Gender in advertising

These two ads for boys and girls clothing differentiates in that the boy is wearing clothes that promote
learning, with an Albert Einstein shirt, and the heading saying ”The little scholar”. Meanwhile the young
girl is wearing less academic clothes and the heading reads “The social butterfly.”
My perception of gap did not change after this, they have been slammed for similar ad campaigns in
the past.  This ad implies that only boys can be scholarly, and that women are not interested in learning,
only in being social. I do not think this ad is okay, and this controversy could easily be fixed by just
having both of the children’s titles in the ads be scholarly. For example, just call the little’s girls look
“the bookworm” or some other nerdy phrase and it wouldn’t have been a problem. I doubt the makers of
the ads were purposefully trying to offend people, and whether or not they did it unconsciously is up for
debate, but how this ad actually reached people is astounding. No one saw this ad at Gap and thought,
“Hey, this might be offensive to some people these days, maybe we should review this?”.
I think that gender stereotyping, especially for children at a young age is inevitable, whether we
advertise to them or not, due to humankind’s innate sense of fear towards the “other”. Little children
are afraid of each other and play games like “cooties” because they are aware of their differences.
These differences are always going to be used to make money by advertisers, and while ones as
out rightly sexist as this one no longer pass by the scrutinizing eye of media, our ideas of gender
in advertising will be virtually impossible to overcome due to how deeply entrenched in our psyche
these concepts are.