THE
BLOGS

In the summer of 2012 we were asked to contribute a series of blogs to the online magazine Bea. We took the opportunity to go over some of the areas where gender stereotyping was particularly stark in children’s lives. But our blogs were conceived with one aim in particular in mind – to be positive. Where many articles and blogs on the subject were big on moaning and short on solutions we resolved to offer a more even split, setting out the problems and the examples we’d found before using that experience to suggest solutions.

BOOKS: THE PRINCESS AND TAKING THE PEE

July 2012

We’re aiming to make this column as much about solutions as problems. We love a good moan as much as the next parent (we’re so tired), but sometimes that can leave us feeling hopeless. So we’re going to try to address some of the things that are making us furious. We’re not talking about big changes, simply sharing the ways that we try to bring equality into our parenting. Also this is not a one-way street, we want to hear your ideas too, because, as we’ve discovered on Twitter, together we’re more powerful.

What we’d like to do with each blog is to look at things like media, language, toys, films, sport and relationships, and deconstruct the problems and suggest alternatives. We’re going to start with books. Here are the problems (and we’re mostly talking about pre-school/primary books of the kind our kids have seen, but a lot of the problems are universal):

Male characters outweigh female characters significantly

Here’s a study from the US on the skewed ratios of male to female characters in picture books,41 which we can speculate gives children a view of the world that expects females to be less prominent, but not just that, they also see…

Male characters partake in ‘action’, while female characters often do not

The study above updated the work of Hamilton et al. (2006) which noted, ‘Modern children’s picture books continue to provide nightly reinforcement of the idea that boys and men are more interesting and important than are girls and women.’42

This is a bad situation for the psychology of girls AND for the attitude boys will have towards girls and themselves.

Animals are most often referred to as ‘he’

Seriously people, cows with udders are not male. It’s one that most of us find very hard not to do. Most people will be brought up to automatically call an animal ‘he’. Authors of kids’ picture books are no exception. This compounds the problem of males being more important and females less visible.

The historical position of women is presented uncritically in fairy tales

Yeah, we’re mostly talking princesses here. If you’ve never read Jeff Brunner’s deconstruction of Disney’s upsettingly successful Princess brand, then read it, weep, and consider what message it’s sending kids.43

No doubt you’ll have some of your own favourites, but that’ll do for now. So we’ll suggest some books here that you can buy/take out the library which contradict the problems above.

You want action? Ladybird do a simple line of superhero phonics readers with titles including Jumping Jade and Invisible Liz by Mandy Ross.

Spot It! by Delphine Chedru is a simple but beautiful book where the reader has to find hidden animals – and some of them are female. Radical! If your kids love it, like ours do, you can get the sequel, Spot It Again!

In The Paper Bag Princess by Robert Munsch, a princess uses her wit to outsmart a dragon in order to rescue the prince. The prince, however, isn’t grateful enough to run off into the sunset with someone wearing a paper bag. She tells him, ‘You are a bum,’ and they don’t get married. The classic anti-princess book, but not strictly a traditional fairy tale, so how about Kate and the Beanstalk by Mary Pope Osborne? Kate climbs the beanstalk, outwits the giant and brings home riches to her mother. Woot.

Finally, a book you can use to discuss the way the world divides us by our gender with your kids. Horace and Morris But Mostly Dolores by James Howe. The three characters are great friends until Horace and Morris become part of an exclusive boys’ club and Dolores finds herself left out. Soon, she, too, finds her own club, where no boys are allowed and girls are supposed to have fun doing girl stuff. But after a while, Horace and Morris and Dolores realise they aren’t happy at all doing what everyone in their clubs seem to enjoy. They miss each other. Is it too late to be friends again? Nah!

That’s just a few ideas, but we’ve made a reading list which has loads more suggestions for the kind of books that show kids there’s more than one way to live life and includes books up to age 14 (see Appendix II). Feel free to suggest more books for the list.

And if you like these books but they’re not in your library suggest them to your librarian. This can really work, our council has an online form for making book suggestions.

You can also buy more books like this from Letterbox Library, a children’s booksellers celebrating equality and diversity. Even better, suggest to a school that they should use Letterbox as a supplier.

Fill your house with the books you want your children to read and give them as presents to others. And for the books that your children choose without your input, edit books as you read aloud – say ‘she’ for every other animal. While they can’t read, this is a temporary solution. When they are older discuss the problems you see with gender in books and encourage them to be critical of it.

Was that 50/50 moan and solution? There’s nothing world-changing here, but these are small ways you can show kids the kind of world you want to see.

FILMS: A LEAGUE OF THEIR OWN

August 2012

We love films. Before we had kids we used to have a weekly cinema club, a bit like a book club. We’d go with the same group of friends every Monday night and then discuss the film afterwards over a cheap dinner. Back then though, I don’t think we were aware of the Bechdel test. If you’ve been living under a rock you won’t know that it’s a depressingly spare way of fathoming whether a film has a female presence in it with these three checks:

1.It includes at least two women,

2.who have at least one conversation,

3.about something other than a man or men.

Alison Bechdel brought the idea to the world with an awesome comic strip explanation of how it works. I’m pretty certain that our weekly club would have been monthly at best if the films always had to pass Bechdel.

Those who haven’t heard of the Bechdel test may well want to plead that it’s ridiculous and that most films have women in them. We’re so used to the reality of the media that we’ve been brought up with that sometimes it’s hard to see what’s going on in front of our noses. Bechdeltest.com lists films by whether they pass the test. Here’s the bad news. You think of most major children’s films in recent years and they’ll usually struggle to pass the test – Shrek, Toy Story and Ice Age and all their sequels, for example, don’t pass. Seriously, this is not on.

The Geena Davis Institute on Gender in the Media (yes that Geena Davis), are conducting research and consciousness raising on the issue:

They’ve produced a slew of damning statistics among which the standout one is that men outnumber women three to one in family films and that ratio hasn’t changed since 1946. (In real life more than 50% of the population of the United States is female.) On-screen females are almost four times as likely as males to be shown in sexy attire, nearly twice as likely as males to be shown with a diminutive waistline and generally unrealistic figures are more likely to be seen on females than males. Using 2006–2009 as sample years, the researchers couldn’t find a female character in a family film that was a doctor, business leader, lawyer or politician and in the films they looked at, four out of five working characters were male, again compared to a 50/50 split between the genders in the real world.

It’s no better behind the camera. Across 1,565 content creators, only 7% of directors, 13% of writers and 20% of producers are female. This translates to 4.8 males working behind-the-scenes to every one female.44

We’re in the UK, and obviously these stats are for the US, but realistically the majority of big-screen films our kids see at the cinema come from the US. Unlike our previous blog about books and the conservative nature of the publishing industry, the stakes are so much higher in film because of the cost of production. Not that that’s any excuse!

So here we go, that was the moaning section, now here’s some alternatives to the non-representative dross. Here’s some great kids’ films that have females in abundance and also pass Bechdel.

My Neighbour Totoro (1988): where would 21st-century children be without Studio Ghibli? When two sisters move to the country to be near their ailing mother, they have adventures with the wonderous forest spirits who live nearby. Ghibli has managed to produce films that have complex and interesting characters of both genders for years now. Look over there Hollywood, it ain’t that hard!

Labyrinth (1986) was an important film for many of us growing up. It’s only now looking back that you might realise the feminist message. Remember that important line that releases Sarah from the grip of Jareth, ‘You have no power over me.’ That’s an important message for a teenage girl. Still relevant.

Spirited Away (2001) is an Alice in Wonderland-style tale which sees Chihiro and her family wander into a world ruled by gods, witches and monsters. Complex, layered and imaginative – not things often said about kids’ films.

Whale Rider (2002) deals with the pain and rejection that a traditional patriarchal culture can bring. A young Maori girl fights to fulfill a destiny her grandfather refuses to recognise. Powerful and beautiful.

Finally, want to reinforce a bit of that Olympics feel-good factor that has hopefully inspired girls to get out there and try sports? Well, Fast Girls (2012) focuses on training hard to achieve a goal, while also being touching and funny. The actresses trained alongside Team GB athletes to prepare for the roles, which makes it even more ace.

So we never put Bechdel into practice in our cinema-going days, but frankly it’s not exactly possible to do the test before you’ve seen the film. We’ve actually invented our own kids’ version of Bechdel. It’s also incredibly simple: every other film we go to see has to have a female lead. (There’s a big prize for someone who comes up with a catchy name for our test, I can’t think of one.) No doubt you can guess that this is also going to keep you out of the cinema. It’s do-able with young kids like ours but is unlikely to be possible when they’re older. But so far we’ve only broken our rule once, and that was because of the relentless rain over the winter (Happy Feet Two was very much not worth breaking it for though, let me tell you).

The principle of staying away from the cinema means you’re voting with your feet and your wallet. If people go in droves to see new assertive, female-led films like Brave, then hopefully we’ll send the industry a message.

So there are some thoughts and a few gems of films, but there are many more on our longer film list. I’m sure you can think of some more, so tweet us. Sadly, unlike our book list, films that show an alternative to the male stereotype have not sprung to mind. Please let us know if you think of any, we’d like to add them to the list.

SPORT: I CAN’T TONIGHT, I’M WASHING MY HAIR

September 2012

When we went to an open day at our daughter’s new school, the teacher giving us the tour told us what after-school clubs were available. Girls’ football was one of them, and obviously we *had* to ask, why isn’t it a mixed club? The teacher said it’s because the girls feel more confident playing this way. And who can blame them? As Professor Carrie Petcher said to one of us recently (feminist name drop, boom!), ‘The boys won’t pass to the girls.’ I guess it’s hard to see yourself as a star striker when half your team are undermining your efforts.

In the warm glow of the Olympic and Paralympic success story, it’s easy to imagine that sport is now on the top of every child’s hobby list. But there are ongoing sexist issues that explain this:

Just 12% of 14-year-old girls in the UK are reaching the recommended levels of physical activity – half the number of boys at the same age.45

Shocking stuff. The excellent piece of research that brings us this awful statistic uncovered a wealth of interesting information. It found, for example, that boys and girls both agree that there are more opportunities for boys to do sport than girls, and also that girls’ experience of sport at school can really put them off it. But here’s when it really gets down to the nitty gritty:

Half of the girls surveyed (48%) say that getting sweaty is ‘not feminine’.

Nearly a third of boys think that girls who are sporty are not very feminine.

Aha! Woop woop, it’s the sound of the gender police.

Sport is not feminine, where on earth would anyone get such an idea?? Oh, er, just everywhere. When Gemma Gibbons won Team GB’s first judo medal in 12 years, did she get the admiration of every man, woman and child in the country? No, she got a poisonous blog in the Daily Telegraph asking if ‘women fighting each other violently is a perfectly wholesome spectator sport?’46 Now the Telegraph has clearly set itself on a new economic strategy along the lines of the Daily Mail, but the way these papers do that is by writing something that appeals to people’s basest prejudices and that they’d like to have confirmed. GIRLS, FIGHTING, TOGETHER?! IT’S THE END OF DAYS! No, thimble-brain, it’s sport. Get a grip.

Later, the male presenter on the BBC also policed the femininity of the judo medallist when she revealed she hadn’t washed her hair that day. Shocked, he was. Oh piss off, say we. But that’s the problem summed up in one small exchange on television. A woman can win an Olympic medal, the pinnacle of her career, and a man can take the time to be appalled that she didn’t groom her hair to his expectations. This tells girls that maintaining their appearance trumps the achievements of physical activity. And that’s very much what this report found. Being sporty made a boy one of the most popular among his peers. I think you can guess that the same was not true for girls.

Here’s another finding:

Boys were commonly cited by girls of all ages as a reason for why sport and physical activity is not perceived to be fun, particularly in relation to school PE lessons. Boys’ negative attitudes about girls’ abilities in sport and physical activity were also perceived to be a problem.

The attitudes of the other half of the population are a big factor in why girls shun sport.

So remember our policy, a bit of a moan and then some ideas for solutions. Well this isn’t as straightforward as a list of books with girls in. But there really are things you can do.

The Women’s Sport and Fitness Foundation, which compiled that research, has been trying to make us all wake up to the growing problem of inactivity in girls. Their #gogirl campaign strap line, ‘Our vision is a society which encourages, enables and celebrates active women and girls.’ Well yes, that’s nice, how do we do that? Well guess what, parents? To add to the multitude of responsibilities that are on your shoulders, you are a big influence here. Taking children to watch or participate in sport is vital. Not just talking about it, going out and doing it. You’re also a role model for them in terms of whether you are participating in sport.

The marvellous Carrie Dunn is doing a PhD on this very subject. Her feeling is that access to watching sport needs to be the starting focus. Girls are less likely to be taken to sport than boys. Parents are equally likely to fall into the trap of policing their daughter’s femininity by being less encouraging about sport for girls. Carrie’s research has found that if girls are encouraged to think that they are allowed to watch whatever sport they want, then they will. Simples, eh? If it’s presented to them as a gendered choice, i.e. only for their brothers, then they’re likely to see sport as gendered for the rest of their lives.

We’ve been unbelievably lucky to have the Olympics on our doorstep at a time when our daughter is just old enough to be able to enjoy and understand how exciting sport can be to watch. She saw table tennis, basketball, football, athletics and the modern pentathlon, with disabled and able-bodied athletes competing. We hope it’s something that will stay with her for the rest of her life. But will it make her more likely to take part in sport?

Carrie wrote that despite growing up with great role models like Sally Gunnell and Liz McColgan, she still hated sport at school.47 It’s true, sports role models don’t necessarily have the effect of changing our physical behaviour. But here’s where we hope that their power to influence can work in other ways.

Athletes like Zoe Smith, Nicola Adams, Katarina Johnson-Thompson and Laura Robson are smart, witty, confident and incredibly good at standing up to a world that has ridiculous expectations of them because they are women. Zoe Smith wrote the most fantastic blog post in response to tweets criticising her appearance as ‘manly’. She wrote,

What makes you think we actually give a toss that you, personally, do not find us attractive?… We, as any women with an ounce of self-confidence would, prefer our men to be confident enough in themselves to not feel emasculated by the fact that we aren’t weak and feeble.48

So though our girls may not look at these young women and be galvanised to become champion pole vaulters, what I hope they will take on board is seeing high-profile women who are refusing to suffer under the pressure of our appearance-driven culture, because that’s a big part of what is holding girls back. Young role models like these have been pretty lacking. As adults, we find them incredibly inspiring.

Raising the profile of women’s sport can only help to dispel prejudices about ability and importance. So get signing the current petition asking the Government to discuss the state of women’s sport in the House of Commons and to consider making broadcasters obligated to show women’s sport. The petition was delivered to the Department for Culture, Media & Sport.49

But the most important point in the area of raising the profile, audiences and television coverage of women’s sport? Take your sons to watch it, because it’s their attitudes that are part of this problem.

SCHOOL: NEVER TOO YOUNG TO LEARN

October 2012

Ah school, the best days of your life. Our four-year-old has just started school. Here’s a typical conversation when she gets picked up at the end of the day:

Parent: What did you learn today at school, darling?

Four-year-old: Oh you know, just the usual reinforcing of traditional gender roles through a complex combination of adults’ different treatment of children depending on their gender, and peers who police my behaviour to make sure I don’t break out of stereotypical behaviour, and that. Oh, and we did some clay modelling and I made a snail.

Parent: Great, did you remember to bring your PE kit home?

Yes, for the gender-concerned parent, school is the final frontier in exposing your child to the world as it really is. We’ve heard many, many times from followers whose kids did not conform or particularly take note of the ‘things that are for girls’ and the ‘things that are for boys’ until they went to school. The most typical is the boy who likes pink. Several of our kids’ male cousins loved pink until school had the mean-heartedness to wring it out of them. It also tugged on the heart strings the other day when the four-year-old said she wanted to go back to nursery where she could play car races with the boys there, because the boys at school won’t let her play their games. (And before you ask, of course she was reminded that girls play cars too.)

There are so many reasons why school can be fuel for the fire of gender divisions. As the four-year-old so cleverly pointed out, research shows that teaching staff do treat boys and girls differently. In a 2006 UK research paper of children aged 7–8 and their teachers, they found, ‘Whilst the pupils believed their teachers treated them in a fair and just manner, three-quarters of the teachers interviewed believed they did or should respond differently to pupils according to gender.’50

And to those that think it’s necessary because girls and boys (yes all of them, because every single girl is the same as every single other girl, yah?) learn in different ways, read the conclusions of that paper.

So what’s to do? Well overthrow the patriarchy first and foremost, obv, but if that doesn’t come off before half term, here’s our suggestions for ways you can get some badly needed lessons about sexism into a school near you.

A blog post by the excellent @bluemilk describes her experience of running an anti-sexism session in her daughter’s school class of five- and six-year-olds.51 She’s not a teacher but was asked if she’d be interested in doing it. Our daughter’s school has similarly asked parents if they’d like to present anything to classes that they have a particular interest in. If you get the same opportunity in your kids’ schools then grab it with both hands. @bluemilk describes a brilliant set of photos and questions she used to challenge the kids’ assumptions about gender, for example:

The kids were really receptive and by the conclusion of the workshop were readily able to spot sexism in toy catalogues presented to them and were happily repeating phrases in their analysis that I’d been using throughout the workshop, like ‘colours are for everyone’, ‘feelings are for everyone’ and ‘toys are for everyone’.

Do read it and even if you don’t do something as big as a workshop, it will give you lots of great ideas for things to say to kids when you want to challenge something they say that is sexist.

Ditto this piece, ‘It’s Okay to be Neither’ by Melissa Bollow Tempel, a teacher who had a kid in her class who presented with gender variance.52 She similarly worked on sessions that used photos and questions to challenge assumptions and is well worth plundering ideas from.

A more formal way of getting this stuff into your kid’s school could be Laura Nelson’s Breakthrough Gender Stereotypes Project which has completed an initial trial in a school with nine- and ten-year-olds, holding two weeks of gender stereotypes awareness lessons and includes elements of science, geography, history, politics and sociology. The website says, ‘If you work in a school, or indeed if you work with children who you think would benefit from these lessons, we would love to hear from you.’53

Finally, the Astell Project is ‘a campaign and community of activists and educators which aims to get Women and Gender Studies introduced into schools for 13 to 15-year-old girls and boys’. Which is an ambitious aim in the current education climate. You can help them by signing their petition.54

Now in previous blogs we’ve usually had a resource for you to draw on, and we’d like to have a template for something similar to the parent-led workshops mentioned above, but the dog ate it. Hopefully we’ll get that handed in to you in the coming weeks, but in the meantime, as usual, any ideas you can share with us to add to this resource would be gratefully received. Our previous experience of compiling lists and so on is that we’re stronger when we put our heads together to use our collective wisdom. Yes, some of you guys clearly picked up a lot in school, but what you managed to shake off was the idea that your gender defined the things you would think. How clever of you! But we all know it’s not that easy. So let’s try and give our kids the head start that we never had.

LANGUAGE: ARE YOU A PEOPLE PERSON?

November 2012

For me, words are a form of action, capable of influencing change. Their articulation represents a complete, lived experience. (Ingrid Bengis)55

Words. Dontcha just love ’em? But sometimes the 140 characters of Twitter are just too short to record things that happen to our kids because of their gender. Here’s a slightly longer story that happened at the weekend that really sums up why we keep a diary about these things.

We were visiting the playground of an aeroplane museum with the children’s cousins. Five kids, aged 2–5. Two girls, three boys.

Things that were said by an adult with us:

About a remote-controlled aeroplane, ‘Look at the aeroplane doing stunts, he’s obviously having a wonderful time. Look at him go. He’s really enjoying himself.’

To oldest boy child, by name, specifically, ‘Can you see the engines in there, behind the propellers? That’s what makes the plane fly. Can you see all the parts inside?’

To everyone, about the volunteers who run the museum, ‘Men love this stuff don’t they? They have such a good time here.’

Later at home our daughter tells her cousin she wants a remote-control aeroplane for Christmas. He tells her that girls can’t have them and only dolls and Barbies are for girls. Also, he tells her, he hates dolls and Barbies.

D’ya see a pattern here at all? Well do ya? How confusing the world must have been for these kids at the end of the day, when their parents tried to explain to them why *all* toys are for *everyone*!

Yes, the language we use shapes the way children understand the world. Language, among other things, tells kids what roles people of their gender will fulfil when they are older. They can try to kick against it, but there’s often someone there to tell them they’re wrong about wanting to break those boundaries.

Let’s look at that first example of language where someone uses ‘he’ to describe the gender of someone (or something, an aeroplane in this case) even though they don’t know the gender of that person/thing. In Brian D. Earp’s recent article from the Journal of Communication and Culture on so-called he/man generics, he explains why it’s damaging:

This has the effect of minimizing women’s importance and diverting attention away from their very existence. The result is a sort of invisibility – in the language itself, in the individual’s mind’s eye, and in the broader social consciousness.56

As always @GenderDiary is here to bring you good news. Earp’s research shows that use of the masculine generic pronoun in English has fallen dramatically in recent years, while non-sexist alternatives have gradually taken its place.

Earp recorded a marked decline in the use of the term ‘mankind’, while ‘humankind’, on the other hand, saw an 1890 per cent increase (from 63 articles in 1970–1971 to 1192 articles in 1999–2000). ‘He or she’ (rather than just using ‘he’) for its part, saw a 1194 per cent increase. It’s gratifying that this is already happening. But you can help it along too.

You won’t be surprised that we’d encourage you to use gender-neutral language with kids when you can. In our house, we are not remotely militant about it, but boy, girl, man, woman, him, her, etc. are less likely to be heard than kids, children, people, person, them and they.

Those who want to accuse us of terrible political correctness are very welcome to do it, but they’ll find that they’re fighting against a trend in language that is happening anyway. By releasing as many parts of language as possible from the limits of gender, you allow children to choose for themselves whether something is relevant to them. The conversations that we had on that outing sent our children clear messages that gender was relevant to what we were seeing. Boys and men like aeroplanes, is the message they got. The message we got is that by using more neutral language we’re helping to keep options open for our kids, and our daughter will be getting a remote-control aeroplane for Christmas.

CHRISTMAS: PRESENTS OF MIND

December 2012

If you’re reading our blog, you know as well as us that products that are marketed to kids are frequently trying to put them into pink and blue straitjackets. Lots of you tweet us with awful examples of what is often the same thing packaged differently to reflect some supposed appeal to gender.

How did we get to this point? Indulge yourself with a browse through pictures of the 1976 Argos catalogue.57 No really. There is almost nothing that is pink, even among the ‘girls’ toys’. Likewise there are no pages of fierce, dark-coloured aggressive toys like those marketed to boys now. We’d love to write you a thesis on what happened in between now and then, it’d be fascinating. But frankly right now we just know we want this to stop. The message toy marketing is now sending our kids is that your gender defines what you play with. Hands up who wants their kids’ play to be defined by their genitals? You neither?

So this month it’s simple, a crowd-sourced list of places to buy presents that won’t offend your sense of equality. Yes, it may be a bit late for Christmas online ordering, but bookmark this page for future presents. You may be the only person who gives a child a non-gender-conforming present, so your gift can be really important in showing them something different. Thanks to everyone who made a suggestion. They’re mostly UK based with a US round-up at the end.

Clothes

Tootsa MacGinty make unisex clothes for children who, in their own words, ‘want to step into a rainbow and splosh through the colours’.

Love it, Love it, Love it, One tweeter told us their kit is ‘colourful, comfortable and eco-friendly’.

Toys

Myriad Natural Toys & Crafts, Natural play products, toys and art and craft materials.

Orchard Toys, Designer and manufacturer of award-winning children’s games and jigsaw puzzles.

IKEA, Not an obvious place to go for toys but one tweeter pointed out that they sell ‘Great sturdy toys, not gendered, pics of boys and girls on the (minimal) packaging.’

This is Wiss, Original, stylish and practical.

Science kits

Maplin, electronics kits that, as pointed out by a follower, have boxes depicting girls and boys.

Curious Minds Science Shop, A science, nature and technology shop for toys.

Books

Letterbox Library, One of our favourites. Their blurb says they are ‘Celebrating equality and diversity in the very best children’s books. We believe that challenging stereotypes and discrimination should play a fundamental part in every child’s education.’

And of course use our book list (Appendix II) for great ideas for kids aged 0–14.

Films

Our film list of course (see Appendix III).

USA

Really everyone should look at A Mighty Girl, which claims to be home to ‘The world’s largest collection of books, toys and movies for smart, confident, and courageous girls.’

MindWare, Brainy toys for kids of all ages.

aMuse Toys, Creative toys that aim to encourage children’s development.

If you’re feeling fired up about this then we can point you at a group campaigning specifically on this subject. Let Toys Be Toys have been doing a great job of being seen out and about in the media and pointing out that toy marketing has become horribly restrictive.

That’s an important campaign and we’re right behind it, but something to point out is that it’s very easy to get focused on toys and, though it’s important, we wouldn’t want anyone to assume that toys becoming more gender neutral would solve any of our greater sexist problems, really they’re just a symptom of it. The example set by Sweden is that if you have a culture, and indeed a basis in law,58 that is dedicated to equality for children then the elimination of this kind of harmful stereotyped marketing to kids will happen as a consequence of that, not the other way around. Shall we all move to Sweden? Or shall we change things where we are?