On Mattel’s website, there are 71 DC Comics action figures available. Of those, five of them are women and are either Harley Quinn or Katana from Suicide Squad or Wonder Woman from Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. Amanda Waller is not among the figures despite her being a major character in Suicide Squad. Hasbro has 326 action figures on their website with only 25 being female. Of those 25, you can only get six of them if you buy them with a male or a full team of men. This was in January 2017 and both Mattel and Hasbro did not comment on the matter.

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Toys are an important part of growing up and those toys are cultural symbols. Karen E Wohlwend in her “Damsels in Discourse: Girls Consuming and Producing Identity Texts Through Disney Princess Play” explains identity with toys:

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Identity messages circulate through merchandise that surrounds young consumers as they dress in, sleep on, bathe in, eat from, and play with commercial goods decorated with popular culture images, print, and logos, immersing children in products that invite identification with familiar media characters and communicate gendered expectations about what children should buy, how they should play, and who they should be.

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This extends to both boys and girls. Girls, if exposed to Star Wars, could play with Luke Skywalker, Kylo Ren, Princess Leia, and Rey, as much as they would play with Disney Princesses like Jasmine, Elsa, Cinderella, and Belle. The same is true for boys. Part of the problem may be parents’ choice on what their children consume in their media diet.

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Disney Princesses are by no means bad, but they are not the only media open to girls and young women. While princesses help children remember plots and recite lines from the movies, it also can show narratives on identity or gender to the same children as Wohlwend points out. She goes on to define toys as cultural artifacts:

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Among cultural artifacts, toys are unique. Toys must communicate meanings that appeal to children to be taken up and must be malleable enough to allow players to invent new meanings; that is, toys invite a particular meaning and simultaneously enable its revision…A toy is (a) a text to be read, performed, and consumed with meanings suggested by its materials and its history of attached story lines and practices and (b) a text to be written, produced, and revised as children improvise new meanings through play.

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By this definition, it should not matter if toys are gendered. Girls and boys could play with any toys they choose if one follows the definition. More than that, gender is a social construct and does not reflect real life. Wendy Varney in her essay “Of Men and Machines: Images of Masculinity in Boys’ Toys” explains what toys represent for children: “Toys and the context within which they are presented tell children much about technology and incline them to be optimistic and confident in their relationships with it, although this is mediated by factors of gender and class.”

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Girls’ toys are meant to be pink and passive, learning gender roles; boys’ toys are meant to be active and colorful. Varney goes on to explain opposite gendered toys:

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Children will explore the toys of the other gender, of course. Girls, in particular, experiment with at least some play of the toys which are determined to be for boys, especially because they speak of power and control, and girls sense that this is an area from which they would not want to be excluded…Clearly, a great deal is still in need of change, and attempts to bring about those changes must deal with marketing methods, philosophical roots, and the interactions between them.

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We still have a long way to go.