There's a belief that the colours we associate with the genders - pink for girls and blue for boys - used to be the other way around.
About 100 years ago, we're told, boys wore pink clothes, but then during the early 20th century, it flipped over. This is often used as an example of how arbitrary gender stereotypes are.
However according to psychologist Marco Del Giudice, the whole "pink-blue reversal" is an 'urban legend'. He argues that there's really only anecdotal evidence for the existence of the previous blue-girls pink-boys association.
The exceptions are four magazine articles - quoted in the paper that started the whole debate - which seem to provide documentary evidence. These associate girls with blue, but Giudice says that two of these might have been accidental typos, that swapped 'pink' with 'blue', while the other two may have represented a sneaky campaign by early feminists ...
