Unicorns Are For Girls: Adventures In Search Data

Sunday was International Women’s Day, and like everyone else on LinkedIn, I’ve had gender on my mind. I’ve also been thinking lately about the way that gender plays out in the children’s aisle: in kids’ clothes, toys, games and entertainment.

Because I use semiotic analysis at work, I’ve long been plagued by the question of why certain themes, narratives, visual cues, colour palettes and even animals are coded (sometimes explicitly, sometimes more implicitly) as “male” or “female” by kids’ retailers and clothing stores. As suitable for boys or girls but rarely both - when I know, logically, that there’s nothing inherently masculine or feminine about unicorns or rainbows, dinosaurs or robots.

So I decided to do some digging.

As part of our research process at Canopy, we use an AI tool called DIGBIE, which lets us draw on and aggregate search data to develop early cultural (and cross-cultural) hypotheses. Broadly, it tells us what, specifically, people are searching for when they search around a particular topic online - as well as where they’re searching, and in what kind of volume. It throws up some really useful, frequently interesting insights into what people look for, behind closed doors - and often some telling detail around market difference and market nuance in search behaviours.

Here, though, I wanted to use it to find out more about unicorns. And not just unicorns: rainbows, and robots, and dinosaurs too. Specifically, I wanted to know: what’s going on, culturally and behaviourally, that makes unicorns and rainbows ‘pink’ but dinosaurs and robots ‘blue’? What is it, if anything, that makes the former ‘female,' but the latter ‘male'? 

The selection of these 4 topics was a little arbitrary - based more on my experience as a parent in constant need of child-sized dungarees and t-shirts than on any hard empirical data. But anecdotally, at least, they feel like solid choices: unicorns and rainbows are everywhere across girls’ clothes, toys and games in the UK and US, and you can’t swing a cat without hitting a cartoon dinosaur or sad-eyed robot in the boys’ section.

I duly plugged all 4 topics into DIGBIE, with an eye on searches performed in the UK and the US over the last 3 months. The results were depressing and entirely expected, but still significant. On the basis of the results DIGBIE generated, I was able to infer several things about the framing of unicorns and rainbows in both British and American cultures:

·      Rainbows and unicorns mean literal sweetness. Searches for both threw up associations with cakes, cookies, confectionery and birthday treats - and, by extension, with (as in the nursery rhyme) sugar and spice and all things nice, as well as stereotypically ‘feminine’ activities like baking, cooking and cake decorating. 

·      Rainbows and unicorns mean creative expression. Not the more serious, STEM/STEAM creativity encouraged by (say) robotics or LEGO, but the softer (and again, more stereotypically ‘feminine’) side of creative arts - illustration and painting, fashion and make-up design. Associations with colouring, drawing, pencils and paints were widespread, as were searches for “unicorn dresses” and “rainbow sweaters.”

·      Rainbows and unicorns mean softness. Associations with stuffed toys and teddy bears - as well as “girls’ toys” like dolls - also proliferated. 

It isn’t difficult to tease out conclusions from the data here - to move towards understanding that the perceived sweetness, softness and gentle, imaginative creativity of rainbows and unicorns might equate to femininity in cultures primed to see the two as intertwined. 

Robots and dinosaurs tell a similar cultural story:

·      Unlike the mythical unicorns and intangible rainbows, dinosaurs and robots are both real, material things that exist (or once existed) in the physical world - and the DIGBIE outputs reflect this. Dinosaurs, especially, are aligned with hard facts - facts drawn from natural history (as per associations with museums and exhibitions) and from palaeontology (as per questions about, for example, dinosaur bones, or just which species it was that had 500 teeth). Dinosaurs can be counted and catalogued - perfect for male-identified kids culturally conditioned to see math(s) and science as “boys’ subjects.” 

·      Similarly, robots mean STEM, quite literally. They’re firmly associated with complex, adult, tech-enabled practices like robotics, robotic-aided surgery and prosthetics (as per searches for “robot limbs” and exoskeletons) and construction (as per searches for LEGO) - and by extension with archetypically masculine vocations (and male-dominated arenas) like engineering and emergency medicine.

·      Finally, robots and dinosaurs mean active play - not the gentle passivity of unicorns and rainbows, but dynamic explosions of activity, demonstrated by the prevalence of searches for “games”/video games (and specific prehistoric titles like ARK: Survival Evolved), Robot Wars, robot dogs and fun-focused home robots like the Anki Vector. Unlike rainbows and unicorns, robots and dinosaurs don’t just dream - they do.   

Again, the conclusion here is both stark and obvious: dinosaurs and robots are coded as masculine in kids’ brand-worlds and retail spaces - as better suited to boys than girls - because they’re associated in the eyes of a significant number of people (or at least, of a significant number of internet users in the US and UK) with stereotypically masculine virtues: raw power, hard facts, rationality, dynamism, technological advancement. Unicorns and rainbows, by contrast, are not.

Why it is that one set of values has been understood as masculine in UK and US cultures, and another as feminine, is another, much bigger question altogether. And one, unfortunately, that I suspect it’ll take more than a few data sets to unravel.