Abi Bechtel, a mother of three, was shopping at Target two years ago when she spotted a sign in a toy aisle that advertised “building sets,” and, separately, “girls’ building sets.” Bechtel rolled her eyes, took a photo and posted it on Twitter.

“Don’t do this, Target,” wrote Bechtel, an Ohio university instructor.

Two months and 3,000 retweets later, Target responded to the swell of customer criticism with a promise that its stores would begin phasing out signs that categorize toys by gender.

The 2015 move was applauded by researchers and parents concerned that labelling toys for “girls” or “boys” reinforces harmful gender stereotypes. But a backlash soon erupted on social media, with some customers decrying “political correctness” and fearing the world was headed toward “the end of boys and girls.”

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“I think Target may be forgetting who has made their stores strong,” Franklin Graham, the head of a prominent American Evangelical organization, wrote in a Facebook post that was shared nearly 50,000 times. “It’s not gender-neutral people out there — it’s working American families, fathers and mothers with boys and girls they love.”

As calls to end the gendered marketing of toys have gained momentum in recent years — the White House hosted a conference on toys and gender just before President Barack Obama left office, and the U.K.’s Let Toys Be Toys campaign has convinced 14 companies to remove gender labels — each step forward has been hotly debated.

Fighting for change are parents who want to see a world in which toys come in a rainbow of colours and are divided by interest and age, rather than gender. Detractors like Graham believe the push to remove labels from toys is part of a broader movement to create genderless children. Many online comments criticizing Target’s move were steeped in homophobia and transphobia.

While complaints like Bechtel’s have pushed the toy industry to move away from some of the more blatant gender-based labelling practices, holiday shoppers are unlikely to notice major changes in stores. The pink-and-blue divide in toy aisles persists, and a recent U.K. survey found that gender stereotypes are on full display in most 2017 holiday toy catalogues, including that of global giant Toys “R” Us.

Toys are more divided by gender more than ever before. While traditionalists argue that it is natural for girls to play with dolls and boys to play with trucks, the science behind toy selection paints a picture far more complex. The choices children make about which toys to play with and which to avoid are informed, in part, by the world around them, and can have far-reaching consequences.

Walking through toy stores in the years after her daughter was born in 2002, Elizabeth Sweet saw a different world than the one she remembered from her childhood.

“I was really struck by the pink and blue segregation,” she says. “I had seen it evolving somewhat over time, but when I had my own child it was undeniable that there was something going on there.”

Sweet grew up in the 1970s playing with Lincoln Logs, Tinkertoys, Lego — building toys in bright primary colours. She had a Fisher-Price castle with a trap door through which she could banish figures to a dungeon. Her Barbie doll drove a Tonka Blazer; her Lone Ranger action figure rode shotgun.

Sweet wanted to find out if there really had been a change. Beginning in 2009, for her dissertation and post-doctoral research at UC Davis in California, she analyzed more than 7,300 Sears catalogue advertisements from the 20th century to understand how gender marketing has changed over time.

She examined advertisements and labelled them as explicitly gendered (“every little girl loves dolly”), implicitly gendered (through words like “fireman” or “mother,” and later, the use of pink and blue), or not gendered.

Sweet discovered that toys are more divided by gender today than they have been at any point in history — a swell that occurred, paradoxically, as western society made significant strides toward gender equality. Even in the 1950s, when many toys were designed to prepare girls for a life of homemaking and boys for future careers in the industrial economy, more than half of the toy advertisements she examined were gender neutral.

In the 1970s, at the height of the second-wave feminist movement, Sweet found a significant shift: explicit gender-based advertising was almost nonexistent, seen in less than 2 per cent of ads in the 1975 Sears catalogue, and implicit advertising had decreased to 31 per cent. But by 1995, the overall percentage of gendered advertising had rebounded to levels seen in mid-century.

What happened between 1975 and 1995? Sweet attributes the regression to a few factors. Regulations in the U.S. television industry enacted in the 1970s to protect children from advertising were dismantled by the Reagan administration in 1984. This move allowed the toy industry to create television shows that essentially served as advertisements for their products — My Little Pony, G.I. Joe, Care Bears.

Advancements in market research told toy companies that advertising directly to children, rather than their parents, and to boys and girls separately, would be more lucrative. Over time, the segmenting of the market into “boy” and “girl” categories became the defining feature of toys.

“The ripple effects of these monumental 1980s-era marketing changes are evident today,” Rebecca Hains, a professor of advertising and media studies at Salem State University, wrote in an op-ed in the Boston Globe. “Now, once classically gender-neutral toys are produced in ‘boy’ and ‘girl’ versions: Radio Flyer Wagons, Tinkertoys, Mega Bloks, Fisher-Price stacking rings, and everything in between come in ‘pinkwashed’ varieties, in hopes that families with children of each sex will buy twice the toys.”

At the same time, Sweet says, a cultural backlash against feminism was gaining momentum and the theory that men and women are equal but inherently different — think Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus in 1992 — began to take hold, which favoured preference over oppression as the reason women gravitated toward certain career and domestic roles.

By the early 2000s, when Sweet became a parent, gender had become the primary way of marketing toys.

“And not just gender,” she says, “but really deep stereotypes about gender. It’s not just that they’re marketing to girls, but that they’re marketing to a vision of girls as very interested in beauty and fashion, and boys as being very active and industrious, to the exclusion of all other types of interests and characteristics.”

Traditional gender roles seen in toy advertisements in the first half of the 20th century — girls as future homemakers, boys as career men — began to morph into fantasy gender roles.

“So you see the princess and the superhero emerge,” says Sweet, now an assistant professor of sociology at San Jose State University. “Ultimately it’s the same stereotypes and ideas about gender that are underneath those gender roles.” The same focus on beauty and domesticity. “But instead of being realistic,” she says, “they’re cloaked in fantasy.”

In Toronto, 4-year-old Ada Mullin — named in part after the 19th-century English mathematician and programming pioneer Ada Lovelace — is going through a princess phase.

Ada’s parents worried this time would come. Jessica Woolard, 39, a math teacher, and Sean Mullin, 38, an economist, spent Ada’s early years introducing her to toys carefully selected to develop problem-solving skills and foster curiosity about the way the world works. Books. Building sets. Magnetic tiles. Puzzles. They consciously avoided toys that played to stereotypes of beauty and fashion. Friends with daughters warned them about the inevitability of the princess phase, about how it would trickle into her life from the outside world.

It started a few months after Ada’s third birthday. On a trip to visit family in Oklahoma, she fell in love with her cousins’ collection of princess gowns. Back in Toronto, Ada came home from a birthday party with a princess colouring book and, to Woolard’s surprise, knew all the characters’ names.

She returned from school singing songs from Disney’s Frozen even though she had never seen the movie. For her birthday in November, Ada asked for an Elsa dress and Elsa heels. Heels!

“I’ve got to say, it breaks my heart a little bit,” Woolard says.

Woolard does her best to support Ada’s current passions while encouraging broader interests. Ada got the Elsa dress and, yes, the heels, for her birthday, but she also got a Paw Patrol car. For Christmas, Woolard is eyeing a Design & Drill — an upgrade on a toy tool that Ada has loved since her toddler days.

Ada still enjoys reading and playing with her magnetic building tiles, but princess stuff is No. 1. Pink is her favourite colour. She now distinguishes between things “for boys” and “for girls,” even though such lines have never been drawn in her home. Woolard often wonders where Ada’s interests would lie if she were free from outside influence.

“At birthday parties, the majority of gifts she gets from her peers are pink and involve mermaids, ballerinas, dolls and dress-up,” Woolard says. “I’m grateful for the gifts, she loves them and they are very kind gestures. But I think a lot of a child’s interests are influenced simply by what they are exposed to.”

At Ada’s preschool graduation in the spring, Woolard watched as each child was handed a diploma and a necklace — pink for girls, blue for boys. It bothered her. Why should schools reinforce such arbitrary distinctions?

“I started to think about all the subtle messages (Ada) absorbs from the world every day. Yes, my daughter has an interest in princesses and pink now, but where does that come from?”

When Guinevere Orvis’s father bought her a Tonka truck for her fourth birthday, relatives were floored by the “boy” gift, but she adored it. That was in 1979. Now, decades later, Orvis has to convince her own daughter that trucks aren’t only for boys.

“We are still having the same battle,” says Orvis, a Toronto change management executive. “It feels like such little progress has been made.”

The 38-year-old Tonka truck was recently restored by a relative and gifted to Orvis’s son for his second birthday. Her daughter prefers stuffed animals and dinosaurs.

“When we go to Toys “R” Us she calls the section with cars and robots the boys section,” Orvis says. “We say, ‘This is not the boys’ toys section, this is the section for kids who like robots and cars.’ ”

Orvis and her husband didn’t teach their daughter that. So where does it come from?

“It’s easy to assume children are born naturally liking certain toys,” says Lisa Dinella, a psychologist and researcher at Monmouth University’s Gender Development Laboratory in New Jersey. “The social aspect starts very young, so sometimes what is interpreted as a clear biological choice can be explained partially through some of the social factors that are built into toys.”

While there is evidence to suggest play habits are partly innate — studies have identified toy preferences in babies, links between hormones and play habits, and a fondness for cars and trucks over dolls in our primate cousins — both biological and social factors influence kids’ choices about what toys to play with and how to play with them. Nature and nurture. Not one or the other.

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Dinella pointed to one Cambridge University study that followed children from age 3 to 13 and found that while boys were slightly more aggressive on average than girls, aggressive play made all kids more aggressive over time.

“The beauty of this study is that it’s showing that it’s not that someone’s aggressive tendencies is 100 per cent driving their toy choice, but rather that there is that feedback that’s going in, the toys that they choose also changes how aggressive they are as they get older.”

Why does it matter which toys children play with? Dinella, who has spent much of her career studying the impact early learning experiences have on children, says we should care because science tells us that toys lead to learning.

“Every single toy that a child engages with teaches a different type of skill, and many toys teach lots of skills,” she says. Dolls and pretend kitchen sets teach complex sequencing of events and language skills. Blocks and puzzles teach spatial abilities and math foundations.

Dinella says it’s important for all children to learn all of the lessons, rather than be limited to those that marketed to them based on stereotypes and assumptions about what they are interested in.

Unlike biology, Dinella says, the social factors that influence toy choice are changeable. Children are guided by explicit “boy” or “girl” labelling, through cues such as colour, and also through observational learning — the gender of the child shown playing with a toy on packaging and advertisements, and which toys they see their peers playing with. Once a child makes a decision about whether a toy is “for girls” or “for boys,” Dinella says, their goal, often, is to conform to their gender group.

A few years ago, Dinella, with co-authors Erica Weisgram and Megan Fulcher, tested the long-held assumption that boys like wheeled toys more than girls do. In three separate studies on preschoolers, they found no evidence that boys are naturally more interested in wheeled toys, contrary to the oft-cited studies that showed a preference for cars and trucks in boy monkeys.

The findings suggest that a combination of social factors subtly guide their interests, Dinella says, telling children what they are supposed to like and influencing adults’ choices on what to buy for them. Even more interesting, when the children were asked later about which toys they thought girls and boys would like, their answers reflected the stereotype rather than their actual choices.

“By preschool they already knew this expectation that boys were supposed to like wheeled toys more than girls were.”

The toys kids choose to play with can have long-term effects. Dinella pointed to the findings of a recent study by researchers at Pennsylvania State University that followed children from age 10 to 25 and found that kids who played more with traditionally masculine toys ended up in more traditionally masculine careers, which came with higher salaries.

The modern trend of making pink and blue versions of toys sends the wrong message, Dinella says, reinforcing that idea that there are rules about whether toys are for girls or for boys.

“Rather than changing colour of toy, I say just take gender out of the whole equation. Just make a toy.”

Some argue that parents are free to choose whatever toys they want for their children. “If my daughter wanted a monster truck, she got one and if my son wanted a doll, he got one,” read one of the comments in response to Target’s 2015 announcement. “I didn’t need bloggers or Target to tell me it was okay by posting gender neutral signs.”

Elizabeth Sweet, the sociologist, says such arguments fail to consider that kids are embedded in a much larger environment that provides rewards and sanctions for gender-appropriate behaviour.

“A parent can give a child a toy that goes against a gender stereotype,” Sweet says. “But when they go to school and get teased and harassed by their peers they may decide that going against the norm is not worth the social cost.”

When Sally Seston’s son was 4, he became fascinated with vacuum cleaners. All the toy versions came in pink in the late 1990s, so Mom got creative. She bought her son a DustBuster.

“He loved it,” says Seston, a retail consultant in Toronto and New York City who works with companies, including toy makers and retailers, to help them sell products.

When the toy industry is criticized for using gender stereotypes to market to children, companies often counter that they are giving consumers what they want. Seston understands the predicament. She agrees in principle with the push to remove gender stereotypes from children’s toys, but says if customers want change they must demand it.

“Toy companies are not at the forefront of social change,” she says. “Change is expensive, and you’re not going to invest and make that unless you see a business reason to do that.” Some people may complain, but the products on the shelves are selling. “Money talks,” Seston says.

With Toys “R” Us in bankruptcy protection and Canadian toy retailer Mastermind expanding across the country, the Canadian toy market may be an interesting one to watch for signs of a shift.

Mastermind’s 2017 holiday gift guide provides a fascinating case study in what a gender-neutral world could actually look like. The catalogue is bright and colourful, in shades of green, blue and red, and it defies stereotypes at every opportunity.

The science page features a girl playing with a toy jet engine. The art page features a boy painting on an easel. The games page shows a girl and boy playing table hockey together. The dolls stand alone, featured without any child models, leaving it to parents and children to decide who they are appropriate for.

Most surprising is the Lego page featuring a girl battling a Star Wars heavy assault walker — notable because the manufacturer markets its Star Wars line almost exclusively to boys, while its girl-targeted “Lego Friends” has been criticized for featuring simpler and more frivolous building kits, such as a cupcake café, hair salon, snow resort and veterinarian horse trailer.

Mastermind’s gift guide stands in stark contrast with other 2017 holiday toy catalogues, the majority of which play to gender stereotypes, according to research by the U.K.’s Let Toys Be Toys. The survey found boys are four times more likely to be shown playing with cars and twice as likely to be pictured with building toys; girls are twice as likely to be shown with kitchens or other domestic play sets and twice as likely to be featured with arts and crafts.

Jon Levy, Mastermind’s co-founder and chief executive officer, says the company does not have an agenda to promote social equality, nor does it have policies related to gender representation. The presentation of toys in advertisements and in stores, he says, is a reflection of their business model, which has always been about providing a curated selection of specialty toys that are well-made and fun. The gift guide is created in house by a team of young designers, Levy says.

However, Mastermind does not buy for girls and boys separately. “That’s just not in how we think,” Levy said. The focus, instead, is on play value, authenticity and what children enjoy playing with at different ages and stages.

It’s difficult to imagine a scenario in which the catalogue was created without any discussion of gender inclusivity. It’s easy to imagine that a toy company executive might want to tread lightly in this area, especially given the backlash Target faced for its shift.

Gendered marketing is not a subject retailers seem eager to discuss. Toys “R” Us Canada declined an interview request for this story. Walmart Canada did not respond. A spokesperson for Amazon Canada said yes to an interview initially, but declined after learning the subject of the story.

Even so, small signs of change are steadily emerging. Canadian toy maker Spin Master took action after hearing concerns from parents whose children were disappointed that Skye, the popular female pup from Paw Patrol, was excluded from merchandise marketed to boys.

“We value the feedback and listen closely to parents and children with regard to their feelings about the show and our characters,” spokesperson Jodi McDonald said in an email.

Spin Master has started incorporating Skye into boys’ apparel and Chase and Marshall, two boy pups, into girls’ apparel, and has also worked with companies that license the Paw Patrol brand, such as Nickelodeon, to ensure Skye is included whenever three or more pups are shown in merchandise, McDonald said.

Toy manufacturers often respond to criticism by citing focus group research which they say has shown boys and girls gravitate toward different toys. To create “Lego Friends,” the company “embarked on four years of global research with 4,500 girls and their moms,” a Lego spokesperson told the Atlantic.

“If you’re doing research on kids who have already been socialized in a culture that really gender segregates and gender stereotypes toys in its media and its advertising, then of course children are going to express a preference for what they’ve been socialized to believe is correct for their sex or gender,” Rebecca Hains, the advertising and media studies professor, said in an interview.

Target’s 2015 move wasn’t revolutionary, and it did not bring about the end of boys and girls. Hains isn’t sure the retailer deserved the accolades. “Companies get a lot of mileage out of making what are actually pretty small changes in response to the criticism that they’ve received.” A more meaningful change would have been to reorganize the store by interest, she says.

Dinella, the psychologist, empathizes with the position toy retailers and manufacturers are in. This is a symbolism that society has created, she says, and it will take movement from everyone — researchers, parents, toy makers and retailers — to undo the negative effects of labelling of toys.

“But if we all agree that it’s important for kids to be able to have a wide range of experiences and that we want the best for our kids, then I think it’s a worthwhile pursuit.”