Why is pink for girls

In other words, kids who would have been dubbed boys at birth but identified as girls instead preferred pink, too. Preference tracked gender identity, not biologically assigned sex. They will say it has nothing to do with other people; they just like it. Paoletti, Ph. When their clothing started to be gussied up with colorful ribbons, Paoletti argues, in many places blue was the girl color and pink was the boy color. In , the U.

As Peggy Orenstein pointed out in Cinderella Ate My Daughter , the more different clothes and toys are marketed to different babies, the more companies can sell. But no one has been able to prove it. And this isn't just about girls. Van Buren makes a good point: If true feminism means the right to choose, her daughter should be able to like whatever color she wants.

But real choice, real self-determination, means the freedom to sort through options without a societal finger on one side of the scale.

For can't-miss news, expert beauty advice, genius home solutions, delicious recipes, and lots more, sign up for the Good Housekeeping newsletter. Subscribe Now. Product Reviews. Home Ideas. United States. If pink is a feminine colour, then it says a lot about how women are considered in our society today. After all, stereotypes often reflect the world we live in. However, the perception of pink differs in different areas in the world! For example, in Northern-India, pink is not seen as feminine and is commonly worn by men as part of their garments.

In recent years, pink has experienced a rebranding as many feminist groups reappropriated the colour in order to promote their ideas and the concept of strength.

This led to a revival of the colour which is praised more than ever. This is great news as it shows that gender stereotyping bias seems to be running out of steam, even though it will take more time for it to completely disappear. Your email address will not be published. However, a new letter published July 21 in the Archives of Sexual Behavior questions this widely accepted pink-for-girls, blue-for-boys origin story.

Marco Del Guidice, a sociologist at the University of Turin in Italy, says a simple search of all the books published in the United States between and , which have been scanned by Google, suggests that pink was associated with girls and blue with boys during that entire time.

Using the program Google Ngram, he searched for the phrases "blue for boys," "pink for girls," "blue for girls, "pink for boys," as well as the singular versions "blue for a boy," and so on.

The rules we abide by blue for boys and pink for girls appeared in books from onward, becoming more common over time, but the opposite rules pink for boys and blue for girls didn't turn up in the book search at all. If pink has always been feminine and blue masculine, this allows for the possibility that these gender-color associations have some basis in human biology.

Do girls inherently prefer pink, and do boys inherently prefer blue? No one knows, Del Guidice said. For example, in a study found evidence that males and females may be sensitive to different regions of the color spectrum, but the explanations that have been proposed are still very speculative and leave much to be desired.

I think this is an absolutely fascinating question. However, Del Guidice added, people stopped studying whether there was a biological basis for the gender-color associations because it seemed obvious that there couldn't be, in light of what he calls the "urban legend" that the associations only formed recently.