Anything you can do I can do better

Yesterday my daughter hung this on the refrigerator:

There are so many things that I like about this. I love that my seven-year-old is giving ninja lessons (because she is SUCH an expert). I love that she put a very specific day and time on the flyer to ensure her students' skills were honed on a regular basis. And I love that she spelled lessons wrong (because she is seven and they usually spell words wrong.)

There is one thing however, that I kinda wish wasn't there. The "For Boys Only" part. It seems a little ironic to me that a girl teaching a class on ninjas is excluding her own gender. I am sure that this was added just to keep out my youngest. Being only two, I'm sure it was assumed she couldn't keep up with the rigorous demands of ninja training. Or maybe she was just annoying them last night and they wanted to exclude her. The latter seems much more plausible.

While it seems silly for me to take issue with anything written on my daughter's cute, benign little sign the exclusion of her sister annoyed me a little and sent my thoughts wandering (and then spiraling) down the path of gender in our society today.

I strongly believe that girls can (and should) do anything boys can do. We are all equal and should be treated the same. The marketing world, however, has yet to receive that memo. Just walk down a toy aisle and you will see the glaring reality on how the world perceives girls and boys. Girl aisles are doused in pink and purple (but mostly every shade of pink). Boys aisles have a color too - it's just not so glaring.

Don't get me wrong I love pink. And my daughters have many, many (many) pink things. Toys and dolls, cameras, brushes ... Suffice to say 75 percent of my daughters trickety toys are pink. They like the Disney Princesses and I am fine with that. They balance it out with having Light Sabers and having Star Wars battles in the living room.

We have a lot of "girl" toys at our house, yes. Then we have "girl" toys that really don't have to be so gender specific. This year for Christmas and then for her birthday my oldest received Goldi Bloxs. It is relatively new toy out on the market to help create interest in engineering in girls. It is a wonderful product and my daughter loves it and I hope it does foster her skills in engineering and math. But does it have to be pink?

It's like the Legos and Duplos out there for girls that consist mainly of pink, purple and pastel colored blocks and build bakeries, supermarkets and pet salons. Why is just about every thing for girls pink? Why does a girls science experiment kit have to make bath beads and facial scrubs?

I am sure there has been excessive market research done on how girls gravitate toward the pinks and purples and these companies are just trying to attract the most customers. Can't say that I blame them there. If girls buy items that are pink and purple why not make your product one of those two colors (and usually that color is pink)?

I know girls could learn the same skills if the blocks were blue or green or turquoise. So I guess it is really up to us as parents to not pigeon hole them in the gender roles (and colors) that seem to bear down so heavily on us and them.

I know 90 percent of who they become and how they view themselves in the world come from their home life and much of that is directly from me. How I present myself, what I say, what I don't say, how I react to situations - they take all that in whether I know it or not and it crafts who they are. If I constantly critique and bash my appearance, my daughters will see that and I will be training them to be over critical of their own bodies and place more importance on their looks then their brains. If I make off-handed jokes on how bad I am at math they will think they will be bad at math and just stop trying.

I know that I am sending mixed messages when I ohh and ahh over the way they look in dresses or paint their fingernails. It's a constant battle and I know most of the time I am losing.

Recently I read the book "Schoolgirls: Young Women, Self-Esteem and the Confidence Gap" by Peggy Orenstein. It was a very interesting read and had many dead-on points about young women and how we lose them to appearance and peer pressure. The material was a bit dated (she interviewed the girls 1994) but it still carried relevance to today's young ladies. Although I wonder how the book would be written in today's society with all it's texting, sexting, Facebooking, Instagraming, Tweeting and the like.

So what do we do? I have to say I really don't know. While I am glad there are toys and tools out there that are trying to help foster girls love for math, science and engineering, I wish that it didn't have to come in a pink box to do it. But in the end if it excites girls and educates them, why am I pushing back?

I guess all what I really want for my girls is to be independent and confident. To be comfortable with themselves and know that they can do anything they set their minds to. I want them to know that while there may be a couple of body parts that make them different than boys, their brains are just the same.

Pinkness aside, the gender gap is slowly closing and I know that being a girl now is possibly as good as it has ever been. I am so thankful and grateful for all the women who have blazed path and path for the sake of equality and maybe, just maybe by the time my great-granddaughters are born gender issues will be a non-issue.

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