![]() These articles, however, do not always agree on whether toys show gender differences and, for those that do, how large the differences are.Īnyone who has watched children play would probably conclude that girls and boys tend to prefer different toys, but researchers have not always been able to document these gender effects. There are hundreds of scholarly articles documenting gender-related toy preferences, and these are often cited and shared in the popular press (e.g., Barford, 2014 Oksman, 2016). Consequently, parents, educators, and policymakers want to know whether gendered toys might be influencing boys and girls differently (e.g., Bainbridge, 2018 Kamenetz & Turner, 2019 Tortorello, 2019). Toys might influence children’s development of social and spatial skills (Jirout & Newcombe, 2015 Wong & Yeung, 2019) or signal later developmental changes such as sexuality (Li, Kung, & Hines, 2017) or aggressive behavior (Kung, Li, Golding, & Hines, 2018). Gender-related toy preferences, and their origin and development, remain a controversial topic. Forced choice methods produced larger gender-related differences than other methods, and gender-related differences increased with age. Researchers sometimes misclassified toys, perhaps contributing to an apparent gender difference in preference for neutral toys. When only dolls and vehicles were considered, within-sex differences were even larger and of comparable size for boys and girls. Preferences for gender-typical over gender-atypical toys were also large and significant ( d ≥ 1.20), and girls and boys showed gender-related differences of similar magnitude. Girls also preferred toys that researchers classified as neutral more than boys did ( d = 0.29). These differences were large ( d ≥ 1.60). Boys preferred boy-related toys more than girls did, and girls preferred girl-related toys more than boys did. We also assessed the impact of using different toys or methods to assess these differences, as well as the effect of age on gender-related toy preferences. Our systematic review and meta-analysis combined 113 effect sizes from 75 studies to estimate the magnitude of gender-related differences in toy preferences. These inconsistent findings could result from using different toys or methods to measure toy preferences or from studying children of different ages. Furthermore, not all studies of gender-related toy preferences find significant gender differences. However, the magnitude of these differences has not been firmly established. It is generally recognized that there are gender-related differences in children’s toy preferences.
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