When I was growing up, a Halloween costume wasn’t something you bought. You had to make it yourself.

Scanning through my photo albums, you will find me in homemade costumes resembling a martian, a clown, a doctor, an undertaker, a ghost, a nurse, a vampire and the Lone Ranger. Yeah that’s me in October 1979.

But here we are in 2013 and Halloween costumes are big business. But something is missing when it comes to girl costumes. Something very, very important.

Do you know what it is?

Last year, I went on a rant about the Halloween costume choices for girls in a popular post titled “Mommy, I want to be sexy for Halloween“.

My main point wasn’t about the skimpiness of the costumes (that’s a whole other issue), but the discrepancy between the boys and the girls costumes. I was hoping for a different turn out this year, but no such luck.

Usually I go out to my local stores and snap pictures of these marketing disasters, but I am too busy this year to make the trip. Fortunately, a quick visit to Target’s web site makes this a super easy task. They’ve done all the discrimination work for me!

Let’s play a game from Sesame Street (which was still being played on the show in 1979) called….

One of these things is not like the others!

From the two screen shots below, see if you can spot the difference between the boy costume choices (top row) and the girl costume choices (bottom row). Can you tell which thing is not like the others?

Figure it out yet?

Do you see which category the girls DON’T get to choose from?

That’s right. Career.

What message does this send?

Girls can’t have a career.

Halloween is about dress up and make believe, right? So why can’t she fantasize about being a firefighter or an astronaut or a brain surgeon? Why are there no career costumes for girls?

Girls can’t even pretend to have a career.

Sesame Street would not have made such a ghastly mistake (sorry if that came off a little punny).

Surely you’re not serious, are you?

Yes, I am. And just to be sure I wasn’t overlooking things, I used the sidebar to filter by theme.

This is what I found:

Still no career costumes for girls. Boys get “Uniformed occupation,” but no such corresponding category appears on the girls side.

But hey if your daughter wants to be a sexy fairy, she has plenty of costume ideas to choose from in the storybook and fairy tale section.

Another Halloween fail. Maybe next year, right?

I feel like Linus, sitting in the Great Pumpkin Patch… waiting for nothing.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this. Post your own costume frustrations below.