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

Equality

[Anonymous Coward]

Both genders should have the same opportunities. They don't necessarily have the same interests.

Re:Equality

[Anonymous Coward]

Men and women, boys and girls are different, but still the only voice we hear is Wimmin's Studies lunatics shouting for 50-50 everything ( well everything where men currently dominate ).

Re:Equality

[Anonymous Coward]

No, not everything where men currently dominate. Not mining, not oil rig work, not farming, not anything involving manual or dangerous labour.

Only fields where there's lots of money and\or social status

Re:Equality

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is that society has a huge influence on what is accepted for a given gender.

It is perfectly acceptable for a woman to go to bed in a set of boxers and a white t-shirt.

However, it is unacceptable for a man to go to bed in a lace teddy and panties, even when his girlfriend is laying there in said boxers. :P

No amount of blue will make that lace teddy and panties "OK"

Re:Equality

[Anonymous Coward]

only the none physical and high paying jobs, none of the feminist are trying to get more women into garbage collection, construction, fishing, you know stuff that are hard dirty and dangerous

Re:Equality

[Anonymous Coward]

Are we lacking in programers? Why do they have to be women? These people talk about equality, but then turn around and say we need women and not men. If you want to be equal you talk about how many new programers we need, not which gender we need to fill the jobs.

These people are never happy, they are like forum trolls, they make their living being angry.

Re:Equality

[Mashiki]

Apparently you haven't been paying much attention to the 3rd wave feminists over the last 10-15 years. They're the ones screaming they want 50-50 in everything. They're also the ones screaming when women are required to do the same amount to pass physical tests for important jobs like firefighting. And of course over the last 5-6 years or so, they're also the same ones screaming that womens studies is very, very, very, important and women should go into it. While yelling about how there's a lack of women in STEM fields.

3rd wave feminism is junk, nothing more nothing less. It focuses on first world problems, and when it comes up against something like the mythical wage gap you start running into the people who say that 'women are paid less then men' but they fail to realize that women take more time off, have more sick days, and so on. And of course, these are the same types that would scream from the rooftops for someone like Hillary Clinton who actually does pay women less then men.

Re:Equality

[psm321]

I'm not female, so excuse the potential mansplaining, but I suspect it has a lot to do with changes overall in software and society. Back in 85 the people getting into CS were hardcore nerds, male or female, not just looking for a job that was popular or going to make a lot of money. This means that it was full of true nerd culture, and not either "brogrammer" or "SJW" culture, both of which I think repel true nerds. Then more overall societal pressures mean that non-nerd men are much more likely to get into software than non-nerd women, whereas the nerds of either gender didn't care what society thought.

I also suspect (and this is where the potential mansplaining comes in, but I do have backup) that the fact that women in tech are now WOMEN in tech, versus women IN TECH is probably driving away nerdy women who just want to get their nerd on and not deal with conferences about women in tech, etc. I think this article is a really good read (and the comments from people criticizing her for it are also telling): http://www.linuxjournal.com/co...

Re:Equality

[Inferno Vulpix]

A one day old child has not had the slightest chance to be biased by parents or society as to what they should prefer. The fact that male babies preferred male-oriented toys and similarly for female babies and female-oriented toys means that the preference towards that sort of toy is derived from the nature of the child, instead of nurture. Since the factor being tested here was gender, we can conclude that there is a difference in psychological nature due to gender.

Fuck SJWDot

[Anonymous Coward]

Remember when this site wasn't constantly about SJW topics and jobs? When it didn't try to make you feel bad for being a nerd?

Screw you Dice.

Wow, just wow...

[qrwe]

Is Slashdot rhetorically asking about an issue that people has been pointing out for years about this matter? For the love of Pete: YES – toys "geared at girls" is stereotyping at its finest! Loads of toys (not even mentioning professional tools) is not focused on gender whatsoever. Stop painting them in pink, both symbolically and literally speaking! It helps no one, especially not girls in the end.

Re:Wow, just wow...

[NotDrWho]

Maybe we should create a special girls-only class to teach girls about how to live in a world where they won't receive special treatment.

Re:Wow, just wow...

[turbidostato]

"Why making stuff more "girl-ish" (or boy-ish" for that matter)"

Because toy makers think this will favour their bottom line. It's up to buyers to demonstrate them right or wrong.

Re:Wow, just wow...

[Dog-Cow]

I think the point is that it's irrelevant. Stereotypes often have a certain amount of truth to them. If this one does as well, it makes the manufacturers money, and that's all they care about. If you want that to stop, change the stereotype.

Not if feminists have anything to do with it

[Anonymous Coward]

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

No.. if feminists have anything to do with it, girls\women will perpetually be recruited and promoted to fulfill diversity quotas and satisfy PR, and the majority of the work will have to be done by men. Capable women would leave the field over 1-2 generations, since, due to feminism, companies are forced to recruit incapable women alongwith capable ones, leading to the entire gender being stereotyped and written off as present and promoted only due to quotas\diveristy\PR

There's no winning with the feminist crowd...

[XxtraLarGe]

So why bother trying? You don't make engineering toys for girls, they complain about them not existing; you make them for girls, they complain about them being stereotypical.

Re:There's no winning with the feminist crowd...

[XxtraLarGe]

The right thing to do would be to make engineering toys that aren't "for" anyone.

That was the first option I mentioned. Just making engineering toys. When I was a kid, I had some female cousins around my age and we'd play with Lincoln Logs and Lego blocks all the time. They were just toys. Then they had their dolls and I had my Star Wars action figures. There were some things we both liked, and other things we didn't. But that's not good enough. There's an insistence that we need more women in STEM because patriarchy, or whatever, and that these toys need to be designed to interest them. Then when somebody comes out and designs toys to interest girls in STEM, the complaint is that they're too girly. That was the entire point of my previous post.

Re:There's no winning with the feminist crowd...

[NotDrWho]

Make a toy that stands on its own merits, then market it to everybody. It's not a "science kit for girls", it's just a science kit, and it's advertised across all applicable demographics, regardless of gender.

Yeah, that's what we were doing BEFORE the SJW's came in and demanded that more girls be made (somehow) to play with science toys and major in STEM fields. Reality stubbornly refused to conform to what they want it to be, so they decided to blame everyone else but the girls/women themselves for it.

Girls don't want to play with science kits? Well, then you must MARKET THE SCIENCE KITS TO THEM! Only you must do this (somehow) without making the science kits stereotypical "girly." Don't know how to do this, you say? WELL FIGURE IT OUT!! Reality WILL conform to what we want it to be, or else!!

Why make science and engineering toys girly?

[Chrisq]

Why make science and engineering toys girly? Because of the parents who wouldn't buy a non-gendered toy. Girls enjoy fishing newts out of a pond, making towers and knocking them down. etc. as much as boys, but many parents discourage this. Enjoying these things at 3 to 4 years is a good foundation for enjoying construction and understanding stability, or examining echo systems when they are older.

Re:Moral Panic

[Jack Griffin]

I swear the similarities between modern feminism and the Satanism scare of the 80s are becoming increasingly uncomfortable.

I've noticed this but not sure what kicked it off. I remember feminism in the 70's and early 80's, then it all seemed to go away. Then some time about 5 years ago it came back with a vengeance. Every day is some man hate article in the local rag, and there's never any counter argument exposing the holes in the logic (ie women on average earn less, because women on average choose lower paying careers AND take more time off, not because they are paid less for identical jobs).
Women get raped, but so do men. Women get breast cancer, but more men die from prostate cancer. Pornography is anti-women, even gay porn etc...

Re:"getting boys and girls to play together"

[XxtraLarGe]

I don't read comments -- or post -- as much as I used to, but /. used to have a significant population of conservative-libertarian readers.

Perhaps it's a matter of perspective. I'm more of a conservative leaning libertarian, so Slashdot seems more left-leaning with some libertarian sympathies. So when I post in favor of civil liberties/privacy there is a lot of agreement. But there's a pretty strong leftist/authoritarian strain when it comes to economics, coupled with a fairly strong anti-gun sentiment. After all, if you're going to redistribute wealth and tell people how to live their lives, you can't have the unwashed masses be armed.

Re:Moral Panic

[jcr]

What happened to the feminist movement is typical for successful reform movements. Once they achieved their reasonable goals (equality before the law), the reasonable people in the movement went on to pursue other goals, leaving the dregs behind. That's why feminism today is lousy with witch-hunting and guilt-peddling.

Two other examples are the civil rights movement (it used to be MLK calling for an end to Jim Crow, today it's Jesse Jackson shaking down large corporations for not meeting racial hiring quotas), and the labor movement (used to be concerned with workplace safety and humane working conditions, now it's just a way for looters to take money from workers to buy hookers and blow for politicians and mobsters.)

-jcr