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Are Girl-Focused Engineering Toys Reinforcing Gender Stereotypes?
theodp writes: VentureBeat's Ruth Read casts a skeptical eye at the current rage of toy segregation meant to inspire tomorrow's leaders in STEM: "Toys geared at girls serve to get them interested in coding and building when they're young, hopefully inspiring their educational interests down the road. But these gendered toys may be hurting women by perpetuating a divide between men and women." Read concludes, "Ultimately, girls (who will become women) are going to have to learn and work in a world where genders are not segregated; as will men. That means they need to learn how to interact with one another as much as they need to be introduced to the same educational opportunities. If STEM education is as much for girls as it is for boys, perhaps we should be equally concerned with getting boys and girls to play together with the same toys and tools, as we are with creating learning opportunities for girls."
Girls - to do the dishes
Girls - to clean up my room
Girls - to do the laundry
Girls - and in the bathroom
Girls, that's all I really want is girls
Stereotypes exists because they reflect natural gender differences. Yes, boys and girls are different. All research show this.
I have daughters. I work in IT. I have tried all sorts of shit to get them into it and give them an unfair advantage in life but there's precisely zero interest in it whatsoever. All they want to do is gymnastics and dancing, they love that stuff and spend every waking hour doing it. One day they will grow up and probably have average jobs earning mediocre wages while my mate's son, who absolutely loves anything technical and is years ahead of every other kid his age, is earning huge dollars in some technology field. In 15 years some feminist somewhere will compare their wages and blame misogynist men for all of that.
At 22.22 of the video: a test on newborn (one day old!) babies, where they present them a mechanical object and a face: boys look longer on mechanical object, girls look longer on face!
Antisthenes: "Wisdom begins by examining the words/names." - excuse my English, i am (slightly...) better with my Greek!
No, we weren't. We USED to make toys like that, but that hasn't been true in a while. Certainly a lot longer than unsuccessful men have been whining and crying about "SJW's" or whatever it is they're blame for their personal insecurities these days.
Trying to find any toy not marketed to a specific gender today is painfully difficult. Head down to your local toy store and see how easy it is to find a gender-neutral lego set. Can you find one in the vast ocean of sets for boys? Is there one near the end-cap of the one or two sets marketed toward girls? Before the mid-80's, gender neutral lego sets were the norm.
Girls don't want to play with science kits? Well, then you must MARKET THE SCIENCE KITS TO THEM!
Yes, yes we do. Try to find a microscope or science kit that ISN'T marketed exclusively toward boys. It isn't easy. It's because we've created this bizarre gendered toy phenomenon that we need to break those stereotypes. Girls don't want to play with "boy-toys" because they're for boys, not because of anything related to the nature of the toy. The same is true for boys, who don't want to play with "girl-toys" -- this is true even when the girl and boy versions of a toy are identical in every way except color or other similar decoration.
We do need more gender neutral toys -- and we'll need a period where we have "traditionally" (read: over the last 25-30 years) toys to help dissolve those stereotypes we've already passed along to our children. Give us microscopes marketed toward girls for the next 15 years and I'll happily lobby for general-neutral science toys.
Required reading for internet skeptics
Now, a related question...why did pink and cats draw her in? Is it innate? Or is it something she was taught by society? To that question, I have no answer.
That's an easy one. It's not innate. 100 years ago pink was a boy's colour, similar to red. Girls preferred blue, a soft and pale colour. In the 1920s it flipped around.
The reason your daughter needed pink bricks to become interested is because she has been bombarded by images and advertising telling her that pink is a girl's colour, and girls should seek out pink toys. What we need is for advertisers to go back to showing girls playing with non-pink stuff, like Lego did before about 1985. Maybe you should show her this, and the many similar images from that era.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC