Why we give our daughters dresses to wear and our sons problems to solve

This week the retailing giant Debenhams revealed that parents spend 20% more on their daughters’ clothes than on their sons'. 

Over the lifetime of childhood that adds up to a lot of pink frocks and sparkly tops. In a report on this for the Daily Mail I was asked the killer question of whether it was nature or nurture. There’s never a simple answer to that question but in this case I plumped for nurture. Look how we still praise girls for looking pretty and comment on their appearance, whereas with boys parents are more likely to get excited when he masters their mobile phone functionality.

Whether or not we know we’re doing it, parents start to treat boys and girls differently in the delivery room. Studies show that parents describe their newborn daughters as more delicate and having finer features than boys, even though gender differences aren’t visible early on. So if you dressed all babies in green (rather than pink or blue) we couldn’t tell which gender they were, with a nappy on of course. (You can fluster adults by handing them a baby and not telling them which sex it is, they really don’t know how to behave).

Later on the difference treatment continues:

·      Parents play more roughly with boy babies than girls.

·      They allow boys to explore more as toddlers.

·      They use more emotion words with girls than boys.

·      They encourage girls more in play that involves domestic themes and dressing up.

These subtle signals create the child’s early gender identity. Girls get more parental and societal approval for ‘looking pretty’, sending the message that what they wear is important to others. As little girls grow, they are socialized to continue to care about their appearance. Society glamorizes the female image and places heavy emphasis on the outward show. I guess that’s why women shop more but it must also subtly skew their aspirations and futures. We buy girls princess outfits and boys get Superman costumes. No wonder only 6% of UK engineers are women (the lowest in the EU) compared to 40% in China (according to the Institute of Technology).

Of course, there will be a myriad of reasons for this difference but spending less of their formative years in dress shops may have had something to do with it. 


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