1972 Easy Bake Oven, © General Mills Fun Group, Inc.

Biological

The Easy-Bake Oven was initially intended to be used by young girls, and it appears that not much has changed in this regard. Many domestic toys came out after WWII in order to make a clear distinction between what is appropriate for women and what is appropriate for men. The message was that women “worked” inside the home cooking and cleaning, and the men brought home the paycheck (Schwartz, 1997). Looking at the packaging and advertising for this toy today, it is easy to see that these gender roles are continuing to be enforced. Incidentally, majority of professional chefs have historically been men, and yet boys are not encouraged to play with this miniature oven.

The Easy-Bake Oven is pretty straight forward to operate. Baking the prepackaged mixes is the typical usage. The only room for variance is if consumers create their own recipes. There are not many studies done on the use of the Easy-Bake Oven and how children of different sexes actually play with it. Many anecdotal stories suggest that girls would do the baking and boys secretly wanted to play but were too ashamed, happily ate the treats their sisters or friends made, or put the fear of playing with a girl’s toy aside and used it themselves.

Social

Cooking and baking are valuable life skills and most adults should have at least a basic understanding of how to perform them. The Easy-Bake Oven is a very simple cooking tool that requires the user to add water to a package of mix and push it under a light bulb for a designated amount of time. Boys and girls alike can master the technique required, but boys have been left out of marketing for this toy since its creation.

Gender Neutral Easy Bake Oven, © 2016 Hasbro.com

One 13 year old girl in 2012 decided that Hasbro, maker of Easy-Bake Oven, was being sexist by not including a gender neutral version of their ovens. Her four year old brother was greatly interested in owning one, but was discouraged by the lack of boys on the packaging and in advertisements, and the feminine colors of purple and pink that graced the hard plastic exterior. She started a petition asking Hasbro to make an oven her brother could play with. Her petition received over 40,000 signatures and the attention was enough for Hasbro to introduce a black version intended to be gender neutral (Grinberg, 2012). Now young boys can play with their Easy-Bake Ovens without the stigma of a boy playing with a girls’ toy. The next step would be to include more boys in their advertisements and packaging.

Cultural

Postwar culture of the late 50’s was all about consumerism due to the economic growth of the United States. Families had disposable incomes for the first time and toy companies took full advantage of this. The article When Barbie Dated G.I. Joe states, “by 1950, toy sales reached sixty million dollars, far higher than they had ever been before. The industry’s production soared from then on; by 1993, American toy manufacturers produced eleven billion dollars worth of goods” (Schwartz, 1997).

Culture of the time also dictated rigid gender roles indicating that mothers took care of the home and family, and fathers worked outside of the home. The aforementioned article also points out that “toys reveal what adults wanted to tell children”. Children were not the people designing, manufacturing, or purchasing toys. The ideologies of adults were being reflected into the ways in which they expected children to play. Domestic toys such as the Easy-Bake Ovens, miniature cleaning supplies, and dolls are prime examples of these expectations (Schwartz, 1997).

Economic

Technically speaking, both female and male parents are affected by the economics of buying their children an Easy-Bake Oven, or any toy for that matter. Women, however, make up a vast majority of purchasers from all different categories of products, including toys. As a group, women “control $20 trillion in annual consumer spending” according to a 2009 issue of Harvard Business Review. Also, the amount of working women in the United States is on par with the amount of working men. Looking at these statistics, it is clear that the financial decisions makers, and therefore the group most heavily affected by purchasing decisions, is women (Silverstein & Sayre, 2009).

Consumer Spending, © 2016 Harvard Business School Publishing

Political

Gender roles can certainly be considered a political issue. Political candidates boast the merits of traditional family values and government bodies make laws based on some of these ideas that men and women are fundamentally different. Labeling and marketing toys to different genders emphasizes these presumed differences and studies have indicated that when something is labeled a “girls’ toy”, girls become interested but once it is labeled a “boys’ toy”, they generally stay away (Dahl, 2015).

Educational

The intended user for the Easy-Bake oven is 8 year old children and older. Since this oven functions as a tool used to cook things, several education benefits might be observed. Education.com lists skills such as math, science, fine motor, and socio-emotional can potentially come from cooking and spending time watching others cook. Cooking measurements are usually fractions and can be a great way to introduce different measurements and weights for liquids and solids. Science skills stem from observation, experimentation, and how the physical properties of the mixes change from the beginning of cooking to the finished product. Socio-emotional development comes into play because “As children cook, they develop initiative, responsibility, self-regulation, and a feeling of competence” (Bullard, 2010).