IoToys and gender

Abstract

The issue of gender and how this impacts on the study of childhood and media has been a common topic of discussion for decades. It is a wide-ranging topic, however. In this chapter, we focus on a number of IoToys as examples of gendered toys. IoToys are a new phenomenon in children’s changing media environment. Discussion and so-called media panic usually tend to focus on new and still partially unknown phenomena, such as privacy risks. Although there are rapid changes in the media environment and in the notion of childhood itself, there are also some recurring features that remain largely unchanged. Examples of these are gendered toys, games and play. Previous research on toys has documented the gender-differentiated use of such explicit markers as colours, names and logos in toy marketing (Owen & Padron, 2016). Digital gaming has been promoted by marketing different games for boys and girls. This has been noticed for example in the Children’s Media Barometer in Finland 2012 (Suoninen, 2013; Kotilainen & Suoninen, 2013). The segmentation of gender into target groups has been done largely for commercial reasons, in order to market products more accurately. Gendered toys are perhaps the best-known and most visually perceivable example of segmentation. A brief visit to any toy store will instantly show “pink and blue” sides of the store and the toy market. However, IoToys bring a new and interesting dimension to segmentation. Traditionally, toys for boys have focused more on technology than those for girls (Buckingham, 2011). Also, boys have owned more technological devices, especially televisions, computers and games consoles (d’Haenens, 2001; Marsh et al., 2005). But IoToys combine technology and toys, and in this way they can be considered as somewhat ambivalent products that blur the gender boundary in the toy market.