It's time for sexism to exit through the gift shop

Striving to be gender inclusive- except in the gift shop.

When I was in college I had a job as a cashier in the gift shop at a children's museum. While I loved working at the museum, I didn't like working in the gift shop. It seemed to be the place in the museum that brought out the worst in people, children and grownups alike. A family who would spend the afternoon strolling through the exhibits, laughing and enjoying each others' company would end their visit in the gift shop, playing out the roles of whiny, wheedling children and bribing, manipulative adults.

But even more disturbing than the tantrums, bargaining, and empty threats, was the way families who had happily played dress-up with their boys and built block towers with their girls would pass over the gift shop threshold and suddenly become staunch gender-enforcers.

I vividly remember witnessing one such instance:

A mother and son were perusing the gift shop's one-dollar bins. Among the piles of cheap plastic toys the little boy, maybe four years old, settled on a pencil. A pencil. It was the color of bubble gum and had a matching pink downy feather sprouting out of where the eraser should have been. He smiled and held it up for his mother to see, absentmindedly stroking his cheek with the soft feather. She frowned at him and shook her head.

"No!" she said emphatically. "Pick something else."

Then she said something that made my stomach turn: "What would your father say?"

Now, it wasn't the museum's fault that this interaction happened in their gift shop. The pencil didn't say "girl" on it and it wasn't in a bin marked "girls". But it made me realize that the values that we were promoting in the rest of the museum (like gender equity) seemed to stop at the gift shop.

It is well-documented that when girls are reminded of their gender they tend to perform worse on academic tests. This phenomenon is known as stereotype threat and it happens when women internalize expectations that they won't be good at certain subjects like math or science. Many museums take this to heart and are careful to include representation of girls in their STEM exhibits by featuring girl characters, female pronouns, and profiles of important women in STEM professions. Likewise, many museums also won't discourage boys from trying on dresses, playing house, and caring for dolls in their exhibits.

The offerings in the exhibits reflect the museum's values, which educators and exhibit developers take very seriously. However, when it comes to gift shop offerings, a lot of museums will defer culpability. Our gift shop is run by an external vendor, they say with a shrug. We don't pick what gets sold or how it's displayed. Maybe true, but do you really have no say? What about that time you demanded that the cafe (also run by an external vendor) take peanuts off the menu? And don't try explaining that there's precedent for non-mission-aligned offerings because your cafe sells corn dogs next to the healthy eating exhibit. That's not an excuse, that's just hypocrisy. Get on that!

In a recent blog post on Let Clothes Be Clothes, the author asks London's Natural History Museum to imagine that the tops in their gift shop, "...aren’t t-shirts, but mini exhibits, and this exhibition is advertised to and for boys only – would that be acceptable? The Sciences are not a girl-free zone, and should never be promoted to children as such." Likewise, a post on Nerd in the Brain just articulated everything wrong with the unfortunate girls-only science books on sale at their local science museum. Namely that the books are "for girls" because they focus on the biology of flowers or the chemistry of baking muffins. Because boys don't want to bake muffins? Tell that to all the boys you didn't kick out of the play kitchen exhibit upstairs because they were busy pretending to bake. What message does it send to our visitors when they spend their whole museum visit exploring their interests freely, only to be packed back into little pink and blue boxes when they arrive in the gift shop?

This is about consistency of messaging so if it helps, think of it as branding. And it may be easier to improve than you think. Here are some suggestions for making the gift shop more gender inclusive, regardless of whether or not it's run by an external vendor:

• Refuse to carry gender-labeled items. This means no "Girls Only" science books and equal-opportunity dinosaurs.
• Do away with "girl" and "boy" sections. Group by age or interest instead.
• Run training sessions for staff so they can help customers in ways that don't make assumptions. For example, give them the language to respond to a customer who is shopping "for a girl" by asking questions about the girl's interests rather than automatically pointing the customer at anything pink.
• Make visible the efforts you are putting into promoting gender equity throughout the museum. Consider signage that points out specific design or content decisions you made and why you made them. If visitors have access to that knowledge, they might become more conscious of their own biases and assumptions about their children and themselves.

Our values are only as strong as our demonstrations of those values. The museum's mission shouldn't stop at the gift shop door.

Take it from children's museums- these toys are for everyone

Around this time of year the discussion about girl toys vs. boy toys gets particularly lively. Most of us who are concerned about the strict gendering of toys are in agreement: the way toys are designed and marketed is sexist and harmful to children. But all too often these discussions take a turn away from discussing the limitations this puts on children and starts maligning toys meant for girls and upholding boy toys as somehow better.

I’d like to argue for a more inclusive way of talking about toys. Instead of using the word “girly” as a synonym for “dopey” or “frivolous” or referring to “playing with dolls” in a dismissive way, let’s recognize the value of “girl” and “boy” toys. To say that playing with dolls is not as important as playing with blocks, we are creating a hierarchy of play and sending children the message that some interests are better than others.

And it has implications on the professions that grow out of these interests- it’s no secret that the salaries in the male-dominated engineering (building stuff) field are much higher than the salaries in the female-dominated teaching (communicating and taking care of people) field.

Here are three toys that are generally thought of as being for girls and why they are not to be dismissed. In fact these toys are so important that children’s museums include them in their exhibits, and though I’m completely biased, I happen to think that’s a great metric for evaluating a play experience.

1. Baby Dolls

A boy and girl with baby dolls at the Iowa Children's Museum 

Photo by Jody Landers.

These are some of the best dolls you can get. Unlike fashion dolls, they are realistic and often anatomically correct and their skin comes in a variety of colors. In their day-to-day lives, children are completely dependent on grownups and it can be extremely rewarding to flip things and become someone who takes care of someone else for a change. And children know just what to do. They rock the baby in their arms, sing to it, feed it, and change its diapers. When children imagine the feelings and needs of others, they are building empathy skills and those will serve them well regardless of whether they want to become parents themselves one day.

2. Dollhouses 

Historic dollhouse on display at Boston Children's Museum.

Dollhouses make a child’s familiar world small and easy to manipulate. The scale gives children control over things they have no control over in real life and allows them to act out scenarios between characters. Storytelling and dialogue are ways that children learn valuable communication and interpersonal skills. When two or more children play together with a dollhouse, the negotiation skills they develop are valuable too.

3. Play Kitchens

The Rainbow Market at Children's Discovery Museum of 

San Jose features a play kitchen with child-sized appliances.

In a world where counters are hard to reach, a scaled-down anything is exciting and kitchens are no exception. Real kitchens are not particularly child-friendly places to play, but they are a central part of daily life in a society that eats three times a day. When there is nothing to mash or stir, children often need to be shooed out of kitchens for their own safety. Play kitchens give children a safe opportunity to emulate grownups independently and begin to develop healthy personal relationships with food, eating, and cooking.


Resources:

• Let Toys Be Toys campaign
• Make your own play kitchen
• Rebecca Hains's gender-inclusive gift buying guide