
Paul Dini explains why execs don't want girls watching their superhero shows - a_w
http://boingboing.net/2013/12/16/paul-dini-explains-why-execs-d.html
======
tlb
Not to defend any of this, but it's true that you can make more total
advertising revenue from two shows if one gets all boys and the other gets all
girls, rather than them being split 50-50. Each commands a higher ad revenue
by being more targeted.

It's an unfortunate fact of human nature that many boys find toys less
desirable if they see girls playing with them too. Toy marketers would prefer
to advertise on a show with 10M boys and ~0 girls, than a show with 10M boys
and 2M girls at the same price, because those 2M girls might buy their toys,
the boys might see them and write off the toy as "for girls".

With a few exceptions, toy marketing is an exploitative business. Don't let
your kids watch TV or buy them action figures.

~~~
Confusion
That's not a fact of human nature. That is nurture/culture at its finest. Do
you think young chimpansee boys and girls play with different 'toys'?

Capitalism didn't create this culture, but it certainly isn't going to make it
go away. Blaming managers for capitalist comsiderations is like blaming the
wind for uprooting a tree.

~~~
nerfhammer
> Do you think young chimpansee boys and girls play with different 'toys'?

Yes, they do, and their preferences are largely similar to those of human
children.

[http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982210...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982210014491)

[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18452921](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18452921)

[http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1090513802...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1090513802001071)

~~~
polymatter
Thank you very much for providing actual evidence as opposed to speculation.
However, there is room for interpretation here, and I am not sure the evidence
is quite as conclusive as you seem to suggest. Its not strange at all for
published articles on the bleeding edge of science to be shown later to be
incorrect. And there are some things that hit me when looking at the
abstracts.

For example, in that first study observing behavior from six females and two
males seems enough to suggest that there is a "greater female interest in
infant care, with stick-carrying being a form of play-mothering".
Unfortunately, I don't think that is quite enough conclusive evidence to make
any conclusions about chimpanzee behavior beyond those particular individuals,
let alone that of the entire family of great apes.

In that third study, I seriously question the gendered objects. A toy pot
might be a girl toy in human society, but I question whether the same is true
in vervet monkey society. Do vervet monkeys hold a sterotype for female vervet
monkeys cooking with a pot in the kitchen, before they invent cooking, pots or
kitchens? And I don't understand how it is that a plush toy is female, but a
stuffed dog is ungendered.

I'd be interested in reading the full papers if anyone can pass on links to
the full papers. I'm sure I remember coming across these same studies
previously.

I suspect that negative results are not actually published and there is a lot
of existing pressure to confirm existing cultural beliefs in order to actually
get published. Look at what happened to the Harvard President Lawrence Summers
when he questioned whether women have less aptitude for science. There is a
lot of emotion behind this (and I won't deny being very biased myself). Though
I have to admit that the evidence does point towards a gendered difference in
toy preference, I just felt the need to question its conclusiveness.

~~~
thelamest
1\. Yes, there are differences between sexes/genders.

2\. No, they are not of stereotypical delineation/clarity/scale. If anything,
we now know more than ever that while people vary, there is no reason to
generalize against any social group ability in any matter.

3a. First study: female apes are more interested in tool-like sticks than male
apes.

3b. Second study: female apes are equally interested in "feminine" and
"masculine" toys.

3c. Third study: a doll attracts 20% of female vs 8% of male ape attention.

.pdfs of mentioned papers are easily findable on Google Scholar.

~~~
nerfhammer
> First study: female apes are more interested in tool-like sticks than male
> apes.

The study reported that juvenile female chimps were much more likely to use
sticks for doll-like behaviors. Using sticks for other things such as as tools
or as weapons were not reported.

It has been reported elsewhere the female chimps have a greater propensity to
use tools including sticks for food-gathering purposes:
[http://www.eva.mpg.de/primat/staff/boesch/pdf/fol_prim_tool_...](http://www.eva.mpg.de/primat/staff/boesch/pdf/fol_prim_tool_use_making.pdf)

> 3b. Second study: female apes are equally interested in "feminine" and
> "masculine" toys.

Male monkeys showed a strong preference for wheeled toys over plush dolls, and
the preference of female monkeys was smaller, and human children show roughly
the same pattern for these toys.

Also note that chimps are apes, and vervets and rhesus monkeys are not.

> 3c. Third study: a doll attracts 20% of female vs 8% of male ape attention.

Six toy types were studied, not just dolls.

------
Confusion
If you are blaming the execs for this, then you understand very little about
culture and are simply satisfying your ego eith righteous inidignation. The
execs are making the only right decision that allows them to keep their job:
it's their job to make decisions that earn the most money for the company,
irrespective of enlightened moral considerations.

If you want this to change, raise your children to believe differently and
preach different moral standards. This kind of change depends on you, not on
complaining about what others do while swept up in the cultural winds.

And don't take a job where you will be required to take these kinds of
decisions.

------
ars
That doesn't make any sense at all.

OK, by their logic they want boys to watch the show so they'll buy toys.

What do they care if girls also watch? It not like it hurts them - they just
don't get the potential benefit.

This makes so little sense that I don't believe a word of this article. Either
it's fake or someone edited it in a slanted way.

~~~
chime
I'm going to guess they think if girls are watching it, boys aren't. Gaining
20% girls/parents might end up costing them 10% boys, which they presume might
end up being a net loss for them.

He mentioned Cartoon Network specifically. On the other hand, Nick has
fantastic shows for people of all ages and genders. I am a huge fan of Korra.
A friend of mine started watching Avatar with her son a few years ago and told
me to check it out. After Avatar ended, we continued to watch Korra and it is
such a great show with strong backstories on almost all the primary
characters. If I had a daughter, I'd buy her a Korra doll, video game, and
craft supplies. I don't know why Cartoon Network thinks girls aren't
profitable.

~~~
chaostheory
Since we're on the subject, Korra actually had a hard time to be greenlit for
the same reason. Nick was scared that boys wouldn't watch the show even after
the success of Avatar, the Last Air Bender. Well they still bet on the series
and thankfully their fears were proven wrong.

~~~
Fede_V
While Korra is still ok, it's nowhere near as good as the Last Air Bender for
reasons that have nothing to do with the gender of the protagonist.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
That is ridiculous. The production values in Korra have been much better than
in Last Air Bender, including the animation and the music (especially the
music!). The story has been very fast paced with absolutely no filler
episodes, with a lot of character development to boot. Going back and watching
Last Air Bender, you can tell how much they've learned!

------
aidenn0
Not to defend the execs behavior at all, but as a parent I have seen it going
through the toy aisle with my daughter.

    
    
      Me:  "Why don't you get <toy with Lightning McQueen on it>?"
      Her: "It's a boy toy."
      Me:  "I thought you liked Lightning McQueen"
      Her: "I do, but that's a boy's toy"

~~~
clarebear
My 3 year old girl has a lot of boy friends because she wears her brother's
old McQueen shirts. But then she wants princess Sophia shwag because she gets
encouraged to. I would rather she aspire to be both mechanically inclined and
pretty than have to choose.

~~~
kaybe
Thinking about this, I know there is plenty of pretty geekwear for women
online, but I've never seen any for girls. Maybe I've never noticed? But then
there's always the option of buying unicoloured stuff and the print shop.. not
fixing the systematic problem though.

~~~
DanBC
There's a huge problem with gender neutral clothing; or even gendered clothing
with positive messages.

I don't want to buy my son a t-shirt with "trouble maker" type slogans.
[http://www.cooldudeskids.com/products/here-comes-trouble-
tsh...](http://www.cooldudeskids.com/products/here-comes-trouble-tshirt)

I don't want to buy a girl a t-shirt with "Princess Brat" on. Spoiled
Princess: [http://www.printfection.com/princessparade/Spoiled-
Princess-...](http://www.printfection.com/princessparade/Spoiled-Princess-T-
shirts-and-Gifts/_s_120213)

I would love to buy t-shirts in a variety of sizes and colours, and if they do
have messages I'd like those slogans to be positive; or with gender neutral
prints.

------
omarforgotpwd
Cartoon Network probably tries to target certain demographic rates so they can
have different options for advertisers. If you've got a product you're
marketing to girls, or families, or ages 3 - 5, Cartoon Network could
conceivably charge more to "target" your ad to the demographic you're
marketing to via the right show. Otherwise this doesn't make much economic
sense to me.

In any case, the show brought on looks like absolute shit.

~~~
Sniffnoy
One thing that's confused me for sometime about how demographics are used in
TV is that, well, "the sort of person who would watch X" seems like it would
be a useful category that could be targeted. That is to say, you could
optimize for "boys will watch this show, and boys will buy these things"; but
what about the more straightforward "people who will watch this show will buy
these things"? Instead of trying to go for this 2-step correlation sort of
thing.

I can't help but think of the phenomenon of network decay -- say of the Sci-Fi
network, for instance. Sure, you could notice that your science fiction
channel is watched by 18-31 year old males, and try to more heavily target
that group; or you could notice that it's watched by science fiction fans and
target that. I would naïvely expect the latter to be a more sensible way of
breaking things down in this context and thus more effective, but the former
seems to be what occurred. Am I missing something?

~~~
sokoloff
There are likely a lot more advertisers with money to spend marketing products
to sell to 18-31 year old males than to very specifically sci-fi fans.

I can imagine beer, clothing, cars, dating and related (shaving, hair and body
care products) would fit 18-31 male audience well. Some of those are likely
more valuable markets than straight sci-fi demographic products, I'm
imagining.

It may well be that a loose 18-31 male demographic fit is more valuable than a
tight sci-fi fit.

------
hristov
They are not very smart. I do not know much about kids shows, but it seems
like japanese shows always have a girl character with some tiny screeching
bouncing talking pet animal which seems specifically designed to be purchased
by girls as a toy.

~~~
lmm
In Japanese magical girl shows you get the same issue in reverse: they're very
careful to make the show as girly as possible with very few male characters
(often none at all), because once again advertisers want a segmented audience.
E.g. after Heartcatch Pretty Cure took a more serious tone and acquired a
periphery demographic the next two series were made deliberately more girly
and lost the dramatic arcs.

~~~
yarou
I always thought the target demographic for magical girl shows were the so-
called "grass eater" or herbivore men. There's a reason why Akihabara is very
popular, and I'd imagine most of the toy sales come from adult men rather than
girls.

------
vellum
This is amazingly short-sighted and dumb. A lot of the cash cows like
Spongebob and Scooby Doo make an epic amount of money, and they aren't
particularly tailored to one gender or the other.

 _In 2003 alone, Scooby-Doo generated more than $750 million in revenue from
licensing and merchandising_

[http://www.dvdverdict.com/reviews/scoobymonstermexico.php](http://www.dvdverdict.com/reviews/scoobymonstermexico.php)

~~~
PeterisP
I'm pretty sure they know the exact gender distribution of Spongebob / Scooby
Doo merchandise buyers.

I don't - but from observing friends of my kids I'm fairly sure that it's
nowhere near 50/50, despite, as you say, "they aren't particularly tailored to
one gender or the other".

------
spiritplumber
Ponies. That is all.

Seriously, didn't Lauren Faust disprove this once and for all?

~~~
noblethrasher
"Bronies" tend to be older males; think 13 to 40. They probably don't buy many
toys.

~~~
girvo
With the disposable income males at those ages have, I'd wager they certainly
_do_ buy toys. Lots of them.

------
alexsilver
So sad. I distinctly remember how my sis and I (female) got a pair of generic
brand transformers as a present back when I was 8. Dad was inspired after we
watched Voltron every Saturday! Of course, my sister (being slightly girlier
than me at that age) promptly used nail polish to paint its ugly-grey "shoes"
because we needed to distinguish "ours" but still, what fun! It turned into a
fighter plane and back and we'd spend hours playing with it.

... I mean, no, girls don't buy toys. Maybe if they didn't explicitly make it
boring and discouraging for girls then they would?

------
StudyAnimal
Presumably the reverse is also true. I guess boys don't want ponies and
princesses either, and now that I think about it, boys are portrayed slightly
negatively in e.g. Barbie movies. Just market segmentation I guess.

------
sgustard
My daughter has bought a ton of Legos, Star Wars and Harry Potter
paraphernalia over the years. Learning that she put money in the pockets of
drooling marketing dweebs despite their own idiocy is infuriating.

~~~
judk
It wasn't infuriating enough that you paid double for character-licensed
flavors of the toys?

------
tn13
I am not sure what is so surprising about this. Assuming that the execs
understanding of female and male consumers is correct if there is a bias in
their behavior, they should use that fact to increase their profits. We should
stop forcing this gender equality down everyones throats.

