There's a friend of mine whose five-year-old daughter loves to dress up as Spider-Man; another friend has a toddler son who likes to wear dresses.
The reasons seem obvious: the girl has older brothers who dress up as superheroes and the boy has older sisters who like dresses.
The children are only copying those around them.
There was even more convincing evidence of the role external influences play in the shaping of children's behaviour in Horizon: Is Your Brain Male Or Female? (Monday, BBC Two, 9pm) which staged an experiment with a baby boy and a room full of toys.
Volunteers were sent into the room to interact with the child, and asked which toys the boy preferred: trucks and balls or dolls and teddies?
Invariably they said the boy preferred the trucks, which was when the twist in the experiment was revealed: the little boy was in fact a girl.
The point of the experiment was clear: the volunteers believed the child was making its own choices, but in fact the choices were being made by the adults and, subtly, unconsciously, imposed on the children.
On a bigger scale, this is happening all the time to children, and it's what has always happened.
Victorian boys were made to wear pink because it was considered a boy's colour; now girls are doomed to play with pink dolls in pink rooms because their parents think that's what they want.
The consequences of this for girls and boys when they grow up are serious, and Horizon pointed them out when they asked teenage pupils what they wanted to do after school.
The girls chose creative or caring posts, such as being a vet, and the boys chose jobs related to maths and science.
The conclusion - although it was by no means definitive - was that the teenagers believed they were making a free choice but they were doing nothing of the sort: they were conditioned into their roles.
More worryingly, parents could also - as another experiment showed - be unconsciously holding back their daughters. Volunteers were asked to judge the gradient of a slope their children could crawl down and, time after time, they set the gradient steeper for the boys than the girls.
Which could mean we're all wasting our breath talking about the use of quotas in boardrooms or all-women shortlists to make society fairer.
What we need to do is tell parents to get over their prejudices and give their son a doll and their daughter a truck.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article