Sir, – The Late Late Toy Show on November 27th was the most watched TV show of the year so far on RTÉ, our national broadcaster. The show was breathtaking in its ambition and the enthusiasm of its participants, but it was also breathtaking as an example of unreconstructed gender stereotyping. While the girls, dressed in frocks and bows (and even aprons), demonstrated cupcakes, fashion sets and nail-painting kits, the boys showed us robots, farm machinery and dinosaurs. There was not a single exception to this gender patterning in the show. It is dispiriting that in 2015 – the year of the marriage equality referendum – almost the entire population of Irish children watched an influential show promoting gender roles that would have been considered old fashioned in the 1950s. – Yours, etc,
MARY CANNON,
Howth, Dublin 13.