Putting girls in pink ‘harms their future’

Colour coding for children has long-term effects, says expert

Pretty in pink: campaigners argue children should not be stereotyped (Picture: Ann Worthy/Alamy)

30 April 2014

Forcing girls to wear pink and play with pink toys is wrong and could lead to them being treated differently as adults, a spokeswoman for a leading private schools group said.

Hannah Webster, communications manager of the Independent Association of Prep Schools, said it “beggars belief” that children’s toys are still colour coded by gender.

She said that girls are told their role is to be “pretty and frilly” while boys must be “virile” and take charge. Writing in Attain, the magazine for independent schools, Ms Webster said: “There will be those who say that pink and blue colour coding does not matter, that it is just a fact that boys like blue and girls like pink. They are wrong.”

She added: “If we designate a particular colour to a gender, it leads us to designate all manner of other things by gender too. The result is girls and boys read different kinds of books, play with different kinds of toys, study different subjects, consider different occupations, have different roles within the workplace and family and are ultimately valued differently by society.”

It comes as the Let Toys Be Toys campaign is urging shops to stop segregating toy departments. Marks & Spencer has already pledged to make its toys “gender neutral”. A similar Let Books Be Books project is backed by children’s laureate Malorie Blackman, poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy and the author Philip Pullman.

Ms Webster said: “Most of us want a society in which people are judged according to their whole identities, rather than just their gender. And we can only have a hope of this if we stop presuming an array of character traits — starting on the basis of colour preference — go hand in hand with a person’s biological sex.”

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Putting girls in pink ‘harms their future’

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