large retail stores in California will soon be required to
have a gender neutral section. Four Children toys of
a mandate was signed into law on saturday by California's
Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom, it goes into effect in
2024 will impact stores in the state with 500 or
more employees hit a breakdown the new law and share
some of the toys that will be available to buy
in these gender neutral sections is deputy editor Of the
toy book and senior editor of the toy insider James
Zahn James, thank you so much for being here
. Can you break down the law in a bit
more detailed way? And then just also talk about
what will California's retailers start doing now for to get
to be ready for this all by 2024. Sure
. Thanks for having me. This is California's a
B 10 84. Uh, it was the third
time, you can say third time's the charm here
because they've tried twice to get a legislation like this
past before this one goes into effect january 1st of
2024. And it's a little bit grey in terms
of what they're looking for because we're talking child items
, kid items, toys, games, other consumer
products that are geared towards kids. They're saying that
they expect to have a reasonable amount of these that
have traditionally been marketed towards either boys or girls displayed
in a gender neutral area of the store and then
they're sort of leaving that up to the retailers in
terms of how those departments are going to be,
uh, kind of put together or signed. Um
, there's gonna be some talk about this over the
next three years because what is a reasonable amount,
no one knows yet, these are for stores that
are For more than 500 employees over the entire state
. So we're talking bigger chains like target and Wal
Mart, but go back a couple years. Target
already took away their gender signage in the Toy Department
. And you've got others like Walmart, the typically
group more by category and brand than gender already.
So this is going to be very interesting to see
how this plays out. It certainly is, you
know, we know that you have said in the
past that U. S. Retailers are already to
this point more ahead of the curve than toy manufacturers
when it comes to gender neutrality. Uh just I
guess, further breakdown. How's that? So why
do you think though that it's going to be important
for change in this area to be more focused on
manufacturers? Yeah. So, you know, there's
the old debate about the pink versus blue and the
way marketing has traditionally zeroed in on boys and girls
and things and that has sort of gone away over
the last decade at retail. But then we still
see a lot of packaging coming from the manufacturers and
it's because it's just ingrained in them these pink doll
boxes and blue cars and all of this type of
stuff, while at the same time, there's more
change towards like the lifestyle imagery that we see now
out of the toy makers will show boys and girls
playing together. Um you know, kids play with
what they like. And a lot of this comes
down to the fact that it's always been not a
kid issue. It's been a grown up issue where
there's decades of this blinders on as far as like
this is for girls and this is for boys when
in reality toys are for everybody you mentioned earlier,
this is kind of not a new concept, right
? That this has been in the works for a
while. I wonder have any popular toy company has
been doing any work or making changes in the area
of gender neutrality. Absolutely. As a matter of
fact, today, uh International Day of the girl
, the lego group released the results of a new
study they put out, they surveyed about 7000 parents
around the world and what they found unfortunately, is
that a lot of these old stereotypes still exist and
typically more on the girls side where um girls don't
necessarily get the messaging that certain things are ok for
them. And on a similar note, Mattel has
been battling that for a couple years with what they
call the gender gap and they've been rolling out things
like new barbie dolls and stuff that highlight some things
where girls may not have necessarily sought after a career
like this year, the career of the year is
music producer because there's a lot of female music artists
, but not very much of the music that's out
there is actually produced by women. So they're looking
at that lego is looking at being inclusive in their
marketing and they've actually been ahead of it for a
while. I mean going back to like 1981 they
had a very famous ad with a little girl in
overalls showing this creation that she had. So a
lot of it feels like it's cyclical every couple years
. This conversation happens again. You know, you
touch on a point that I want to dig into
a little bit more before I let you go in
terms of what can Children learn from playing with toys
that are not conventionally associated with their specific gender.
Yeah, so you think about this, all kids
can learn from playing with building sets and they learn
fundamentals of stem. We talk a lot about stem
and steam science, technology, engineering, art,
mathematics, you're building things, You're learning about engineering
, playing with race cars or hot wheels and matchbox
, you're learning about things like physics and velocity and
kids don't know that they're learning this, but they
are like, hey, if I make the track
a little higher, it's going to go faster.
It's going to get through the loop. There's things
there. Boys, girls, they all learn nurturing
by playing with dolls, playing house playing with a
play kitchen. How many professional chefs out there found
that their interest in cooking and nutrition came from playing
with a little place at when they were a child
. I've seen that in my own home. I
have two girls, but we would have toys here
that some of their friends, some of which boys
girls didn't have at home, their parents maybe didn't
put that into the house. Those kids come over
and it's like an entirely new world opens up because
it's imaginative play. Absolutely love it. Thank you
so much for your insight James on Deputy editor of
the Toy Book and senior editor of Toy Insider.