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gender boundaries and beating boys at their own games, they are generally more confident in their use of technology, while younger and more vulnerable girls are usually far more reluctant to cross established gender boundaries. The alternative offered by the videogames industry to these young girls was the pink games' movement, consisting of games which are, just like the Petal Power laptop, designed specially for girls'.

The problems posed by the arrival of these games for girls' is that they also seem to reinforce the stereotype that girls have and extremely limited scope of interests, prescribing a version of femininity that seems to predominantly involve make-up, flowers, popularity, fashion, cute creatures and the colour pink. This is not to say that little girls might not enjoy exploring one or all of these themes, yet the problem is that it makes it more difficult for them to venture outside of this designated zone of appropriateness and experiment with games that might be for boys'. Because of this limited number of games labelled as being for girls, children perceive all other games as being by default for boys. This process effectively forces girls to stick with safely labelled options and avoid all other products that might have ambivalent meanings for children with gender identities in the making.

While toys such as the Challenger Laptop benefit children by resembling adult technology and therefore working to demystify it and encourage boys to engage with technology, toys aimed at girls seem to emphasize the modification of real-life themes in order to adapt them to a girl's world'. It has often been claimed that the wide array of professions that Barbie has represented embodies the idea that girls can be anything', yet her most potentially empowering roles such as that of an astronaut are mutated into a laughably unrealistic representations. Barbie's astronaut suit, for example, is bright pink with preposterous puffed-up sleeves, and comes with an alternative space outfit featuring a pink mini-skirt. This results is the image of a female astronaut being robbed of all plausibility. While some people would say that there is nothing wrong with unrealistic toys, children do learn from playing, and it is telling that most of the realistic toys being marketed for girls still tend to be restricted to kitchen sets, life-size baby dolls and the ultra-feminine outfits modelled by Barbie.

If the gender-based technological imbalance we still live with today

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