Toy Manufacturers: Battles Are For Boys, Love Is For Girls

In their attempts to convince kids to beg their parents for their wares, toy manufacturers rely on a relatively small set of gender-biased buzz words.

A post on The Achilles Effect crunched scripts from from toy commercials and generated separate word clouds for commercials aimed at boys and girls.

Ads aimed at boys repeatedly featured the terms “battle,” “power,” “ultimate” and “action,” while “love,” “fun,” “magic” and “mommy” were prime go-to words for girl-aimed ads.

The post acknowledges the results aren’t surprising, but if the word clouds prove anything, it’s how unoriginal toy ads are, relying on the same terms again and again.

What’s your favorite blatantly gender-biased toy ad?

Word Cloud: How Toy Ad Vocabulary Reinforces Gender Stereotypes [The Achilles Effect via Boing Boing]

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