A sixth grade class in Sweden filed a complaint against Toys R Us for having a catalog that featured “outdated gender roles because boys and girls were shown playing with different types of toys, whereby the boys were portrayed as active and the girls as passive”.

Whenever the gender behavior of children comes up, people are always quick to jump to anecdotes which always sound something like “well, when I was a kid I had trucks and dolls but I always just chose the dolls and I’m a girl so…”.  These stories seem to prove that there’s something inherent in gender, and that assumption is certainly supported by pretty much everything in our culture from sports to clothing to advertisements to how we all treat the boys and girls in our lives. However, I think the Nature vs Nurture debate is still strong here, and we can’t necessarily jump to those conclusions.

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