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."

Comments

Re:Wow, just wow...

[William Baric]

Stereotypes exists because they reflect natural gender differences. Yes, boys and girls are different. All research show this.

Re:Why not nursing

[Jack Griffin]

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.

Re:Equality

[antiperimetaparalogo]

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!