not performed correctly or that one arrives with a huge backpack full of preconceived ideas created the topic. But what the heck, the commentary likes it: Achiles [sic!] Is hauled as a witness, it is compulsory that one should"leave the children alone and experimentation somewhere else" since the distinction is"organic" or one assesses that the"so-called'gender researchers'" would aim to"break up western society and families" (regrettably, the only dissenting vote does not glow with a very differentiated argumentation). Is this focused load of completely ideology-free science just a reaction to a provocative post? Regrettably not. The NZZ article does not offer a very critical approach to the sources used. There the anecdote is told from the Lego scientists (Lego did not"add this into the range" as promised in the article, but it's a limited edition) and also a"gender-neutral toy catalog" is mentioned. A research as part of a Swiss National Fund project is cited, but it primarily serves to construct a straw man at the end of the article (nobody claims that a woman doesn't study math because of a barbie). The very first question is as naive as the answer given to it"But this cannot conceal the fact that girls and boys each favor various toys. But why actually?" The answer according to the article would lie in the dispute between socialization (gender studies) or mathematics (all others presumably). This discussion in this form Appears to me to be fairly much 1970 as far as science is concerned (along with the localized dig is more or less untrue ): The biological difference exists but according to the present state of knowledge it is very small. Surely one cannot derive such clumsy"natural" tastes for toys out of this. The same goes for color tastes. Gender allocation did not appear until after World War I and children don't possess"natural" color tastes between pink and blue. Toy sex is a relatively new phenomenon which isn't"biology" driven. I have already blogged about the monkey research mentioned in the article (or at least the ones that I suspect are all about ). They are poorly conceived and definitely don't allow such far-reaching decisions to be drawn. I do not know the referenced hormone research. The only one that explicitly refers to toys that I discovered in a short research is that one. Among other methodological question marks that I would like to add, this one stood out (my emphasis):"Participants were 35 men and 29 women between age 18 and 22 years enrolled in an introductory psychology class at Texas A&M University." Even studies such as the monkey study or the hormone study show only relatively small differences. Even if seen uncritically, mr immortal would, in the best of cases, warrant gendered toys as a niche product. This is largely overlooked by those who refer to those studies. Additionally: The variant within one sex and how this overlaps with that of the other is barely addressed. The seemingly plagued lovers of the toy separating diet feign that we are dealing with two bell bottoms which hardly overlap.