Slashdot Mirror
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."
Someone doesn't know very much about child development. Specifically, those cooties that girls see crawling all over boys weren't invented by the patriarchy to keep women down.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
This assumes that most of these girl specific initiatives intend to actually help girls. They aren't, and instead serve as flashpoints to draw money to charlatans, much like any of the "think of the children" campaigns from the last few decades.
I swear the similarities between modern feminism and the Satanism scare of the 80s are becoming increasingly uncomfortable.
And the conclusion is correct- most of the women coders I know were, in part, goaded into familiarity by playing with their brothers.
In reading the two articles, a good part of the problems seems to be twofold. One is the marketing folks discovered that if they created gender specific toys, sales increased. It seems pretty clear that if you want to make more money, you tune your product to your target audience. If creating pink stuff gets you more sales then make more pink stuff seems pretty obvious. The second of course are the folks who see this pink (or blue) stuff and buy it for their girls. But are parents partly to blame? Is marketing part of the issue where girls see the pink stuff advertised on TV and go for it when they hit the stores? Weren't the 80's a transition from wacky cartoons to toy marketing specific cartoons? Is the transition from a single earner family to a dual earner family (and latchkey kids being babysat by TV) part of the problem?
[John]
Shit better not happen!
Both genders should have the same opportunities. They don't necessarily have the same interests.
And the more "gender equality on opportunities" for a society, the more evident the -biology based- gender differences on interests becomes (since boys choose boy toys/jobs and girls choose girl toys/jobs, because they feel free to choose what they like): a great documentary (first watch it after a fellow Slashdoter posted a couple of months ago) from -maybe the most "gender equality" society of the world- Norway (with English subtitles), called "The Gender Equality Paradox", with -among other things- scientists proving the gender biological differences (with "toy experiments" on children), plus... "religious feminists" ignoring science!
note: the documentary was made from a usual extreme political correct Norwegian person... not a sexist Greek like me - so: watch it!
Antisthenes: "Wisdom begins by examining the words/names." - excuse my English, i am (slightly...) better with my Greek!
You could equally ask why men aren't flocking to careers in nursing, early childhood care, or beauty therapy. I suspect it has less to do with discrimination, and more to do with men just don't give a shit about those careers. Be it money, status, working conditions, whatever. Men don't want it. Same probably goes for women in technology, construction, and trades. I don't even care if there is a gender imbalance in nursing, early childhood care, or beauty therapy. I don't know any women who care either. But if I did care, I might find that balancing the male side of the equation in female dominated careers already half solves the female side if things in male dominated careers. Men are welcome to join female dominated careers, if they want. Women are welcome to join male dominated careers, if they want. If people don't want, then they don't want.
Human Rights, Article 12: Freedom from Interference with Privacy, Family, Home and Correspondence
Except that there may well be a large influence in the culture handed over by upbringing. That is, we think both genders get the same opportunities only they don't, not really. This was much stronger previously but may still be there more than we think.
Then again, I'm not sure that clumsily done toys to get women into engineering isn't overcompensating the whole thing, and maybe the effect they're trying to counteract and compensate for isn't as strong as the proponents of these toys may have assumed.
To wit, you still see people derping about the "gender gap" in pay, which upon closer examination turns out to be all but nonexistent. There is a maternity gap in pay, but that, while related, isn't quite the same thing. Women appear to be getting paid the same for the same amount of work, but many prefer to work less, moreso if with children. Should employers pay more for the same amount of work done just because the employee is with child? If so, why?
Back to this here thing: I don't know what the problem really is and so I don't know if these toys are going to help or hinder. Of course you can just throw your solution into the market and see how it does. But then the answer is "time will tell".
How did they control for biases coming from parents? Research that I've read shows that gender stereotypes start to be instilled within the first few days after a child is born. Unless they're testing with children that have never seen a toy of any kind before, then the toy experiments are not detecting biological biases, they're picking up on a mix of inherited and learned responses. There's a lot of very bad science done to try to claim that there are things that girls like and things that boys like, ignoring the fact that the things that girls like vary wildly between countries and even over time in the same country (for example, blue was a girls' colour and ping a boys' colour in most of Europe until 1-2 centuries ago, and horses have swung between the two as a stereotypical interest several times).
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Bullshit: the article itself pointed to why there's some sort of problem now right in the first few paragraphs: back in 1985, women comprised 37 percent of CS students. Now it's only 18%.
What's changed?
Obviously, you can say that the amount of interest by the two sexes is not the same, but apparently there was more interest by girls back in the 1980s. Why is it different now? That seems to be the question that no one is asking.
"Research" means nothing to the folks, who confuse the Universe that is with the Universe that should be. And, unlike the former, the latter is malleable and subject to change without notice.
Remember the denunciations — both passionately angry and "scientific" — of people, who suggested, "homosexuality is a choice", for example? We were repeatedly told both in print and in schools, that "gays are born that way" and thus it is both stupid and cruel to blame them for their lifestyle.
And maybe it is — I do not know. But the The Current Truth is changing. And, unlike Ben Carson, nobody yells at Miley Cirus for "adopting a more fluid label to her sexuality". Sexuality, you see, is a "social construct" now (and since 2004!) — and whatever a human actually feels is simply a reflection of "stereotyping" to be broken, and "peer pressure" to be resisted. With pride.
Whichever is true, both can not be true at the same time, but the conflict of these two ideas does not bother their proponents whatsoever, such logical rational beings they are. "Research" my tail...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Well, here's my anecdote with a sample size of n=2. I have a son and a daughter.
When I bought my very first LEGO set for them, it was a generic box of plain shapes. Something like this.
My son played with them. My daughter didn't. So I bought this and mixed the pieces in. The "draw" of the cutesy pieces drew my daughter in. Now she plays with all the pieces.
So...yeah. I guess what I'm saying is, I don't think they just "color it pink". Probably a bunch of focus testing and playtesting occurs so they know what draws girls to the toys.
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.
"You cannot find out which view is the right one by science in the ordinary sense." - C.S. Lewis on Intelligent Design
He's talking about acceptance by society at large. Very few people will say anything or even think anything about a girl sleeping in boxers, even though boxers are traditionally "men's underwear". However, if a man goes to bed in something traditionally considered "women's underwear", suddenly most people think he's a "pervert", "freak", etc.
Now obviously, very few people are going to see what clothes you sleep in, since this is normally confined to your bedroom. However, if you went around telling your friends and acquaintances about how you dress for sleep, imagine what they'd say. If you're a man and you tell them you sleep naked, or in boxers, etc., no one will bat an eye. If you're a woman and you tell them you wear lace panties, again no one will bat an eye, but the same is probably true if you say you wear boxers. But if you're a man and you tell someone you wear lace panties to bed, prepare to lose your friends and have everyone look at you weird.
And even though it is normally private, lots of people do sleep with other people, either sometimes or every night if they're in a relationship. How many wives could start wearing boxers to bed every night and catch any flak from their husbands about it? Probably not many; perhaps a bit of griping from a few men who'd rather see them in something sexier, but that's about it. Now how many husbands would probably be served divorce papers if they started wearing lace panties to bed, and the wife tell all her friends about it too?
No, not everything where men currently dominate. Not mining, not oil rig work, not farming, not anything involving manual or dangerous labour.
There was actually a lawsuit a while ago about a company that wouldn't let women work in the car battery division. Because of the risk of lead getting into the workers' systems, and the effects of lead on a developing fetus, no woman of child-bearing age was allowed to work there, unless she had her tubes tied.
Of course, the job paid more than other areas, because the men and older women who worked there were exposing themselves to lead poisoning every day.
http://www.nytimes.com/1991/03...
other stories of it: https://www.google.com/webhp?c...
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
That "fun" part starts at 32.25 of the video... how (left-wing) European (social) "scientists" reject science in the most tragic/comic way!
Antisthenes: "Wisdom begins by examining the words/names." - excuse my English, i am (slightly...) better with my Greek!
Try to find a microscope or science kit that ISN'T marketed exclusively toward boys.
WTF are you on about? I did a search of ToysrUs and didn't seen a single science toy that was "marketed exclusively to boys."
http://www.toysrus.com/family/...
http://www.toysrus.com/family/...
Aside from 3-4 (out of of over 100) of the science kits having pictures of boys on the box, I don't get how these are somehow only aimed at boys. And the microscopes seem completely gender neutral, not even pics of boys on the boxes.
Maybe something's changed in CS. 30 years ago, it was probably more about research into computers. Now, almost everybody who is going into CS has no interest at all in doing computer research. They are mostly interested in doing software development. The entire field has changed focused. More than likely, if you take CS, you'll end up writing code for some thankless corporation who doesn't understand what code is and just wants to churn out stuff as fast as possible. 30 years ago, you'd be much more likely to end up working for NASA, Xerox PARC, IBM, or some other research focused company.
Which leads to another problem. People coming out of CS degrees are often very badly equipped to be doing what they actually end up doing in the real world. Personally, I'm happy that I took software engineering. It prepared me much better for real life jobs in software development than my counterparts in CS who spent a lot more time focusing on the internals of how various algorithms worked.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
My mother was a fire fighter, a logger, a paramedic, a construction worker, and many other things. She became a single parent when I was about 12 years old. She defied the imagined odds by:
1) actually getting the education/certification to perform these jobs, which is more considerable than you think. Especially if retraining later in life. A lot of these jobs have many optional certifications that can improve your pay/standing and make you more employable. She has held more tickets than any other person I've ever known.
2) proving she was completely capable by actually doing the work.
3) strength training to be able to withstand physically demanding jobs. Logging for 10 hours is harder than you think.
4) not acting like a baby when things got tough
5) not sitting around complaining about how it's a man's world, and a women can't make it
The real problem isn't that women are incapable. It's that most women don't have the fortitude to continue in the face of adversity. It's easier to give up, find a man who was raised to do all the heavy lifting and undesirable jobs and move on to having kids. It's not that women are inherently lazy, it's that they perceive certain jobs to be easier than others, and they prefer that which they consider easier.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
They further looked at testosterone levels in the kids and followed them through early childhood. The children, girls included, who higher levels of testosterone were slower learning communication skills and had more interest in mechanical things.