• Time, Wednesday, March 31, 2010 10:38 AM

Twin sisters in London have started an advocacy group called Pinkstinks to call attention to girls' toys that puts them "into a pretty little box" from birth while boys toys encourage them to explore and get dirty, Beth Gardiner reports.

Abi and Emma Moore, 38, are pressuring retailers to abstain from stocking traditional stereotypes. For example, they successfully pressured supermarket chain Sainsbury's to repackage a doctor Halloween costume that was labeled for boys and a nurse's outfit labeled for girls and to abstain from gender labeling in the future.

The issue clearly resonates beyond Britain, Gardiner points out. In the U.S., "it's kind of reached ridiculous proportions," says Lyn Mikel Brown, a Colby College professor and co-author of the book Packaging Girlhood. Pinkstinks, she says, "is using the color pink to get at something more complex, and that's the way girls are being packaged and sold, and sold out through marketing."

While Pinkstinks agitates online, a sister website, Cool To Be Me!, seeks kids' views on who their role models should be and highlights adult women's achievements.

Read the whole story at Time »