Lisa Dinella, Ph.D., Director of the Monmouth Gender Studies Program and a professor of gender studies, was invited to speak on a podcast on children’s toys and gender on the National Public Radio (NPR), which aired on Monday, March 18.
The NPR piece plays an important role in sharing science-based recommendations about children’s toys with parents, Dinella explained.
“Early play experiences and exposure to the media impact children’s academic and social development, and small changes in the types of toys adults buy, and how they talk to their kids about play can shape their futures,” she said in the podcast.
Dinella currently serves as the Principal Investigator of the University’s Gender Development Laboratory. She investigates the relationships between gender, academic achievement, and career development.
She also studies children’s toy play and media exposure and how gendered experiences shape academic and career pursuits across the lifespan.
She has addressed the White House, Washington, D.C., on gender disparities in children’s toys and media. In April of 2016, Dinella was a keynote speaker of this event, which was co-sponsored by The White House Council on Women and Girls, The U.S. Department of Education, and The Media, Diversity & Social Change Initiative at the University of Southern California.
She also works with global toy companies and children’s media corporations, helping them apply cutting-edge research on gender and play.
Dinella elaborated that gender stereotypes often influence children’ lives through toys, television, and advertising, enforcing respective interests based on gender.
In her discussion, she provided simple tips on how to reduce the negative impact of gender stereotypes in children’s fun experiences.
She explained that banning toys outright can be counterproductive, and instead, parents should pay more attention to how kids play than what they are playing with.
For instance, she cited one study wherein researchers found that children, regardless of gender, who were playing with aggressive toys like toy-guns grew up to be more aggressive as adults.
In one of her studies, “Pink gives girls permission: Exploring the roles of explicit gender labels and gender-typed colors on preschool children’s toy preferences,” Dinella studied the role of toy type and color in children’s interests and stereotypes.
She gave kids pink monster-trucks and baby dolls in camouflage onesies, coding gendered toys with their gendered colors.
“There’s a bigger barrier to boys playing with ‘girl’ things and acting like ‘girls’ than there is for girls to be able to venture into these cross-gender plays,” Dinella said, noting that there are often more options for girls because they have a broader toy selection.
“These trends that we’re seeing in terms of deciding some toys are for girls or for boys is really just limiting there fun,” she explained in the podcast. “And that’s not what we want. We want kids to have as much fun as possible.”
Jessica Rodriguez, a senior psychology major and an assistant in Dinella’s research lab, which help to collect for her study she discussed on the podcast. She explained that there was a study conducted in 2005 by Blakemore & Centers where participants rated 126 toy on a scale of 1-9, one being only for girls, 9 being only for boys, and 5 being for both girls and boys.
The researchers then categorized the toys as “strongly feminine,” “moderately feminine,” “neutral,” “moderately masculine,” and “strongly masculine.”
“Since this study was conducted in 2005, our lab is currently working on replicating their study to see how and if people’s gender perceptions of toys have changed,” Rodriguez explained.
In another experiment, she painted all toys white so that signal colors like pink and blue did not stick out to girls and boys respectively.
She found was that children were drawn to toys that were more fun, like Play-Doh and Etch a Sketch, rather than the toys that were conventional for gender.
“It was a joy to work with the experts at NPR. As always with NPR, I was impressed with their dedication to sharing science in a fun and engaging manner,” Dinella said. “I also loved that the other expert in the piece was Rosemarie Truglio from Sesame Workshop, a colleague who is well known for her devotion to making children’s lives healthier and more fun.”
Dinella has also been investigating the relations between gender identity, academic achievement, and career development.
Her research program is housed at the Gender Development Laboratory, where she studies the social and interpersonal factors that influence individuals’ academic and career pursuits.
In collaboration with colleagues at the University of Wisconsin and Washington and Lee University, she researches the factors that are linked to young adults’ academic paths, with the intention of isolating variables that often lead to disparities between men and women’s levels of financial independence.
Her research has led her to create partnerships with school stakeholders in settings ranging from preschools to universities.
PHOTO COURTESY Dr. Dinella
