Dive Brief:

• More retailers are offering gender-neutral clothing and home decor in response to resistance by parents and kids to gender norms in apparel, the Associated Press reports.

• Lands’ End, Target and Zara are among major retailers mixing up offerings with gender-neutral options. A group of e-retailers launched a campaign last year, Clothes Without Limits, with a gender-neutral collection featured during the back-to-school season.

• Strong gender lines in kids items solidified in the 1980s as a way to boost sales, but those lines can be harmful, Jo B. Paoletti, University of Maryland American studies professor and author of "Pink and Blue: Telling the Girls from the Boys in America,” told the AP.

Dive Insight:

Pink for girls and blue for boys may have been a way to get parents (and grandparents) to buy more because their sons and daughters were less likely to share clothes or toys. But the practice may be leaving money on the table.

Experts say the decisions to minimize female characters across licensed toy lines like "Star Wars" and "Avengers" reflect an industry trend that markets toys expressly for either boys or girls, but not both. Some contend that retailer toy aisles are more gender-defined now than in previous decades, when sexism and discrimination were more prevalent throughout the culture at large, Retail Dive reported earlier this year. 

But things are changing, in part driven by consumers and sometimes kids themselves. Some girls want T-shirts with "Star Wars" characters, and some boys want to wear pink. Martine Zoer, founder of Quirkie Kids, launched a Kickstarter campaign in 2014 to fund pink tees for both boys and girls. And when one boy wanted to wear a pink shirt to celebrate breast cancer awareness in recent years, his mom found one in the boys section at Wal-Mart. 

After receiving a barrage of complaints last year from parents of girls incensed about its separation of toys by gender, Target has broken down those barriers. The retailer recently launched a gender-neutral line of home goods, dubbed PillowFort (though it’s just starting to blur the lines in apparel).

“It was an aisle of pink, fairy princesses, ponies and flowers,” Julie Guggemos, Target’s SVP of design and product development told the Minneapolis Star-Tribune about developing the new line. “And for the boys it was rockets and dinosaurs. Well, you know what? Girls like rockets and basketball. And boys like ponies. Who are we to say what a child’s individual expression is? We really wanted to develop a collection that would be universal.”