Britain's Prince William and Kate, Duchess of Cambridge and their newborn baby princess

Britain's Prince William and Kate, Duchess of Cambridge and their newborn baby princess, pose for the media as they leave St. Mary's Hospital's exclusive Lindo Wing, London, Saturday, May 2, 2015. Kate, the


William and Kate's new daughter is the first British princess who won't face royal discrimination because she's a girl, but that doesn't mean her life will be a fairy tale.

Thanks to a change in the centuries-old rules of royal succession, if Princess Charlotte has a younger brother, he won't overtake her in line to the throne. But in a world where girls are encouraged to embrace pretty-in-pink princess imagery from birth, the royal daughter born Saturday is bound to face a level of scrutiny her elder sibling Prince George won't have to worry about.

The royal birth was greeted with an explosion of pink, as Tower Bridge and other London landmarks were bathed in magenta light. Not everyone was delighted. "Are we really still in the 1950s with gender norms?" tweeted Laura Sheldon, a 16-year-old student.
"I don't like the way the media are emphasizing the baby is a girl and companies exploiting this in their marketing," Sheldon told the AP in an email. "The whole 'pink for girls' and 'blue for boys' thing is so outdated and too conservative for what should be a progressive society."
Royal historian Robert Lacey said princesses face a different burden than princes. "There's so much enduring sexist comment," he said. "It remains legitimate for the media — and social media even more — to comment on women's dress and appearance.
"And the coverage veers so precipitously from adulation to scorn. Beatrice and Eugenie are examples of that." Prince Andrew's daughters became media figures of fun for wearing elaborate fascinators to Kate and William's wedding in 2011.
Still, society has changed enormously in the past few decades — and so has the royal family. For centuries, the law gave preference to male heirs, so a first-born princess would be leapfrogged in the succession by a younger brother. As a result, there have been some 35 kings of England since the Norman Conquest in 1066, but only seven queens.
In 2011, the leaders of Britain and the 15 former colonies that have the queen as their head of state agreed to establish new rules giving female children equal status with males in the order of succession.