Many years ago in western democracies such as Australia, the UK and the United States of America the idea that a child's path in life should be determined by their gender was generally rejected, but in the last few years I have found many ways in which this idea has in practice, if not explicitly, returned to legitimacy in Australia and around the developed world, and has also become a popular fad embraced my many Australians.
Much of this article was written in 2013 but it has been added to over the years and remains just as relevant in 2016.
In Australia we have gender segregation in........
Baby names
An obvious form of gender differentiation but not inevitable, as unisex first names such as Ashley or Jesse are not a new concept. Girl’s names are more likely to end in a vowel sound and surnames used as first names appear to be more common with boy’s names.
Baby clothes
We are all familiar with the blue and pink cliché.
Skirts and dresses for toddler and baby girls are easy to find in the shops, even though such garments can be a hazard that can trip-up or impede an active crawling, climbing or toddling infant. This must surely restrict the physical activity of toddler girls to some degree.
Schools
Many private schools have always been for boys or girls only, and some private schools have become co-ed, but the idea of singe-sex education has made some inroads into government school education in Australia. In November 2015 a Western Australian newspaper reported on a boys-only kindergarten class that appears to be in the state school system
https://au.news.yahoo.com/thewest/wa/a/30216523/new-kindy-boys-in-a-class-of-their-own/?cmp=st&cmp=st
The teacher of that class cited "research" to back up her apparent beliefs that boys are different in terms of activity levels, noise and "mathematical reasoning and spatial awareness". The "parenting expert" Maggie Dent endorsed these ideas.
Single-sex classes have also gained some popularity in Queensland government schools, even though research has apparently failed to find an educational advantage in single-sex classes and negative effects have been found:
http://incorrectpleasures.blogspot.com/2011/10/scientific-evidence-for-positive.html
Schoolyard play?
A recent study of Australian childrens' play in schoolyards by Kate Darian-Smith and Nikki Henningham has found that "No formal gender segregation was observed in the playground in Australian government and non-government coeducational schools", but what about informal gender segregation? It appears that the report did not directly address this question, even though a fair number of the photos in the report showed single-sex groups of kids playing together. A possible negative impact of girls' traditional school uniforms on their play was observed: "In all schools many schools (sic) girls preferred to wear shorts, including under dresses, so as to be more able to participate in physical play." Co-educational play possibly broadens the play options of all: "A teacher at the all-boys school noted with interest that when girls are involved with holiday programs, skipping and clapping rhymes become evident..."
Youth clubs
Many youth clubs and movements, including church and religion-based youth groups, started out long ago as single-sex organizations, and some remain so. The Boy Scout movement started as a male-only organization, and the Girl Guides developed as a parallel to cater for girls who wanted to participate in similar activities. As with some adult service clubs, gender segregation has remained in the female version of the organization but not in the male one. According to the Wikipedia “Even when most Scout organisations became coeducational, Guiding remained separate in many countries to provide a female-centred programme.”
Of possibly more concern is the trend for local government-funded programs for youths to be single-sex, with promotional material that makes heavy use of gender stereotyping. One example is a girls-only after-school drop-in program featuring cooking, health workshops, wellbeing workshops, life skill development and unspecified "outings". It all sounds very cheap to run and limiting for participants. The flyer promoting the program was decorated with pink, mauve and pale blue flowers and paisley swirls. Ick.
Recreational facilities
Australian public skate parks tend to have a heavy male bias in the gender ratio of users, who tend to be children and youths. I have found that the higher the quality of the skate park, the more likely one is to find young children, parental supervision and girls at the skate park, but nevertheless the normal situation is that there are no females at all using a skate park at most times of the day, and there do not appear to be any initiatives by the municipal city councils who own these skate parks to promote their use to girls or the parents of girls, despite the fact that social research has established that as girls move into puberty their participation in sport often declines.
High school chaplain-delivered programmes for students
Single-sex programs offered by high school chaplains in Australian government schools include programs that go by the names Strength and Shine and Bloke and Chick, which makes me want to puke and chuck. Apparently the Strength and Shine programs are the products of the powerful fundamentalist Hillsong church.
Is this story on the WA version of the ABC's current affairs TV show 7.30 about a "Shine" program for disaffected female students running in a Geraldton private high school the same program as the Shine program of the Hillsong church? http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-06-09/the-shine-program-turning-heads-in-the-school/4742926
Religion-required sex segregation
There are too many examples to attempt to list. Some particularly striking examples include sex segregation in Islam and in some Islamic societies, and also in Orthodox Judaism. FaceGlat is an Israel-based and sex segregated version of Facebook.
Government-funded employment agencies
I know of at least one employment service provider which appears to have a blanket policy of directing job seekers who are the primary care-givers of young children into stereotypically feminine jobs, and the majority of primary care-givers of children just happen to be female. I believe the justification given for this practice is the incorrect idea that these are the only jobs that offer family-friendly hours.
In Australia jobs are sometimes advertised as requiring applicants of one gender, which I thought was illegal, at least in the past, and I know from first-hand observations that some government-funded job service providers will go along with this sexism while matching clients to such jobs.
Government-funded career choice counselling
One Australian state government-funded career counselling service offers a workshop in which participants do a questionnaire based on John Holland's theory about interests and career choice (RIASEC), and while I can't identify anything gender-biased about the tool itself, the illustration about people working in careers that was used in the presentation and in printed material did appear to be a depiction of gender stereotypes or gender biases. The two areas of interests that are the most about dealing with people, the "social" and the "enterprising" interest categories were illustrated with female models, while the other interest categories of "realistic", "investigative", "artistic" and "conventional" are illustrated by male models. Just by the numbers alone this illustration is gender-biased with more males shown than females. An image search on Google did not yield any links to this particular illustration that I could share here, but this search did retrieve many illustrations of the Holland Codes from American sources, and I could not identify any gender biased examples among the US-sourced career counselling material. I did find one American illustration that very much went against gender stereotypes from a university in Maryland in which was the gender-opposite to the Australian illustration except that the "investigative" as also male. So it appears that Australia has a particular problem with gender stereotyping in government-funded career services.
Work
The concepts of occupational gender segregation, vertical segregation (of genders in the workplace), pink ghettoes, glass ceilings and glass elevators are all well-researched and real phenomena. A journalistic photo that illustrates the striking gender segregation in one area of employment can be viewed here: http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/victoria/promise-on-nurse-numbers-in-doubt/story-fn7x8me2-1226278766999
A news story that reports an appalling and growing gender pay gap in Australia can be found here:
http://www.smh.com.au/national/tertiary-education/gender-pay-gap-doubles-in-a-year-20130103-2c78q.html
In 2013 child-care workers in Australia were paid $19 an hour. This workforce is overwhelmingly female and many of them have educational qualifications. This is a disgrace.
I have worked for one of Australia's largest corporations and I have been told by an apparently surprised or puzzled supervisor to stop working at a task among male employees and go work at a different task because "The girls are out the back". During training this same supervisor told me and other trainees that she believed that female employees had a natural advantage at a particular type of work. At another work-site I had a male employer who made jokes about supposed psychological differences between men and women often during tea-breaks. This work supervisor was completely open about assigning workers to specific tasks according to gender. At both work sites there was obvious sorting by gender in allocation of workers to various tasks.
A recent radio show about the persistent under-representation of women in careers in science and technology:
Technology: why is it still a man's world? Future Tense. ABC Radio National. 14 July 2013.
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/futuretense/technology3a-why-is-it-still-a-man27s-world3f/4808386
Exploitation in unpaid work
A recent report about the exploitation of workers doing unpaid work trials found that unpaid trials were especially common in hair and beauty, retail, hospitality and professional services, many of these areas of work being female-dominated:
http://www.news.com.au/breaking-news/national/unpaid-staff-ripe-for-exploitation-report/story-e6frfku9-1226572245792#ixzz2LzsoHOSJ
Job Vacancy Advertisements
It is too easy to find examples of photographs accompanying job ads that could be interpreted as suggesting that the job advertised or some jobs are suitable for one particular gender, in fact it is not easy to find online job ads that don't feature gender-stereotyped photography of workers (men in hard hats and high-viz vests, girls wearing telephone headsets). Note that one of these examples linked to below is a government site:
http://jobsearch.gov.au/resourcesectorjobs/default.aspx
http://jobsboard.seek.com.au/Job/diploma-trained-childcare-full-time-rose-bay/in/sydney-cbd-inner-west-eastern-suburbs/24385189
http://jobsboard.seek.com.au/Job/librarian-local-studies/in/perth-eastern-suburbs/24414667
Websites for Job-Seekers
Example:
Careermums
http://www.careermums.com.au/
University Study and Research
Although people are not formally allocated to study one or another course at Australian universities by gender there is hardly any need for this, because in some areas of scholarship and study Australians segregate themselves by gender spontaneously, as can be seen in these group photos of some Australian university departments:
http://physics.anu.edu.au/ampl/
https://www.facebook.com/CCDPersonPerception
Eating and drinking
According to the stereotypes, women and girls like to eat chocolate, thickly-iced cupcakes and similar sugary junk food as a form of psychological self-comforting (presumably needed because females are supposed to be emotionally fragile and vulnerable), and women are also thought to prefer sweet wines and syrupy pre-mixed alcoholic drinks when indulging in alcohol. After indulging in all this sickly-sweet stodge, stereotypical women overcompensate in a bout of regret, self-recrimination and borderline-anorexic dieting by eating nothing but dry salads, because they are also obsessed with their weight and physical appearance. Eating a sensible, balanced, healthy diet does not seem to be on the agenda for either gender, because a real man would not be seen dead eating a salad, or a quiche. Manly foods are barbecued meat (full of fat, salt and carcinogenic chemicals from high-temeperature cooking), cancer-causing processed meats such as sausages and bacon, and savoury fast foods, and men's preference in alcoholic drinks includes beer or dry wines, nothing sweet. Books about how to feed men and boys and cookbooks aimed exclusively to men have become new genres, and can often be found for sale at Australia Post shops:
Man food by Billy Law (with a book cover design of a photo of woven and cooked bacon)
Mad Hungry: Feeding Men and Boys by Lucinda Scala Quinn
Manly Food by Simon Cave "Because men order steak and women order salad!"
Tea-rooms and restaurants
At a budget terminal at an Australian domestic airport I recently came across a licenced restaurant that had a name and decor with a clearly manly theme, with posters depicting muscle-bound male workers in various occupational groups. They offered a range of beers. Maybe this marketing was aimed at male FIFO workers? Let's hope this silly crap disappears now that the Aussie mining has gone bust.
Another even more gender segregated phenomenon in the Australian hospitality industry is the high tea trend, in which tea and decoratively-presented bite-sized cakes and sandwiches are served on tiered cake stands. The servings are sweet, intricate, miniscule and pretty, engaging multiple feminine gender stereotypes at once: sugar-preference, diet-obsession, daintiness and prettiness-preference (I defy you to say that out loud without lisping).
Photo from Pinterest to show what I mean: https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/a0/62/d0/a062d00a89c0bc7ca1d9fd5e55efcc7d.jpg
High teas are often explicitly promoted as for females "get the girls together". Many hotels offer high tea sessions, but there are also entire tea-rooms that do nothing but high teas, and are typically decorated to saturation-point with old-fashioned, flowery and decorative low-brow ornaments, pictures and lighting. Women-only gatherings are the norm in such places. I recently attended a women-only birthday party at such a place. I thought it was quite sad that males had been excluded from this celebration, expecially in light of the fact that the "birthday girl" had a husband and only sons.
Community health centres, counselling and health advocacy services
Examples:
Mensline (telephone counselling service)
MensTime (relationship counselling, group programs and seminars, run by Anglicare, funded by a state govt. dept.)
Women's Health Victoria (advocacy)
Logan Women's Health and Wellbeing Centre
Women's Healthworks
Menslink (a free counselling and mentoring the service for young men and their families in Canberra, promoted by Prime Minister Gillard's partner Tim Mathieson)
The idea of health service centres specifically for women is widespread and long-established. These places may offer support groups, counselling, gynaecological and/or educational services for women delivered by a women only staff.
Services promoted as “men’s health” appear to have more of an emphasis on counselling, psychology and recreational activities, and there appears to be more businesses advertised as men’s health services. Men’s and women’s health services may be government or charity funded.
Social and informal social support organizations
Some examples:
Dads only playgroups
Freemasons
Red Hat Society
CWA
Mens’ Sheds – an organization that is rapidly growing and being allocated a lot of government funding in Australia, and enjoys the patronage of the Prime Minister’s partner (a man).
The Women’s Connection
Asperger Women Association
single-sex choirs - appear to be popular despite not sounding as good as mixed choirs
Popular Websites
An example:
Mamamia - a popular Australian website aimed at women, full of the kind of stuff that women stereotypically are thought to be interested in, such as celebrities, human interest stories, parenting stories, fashion, food and lots of adverts.
Contributing to the Wikipedia internet encyclopaedia
91% of Wikipedia editors are male according to a 2013 article in New Scientist magazine. The world's most famous online crowd-sourced encyclopedia is primarily a man's world.
Service clubs and business networking organizations
There are many regional and larger networking organizations specifically for businesswomen.
Many service clubs have a male-only membership past that has been modernized in past decades to allow women to become members of the organization as a whole or members of individual branches. Men’s and women’s only branches can be found in some service clubs and societies. The YWCA and YMCA are obvious examples of service organizations that have at least started with a single-sex focus.
General informal socializing (including private parties)
Parties for adults in Australia in the 1960s and 1970s have been described as strictly gender segregated by many social commentators, to the extent that the notion of parties where the men gather at one end of the room and the womenfolk cluster at the other end has become a cliche. It was noted that this was not limited to any particular strata of society - it has been observed among the privileged and the working class. Most definitely attitudes did improve in Australia during the latter parts of the 20th century, but I can report encountering some negativity from some older women during the 1990s in Australia as a result of me talking with their husbands as we all sat around a campfire during some off-road travelling. Their reaction seemed to echo an experience recounted in an interesting article about the controversial Australian movie Wake in Fright: "At one party, I remember my wife, who plays Janette Hynes, got tired of talking about hats and recipes and so decided to wander over towards the men’s circle. Later, she said to me, “I was greeted like I was a harlot, so I immediately scurried back to the women and the women were furious and thought I was trying to steal their men!” I recommend that movie as a striking depiction of gender segregation in socialising in Australia in the 1960s. Men who dared to stray to chat with the women at Australian parties in the past were apparently paradoxically regarded as a bit gay. I'm really not sure what the present situation is, as I don't go to a lot of parties. Sex segregation at parties is definitely one Australian tradition that is not worth resurrecting!
The kinds of social work/counselling organizations in Australia that provide single-gender health services and counselling services have also been known to host or sponsor "Dads' Only Days" or free family fun activity days specifically for children accompanied by their fathers or father-figures. I am not sure what these woman-free events are supposed to achieve in the community.
Consumer products marketed to one gender for no obvious or compelling reason
Some examples:
Cottee's Fruit Cup cordial in different versions for boys and for girls
Bioglan Kids Gummies Multivitamin for Girls for "your little princess" with Disney princesses on the packaging http://www.bioglan.com.au/common-needs/kids-health/multivitmin-for-girls/kids-multivitamin-for-girls.html
Bioglan Kids Gummies Multivitamin for Boys for "your little racer" with Disney animated cars on the packaging
http://www.bioglan.com.au/common-needs/kids-health/bioglan-kids-gummies-multivitamin-for-boys.html
Scrap books as required in primary school booklists purchased from a Coles store in January 2016, identical in every way but for the colourful covers that come in two gender-stereotyped designs, with bluish colours and mechanical stuff for some kids and pinky hues and nature for others:
Powerful Yoghurt. (for men)
http://powerful.yt/
Ian Chillag at NPR reviews yoghurt for men. Amusing.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2013/03/17/174411023/yogurt-for-men-a-review
Chocolate bar lines in Ikea stores, with Karlfazer brand in blue packaging right next to Geisha brand in cute pink packaging
Eggs by Ellah in artsy pink packaging http://eggsbyellah.com.au/
Coffee Chill iced coffee (special promotions with a blokey theme)
Extra For Dudes flavoured milks by Harvey Fresh http://www.facebook.com/ExtraForDudes
Man-New energy drink, seems to be marketed to blokes, possibly capitalizing on the current body-building fad among young men.
Bic Cristal For Her pens ballpoint pens in pretty colours marketed to the female consumer seen at Officeworks.
Disposable Shavers marketed in very highly gendered packaging with different names and colours, but how different could the shavers be? Guess which gender of cheap disposable shavers is the cheapest?
Red Balloon "his and hers" leisure activity gift voucher packages - the men's pack includes activities to do with beer, action, sport and the outdoors, and the women's pack includes wine, relaxation and classes for learning how to make food or drink (cookery and barista classes), because after all that work as a kitchen slave a woman needs a bit of relaxation and a glass of wine.
Dietary supplements, vitamins, pills and potions
These products can be associated with bodybuilding and gym cultures and also appear to be popular sellers in pharmacies and have retailers solely devoted to these types of products, which are often marketed by gender. Is there any scientific justification for gender specialization in these products? Do any of these products have a scientific basis?
Magazines and magazine racks
The magazine industry has been creating products aimed at specific genders forever, and it is not surprising that the retail displays created to sell these products are often similarly gender-segregated. Magazine displays in virtually all newsagents and also some supermarkets are or have been gender segregated according to gender stereotypes that apply to the subject area of magazines, with “women’s magazines”, fashion, slimming, cooking, parenting and celebrity gossip mags displayed on the female side, and business, science, computers, motor vehicle, fishing, fitness, smut and current affairs mags are often shelved on the male side of the rack.
Books and Book Retailing Displays
A similar situation exists with books as in magazines - as the products are often aimed at one gender or age group, so the retail displays often group the products in a similar categorization. Book shelves in the David Jones department store as seen in 2013 are just one example - sex stereotype segregation in much the same manner as the typical newsagent shop’s display of magazines, with sport books, humour and biographies of males on one side, cookery, slimming and biographies of women on the other side. Even Australia Post circa 2016 has been observed to practice gendered marketing of books and gifts, with clearly segregated men's and women's shelves in post office retail spaces.
Books
Some examples:
Womens’ Stuff by Kaz Cooke
The Dangerous Book for Boys by Conn and Hal Iggulden
The Daring Book for Girls by Andrea J. Buchanan and Miriam Peskowitz
Some fictional genres are thought to have a readership of predominantly one gender, for example “chick lit”.
Book authors
A quote from page 53 of the paperback edition of the 2011 book Spoilt Rotten! by Theodore Dalrymple:
"Yet I had never seen books classified in this way before, and the novelty of the arrangement surely tells us something about our present Zeitgeist, as does the classification of books by the race, sex or sexual practices of their authors."
Entertainment
The free-to-air TV channel 7Mate is marketed explicitly to men and the programming of the GEM TV channel is designed to appeal to a female audience.
Movie genres
Some genres seem to be created with only one gender in mind, such as romantic comedy and action movies. Every Hollywood action movie includes at least one stripper scene, by law.
Shelving in public libraries
I have seen magazines for loan arranged with a section for "Women's Interest" magazines.
Parenting advice
Relationships Australia, a counselling organization that is largely funded by government, advertised workshops about parenting girls for Dads and workshops about parenting boys for Mums, presumably based on the presumption that female parents need special help in understanding their male offspring, and vice versa.
Parenting Ideas parenting advice fact-sheets from Michael Grose Presentations Pty Ltd that are distributed free to parents through many Australian schools sometimes have a single-sex theme, one example being a sheet of advice about raising teenage daughters that had an emphasis on enforcing moral values and standards of behaviour that was reminiscent of thinking from the 1950s "It is important that we open up conversations around values and beliefs." " Encourage her to know who she is and keep to her values." "Is she living in a way that respects her core values?"
Books or advice about raising kids of one gender generally originate from a person of that same gender, for example:
Dannielle Miller is promoted as a parenting expert who specializes in the area of raising girls and her book The Butterfly Effect is about raising teen girls. The area of books of advice about parenting teens seems to be particularly affected by division by gender.
The popular but evidence-free book Raising Boys was written by Steve Biddulph, who was voted Australian Father of the Year in 2000 for his work encouraging the active role of fathers, a job surely only fit for a man.
A gender division can even be found in specialized areas of parenting advice:
Smart Girls, Gifted Women by Barbara A. Kerr
Smart Boys: Talent, Manhood, and the Search for Meaning by Barbara A. Kerr, Sanford J. Cohn and Audie Alcorn
Asperger’s in Pink by Julie Clark and Rudy Simone is just one of many recent books on the subject of Asperger syndrome and the autistic spectrum and girls, an area characterized by much speculation by people regarded as Asperger syndrome experts but supported by little scientific research
Raising Boys with ADHD: Secrets for Parenting Healthy, Happy Sons by James Forgan and Mary Anne Richey
Beliefs about Parenting
The idea that the genders have important psychological differences is an element supporting the popular belief that children need parental role models of both genders (or a good non-parental substitute), especially a parental role model of their own gender. This popular belief inevitably leads to beliefs that sole parent mothers are insufficient to parents sons and vice versa, that single parents are insufficient as parents, that same-sex parents are jointly insufficient as parents, and that children from such families are in some way psychologically impaired or damaged, especially ones who were raised without a parent of their gender. Such beliefs go against the actual scientific evidence gathered from research. A great many individuals and families are condemned by this inter-connected set of beliefs about psychology and gender. There is rarely any acknowledgement that single-parent families are often living in poverty, and this stressful economic situation is rarely cited as a possible cause of social problems that are thought to be common to this type of family.
This web page from the single-gender service charity Menslink appears to be based some of the above negative beliefs about sole-parent families: http://menslink.org.au/news/
Events – organizational and informal
Reclaim the Night (men are reputedly banned from these marches)
Movember (Women are not encouraged to grow a moustache to help raise awareness of men’s health issues, although heaven knows, many of us could.)
Hen’s nights
Buck’s parties
International Women’s Day
International Men’s Day
Mental illness - professional diagnosis and also self-diagnosis
In Australia there is a popular belief that in men depression can manifest not as a sad or low mood, but as aggression or irritability, thus widening the criteria for this mental illness to include countless extra men and distorting the definition of depression to the point of absurdity. This belief also gives agressive or violent men a handy excuse for bad behaviour. It is unclear whether irritable or aggressive women are supposed fall into any diagnostic category. Borderline personality disorder perhaps? BPD is a mental illness/personality disorder in which most of those diagnosed are women. Uneven gender ratios are a common feature of psychiatric diagnostic categories, and this has been the cause of much debate, with some alleging an influence of gender stereotyping.
A fine example of the use of gender-stereotyped marketing of mental health/psychiatry services in Australia would be the Man Therapy website from the Beyond Blue Australian psychiatry public awareness charity: http://www.mantherapy.org.au/
Is it even proper or appropriate for psychiatry to be aggressively marketed to the general population, with or without the aid of gender stereotyping?
Crime and social deviance
Outlaw bikie clubs appear to have a male-only membership.
Research studies
Example:
Health in Men Air Quality Study by researchers from the University of WA, Edith Cowan University, CSIRO and WA Centre for Health and Ageing.
Female and child subjects have routinely been excluded from medical research studies, for various reasons, limiting the applicability of the research findings. There are good reasons why some research studies only have subjects of one sex, but for others the reasons are far from clear.
Colours, toys and fashion
Baby boys are dressed in baby blue and baby girls in pink, but the colour-coding of humanity certainly doesn't stop there. In the last 10 years or so there has been a trend in which an overwhelming proportion of girls' clothing is coloured in the stereotypical girly colours of pink, magenta, salmon, mauve and purple, and this trend of gender segregation in clothing colours extends less obviously to boys, whose clothing range in department stores is predominantly in a range of colours that aren't those above, including black and dark colours. The Barbie-doll pink fad has now extended into women's wear, with hues in women's fashion that would have been unusual years ago becoming the mode, colours such as bright salmon and hot pink. Menswear has always been produced in a quite limited and sombre range of colours, and I don't think this has changed much in a long time.
Gendered colours are not limited to clothing, school bags, kids' lunch-boxes or fashion. Any toy section in a variety retail store in Australia will have it's pink aisles full of female and baby dolls, and other aisles full of action-fantasy play toys and moving vehicle toys in which colours such as black, blue, green and browns that are not pretty predominate. The concept of boys' and girls' toys is an established and pervasive part of our culture. For as long as I can remember the McDonalds fast-food chain has been categorizing the free toys given away with children's meals by gender, and your child will be allocated a toy by gender automatically by the staff, unless you object. While explicit labeling of toys as "GIRLS TOYS" and "BOYS TOYS" has been sighted at a Woolworths supermarket in May 2013, such explicit gendered signposting is usually not necessary in the toy departments of discount and department shops because the packaging of gender-specific products make the gender designation very clear, and such toys are usually grouped together by merchandising staff by gender. Explicit labeling of toys by gender appears to be a fairly common practice in the UK, one egregious example being the categorization of a chemistry set as a boy's toy by the Tesco supermarket chain: http://www.tesco.com/direct/action-science-chemistry-set/211-6172.prd
Fortunately, there are also forces acting against such sexism in the UK. In April 2013 a British pharmacy chain Boots was forced to change a policy of explicit gender labeling of toys after negative feedback from the public through social media: http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2013/apr/30/boots-removes-gender-signs-toys The United Kingdom-based Let Toys be Toys campaign objects to the promotion of books and toys as suitable for boys or girls. Concerned Australian parents have formed the campaign Play Unlimited with the aim of ending the segregation of toys along gender lines and promoting the idea that all children should be encouraged to enjoy the widest possible range of play experiences.
Politics
As a part of the desperate 2013 federal election campaign the Australian Labor Party launched the "Women for Gillard" campaign in Sydney on the 11th of June. The endorsement of the idea gender segregation in voting and politics by the Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard and her supporters couldn't be clearer. Playing the "gender card" like it was her only card left Gillard asserted that a Coalition government would marginalize women and use the issue of abortion for political ends. http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/women-banished-under-a-coalition-government-julia-gillard-claims/story-fn59niix-1226661839065 The result of Gillard's June 2013 appeal to a specifically female constituency, which would be referred to by commentators as her "blue tie speech", was an unprecedented drop in support for the ALP from male voters (without any significant gain in female voter endorsement), evidence that Gillard's gendered strategy for political campaigning was truly divisive: http://www.couriermail.com.au/news/opinion/party-games-prime-minister-julia-gillard-loses-500000-male-voters-in-a-month-with-her-blue-tie-speech/story-fnihsr9v-1226665229700 In June 2013 when Kevin Rudd "rolled" Gillard and once again became the Prime Minister of Australia, he regained much support for the ALP from voters of both genders.
Australian politics has for a number of years, especially during the dismal age of Gillard/Abbott leadership in Australian federal politics, displayed a preoccupation with gender segregation and gender roles. The male Liberal Party leader Tony Abbott taking every opportunity to be photographed participating in masculine sports, often wearing minimal clothing, or playing at working in male-stereotyped trade occupations while doing tours of workplaces. Prime Minister Julia Gillard was hailed as a role-model of a working, high-achieving woman from the moment that she stole Kevin Rudd's job, and she has often taken the opportunity to be photographed in the midst of groups of women.
Illustrative links:
http://scribepublications.com.au/books-authors/title/tony-abbott/
http://www.gettyimages.com.au/detail/news-photo/australian-prime-minister-julia-gillard-poses-with-care-news-photo/139630858
The March 2013 edition of the Australian magazine for intellectual types The Monthly featured a photo of PM Julia Gillard with two female ministers of her government, and the caption "The XX Factor". Inside the magazine was a story about women ministers in Gillard's government: http://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2013/march/1361848246/anna-goldsworthy/critical-mass
There is nothing new or uniquely Australian about gender segregation being embraced (and not condemned) by politicians and political campaigners. A news report in 2011 described Michelle Obama, the "First Lady" and wife of the President of the USA, being greeted very warmly by an audience of schoolgirls. On the right-wing/Republican side of US politics, Ann Romney was seen at a Republican Party convention in 2012 speaking in front of an audience in which many women waved identical placards with the message "Women Love Ann". Mrs Romney gave a speech about "love" and her marriage to male Mormon politician Mitt Romney which was all very touchy-feely, a stark demonstration of contrasting gender roles.
Activism
Disappointingly, sometimes the choice of the causes that Australians appear to care about appear to be heavily influenced by their sex or by their adherence to gender stereotypes. Animal welfare and environmental activism appears to be "women's work" while campaigners against immigration and far right political activist groups appear to be mostly male, while a great many other humanitarian or political causes attract a balanced gender ratio. In my personal opinion, I believe a balanced gender ratio goes along with a mentally balanced outlook in activism. Below are links to some Australian news stories showing implicitly or explicitly the influence of gender on activism:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-03-05/duck-shooting-protesters-don-pink-tutus-at-moulting-lagoon-seas/7223350
http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2015/s4422939.htm
Charity, health and celebrity patronage
I recently saw a media story about retirees volunteering in a workshop/factory to make wheelchairs for children that are exported to poor countries around the world, very worthwhile, interesting and satisfying work, but I was disappointed to see that the entire organization appears to be male:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-10-25/perth-men-build-wheelchairs-for-disadvantaged-kids/5840740
The very wealthy and famous female African-American former TV chat show host Oprah Winfrey funded a school in South Africa for girls, the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls. This seems fitting because Oprah's success in business and the world of entertainment has been based on appealing to a predominantly female audience with a daytime TV show that dealt with stereotypically feminine topics from a stereotypically feminine viewpoint.
The Priceline Sisterhood appears to be one of those charity projects done by a retailer as positive PR. It also appears to be marketed to women and promoted as benefiting women through supporting health charities that address issues that have apparently been identified by Australian women as top concerns. Priceline is a cosmetics retailer and the website of this project is bright pink. Shopfronts and interiors of Priceline stores have been decorated in vivid Barbie-doll pink, just in case any consumers were unaware that these are shops for females. Unfortunately, many Priceline stores are also dispensing pharmacies, in some cases the only outlet for medical prescriptions in a shopping centre. This means that men who need to get a prescription filled would presumably be forced to walk into a shop aggressively decorated in a girly-woman theme in order to get their essential medical needs met, an experience that could make men feel that taking medications and looking after their own health needs is an unmanly thing to be doing. Relevant link:
http://www.advancevisual.com.au/portfolio.aspx
References
Caputo, Raffaelle (2009) Wake in Fright: an interview with Ted Kotcheff.
Senses of Cinema. Issue number 51
http://www.sensesofcinema.com/2009/feature-articles/ted-kotcheff-interview/
Darian-Smith, Kate and Henningham, Nikki (2011) Childhood, tradition and change: a national study of the historical and contemporary practices and significance of of Australian childrens' playlore. June 2011.
http://ctac.esrc.unimelb.edu.au/objects/project-pubs/FinalReport.pdf
Recommended Resources
Let Toys be Toys - For Girls and Boys http://www.lettoysbetoys.org.uk/
Play Unlimited http://www.playunlimited.org.au/
Pointlessly Gendered Products by Sociologist Lisa Wade
http://www.pinterest.com/socimages/pointlessly-gendered-products/
Further Reading
Wade, Lisa (2015) Five Reasons Why Gendered Products are a Problem. Sociological Images. December 31st 2015.
http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2015/12/31/five-reasons-why-pointlessly-gendered-products-are-a-problem/
Gender segregation in Australia
