You do realise that most people don’t pay attention to it.
They don’t pay attention to it, but it definitely has an effect. little girls start to identify with what they see around them. They see the boys as being the action based characters and the girls as the prettiness based ones. It’s everywhere in society. My daugheter was made to feel wrong and weird by her peers for liking Star Wars FFS, because they’d picked up the idea that Star Wars is for boys. Despite it being quite feminist.
Kids aren’t rational, ideas stick in their heads and stay there. Star Wars for boys probably came from someone’s parent – not as a direct statement but some other action. Like maybe on the boy’s birthday he gets star wars paper plates, but on his sister’s she gets princess plates without being asked.
We’ve generally stopped directly telling kids how to act based on gender by 2017, but the subliminal stuff is still going strong in many places.
My youngest loves pink. She has chosen to identify with puppies and teddies and all that crap. However my eldest does not, and we’ve had to work hard to persuade her that she’s not a freak because of it. Because growing up thinking you’re a weirdo or an outsider is not necessarily that great.