Pink and blue kid(s)

Jo Paoletti got a nice cover write-up from the UMD magazine Terp, for her new book, Pink and Blue: Telling the Boys from the Girls in America. I especially love the cover photo:

The photo(s) is (are) by John T. Consoli, linked without permission. This is a great exercise for noticing how we internalize gender norms. If you thought even for a moment that one of these kids is a boy and the other is a girl, you’re busted as a product of socialization. (I won’t reveal the “true” answer.)

This is much better than my own crude Photoshop version:

I’ve done a series of posts on color and children, which you can find here. That led me to do a survey on color preferences, which got close to 2,000 responses to the question, “What’s your favorite color.” Based on a simple color chart provided, these were the responses:

More than the gender breakdown, I wanted to see if the nurture-versus-nature element of color preference could be teased out in a single survey. So I asked people if they had children, and the gender of their children — figuring that might reflect some “adult socialization.” And that modest result is what I found. From the abstract:

This study asks whether the gendered social environment in adulthood affects parents’ color preferences. The analysis used the gender of children to represent one aspect of the gendered social environment. Because having male versus female children in the U.S. is generally randomly distributed, it provides something of a natural experiment, offering evidence about the social construction of gender in adulthood. The participants were 749 adults with children who responded to an online survey invitation, asking “What’s your favorite color?” Men were more likely to prefer blue, while women were more likely to prefer red, purple, and pink, consistent with long-standing U.S. patterns. The effect of having only sons was to widen the existing gender differences between men and women, increasing the odds that men prefer blue while reducing the odds that women do; and a marginally significant effect showed women having higher odds of preferring pink when they have sons only. The results suggest that, in addition to any genetic, biological or child-socialization effects shaping adults’ tendency to segregate their color preferences by gender, the gender context of adulthood matters as well.

The paper has been provisionally accepted and should be published in a peer-reviewed journal near you soon.

Jo’s excellent blog is here, where you can read about her new project, exploring the rise and fall of unisex clothing for children.