What comes first, the desire for gendered products or the gendered products?
We know that toy manufacturers spend a lot of money on research.
So, it's possible that they have a bunch of gently flawed research, and the flaws are magnified through poor reporting, poor understanding, and then implementation into product.
And now we're here, with toyshops segregrated into pink aisles and blue aisles there's no way back.
Apparently the desire. Toddlers pick gendered products on their own (for some forms of them). There was some studies about this behavior.
But it is true that kids even make gendered toys out of practically nothing. For instance, a local kindergarten here: three-year-old boys were forbidden to have toy guns. So the kids took some flat crispbread at the midday meal and chewed edges off to make it gun-shaped, and then started playing cops and robbers. Bang bang.
A gendered toy would be a toy gun packaged in a blue box with only images of boys on the packaging.
I don't care if more boys buy guns and more girls buy toy horses. I do care if those toys are packaged in rigidly gendered packaging and stocked in gendered sections of the toy store.
I would probably first try with a "normal" Nerf gun, but if that doesn't stick, why not try the girl variant.
And you can have things custom made. For items like suits or furniture it's not that much more expensive than quality pre-made lines.
Do you reckon socialism does a better job with providing individualistic toys? Or what alternative to free markets would you propose?