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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."
Both genders should have the same opportunities. They don't necessarily have the same interests.
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.
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.
There are 2 types of people in the world - those who understand decimal and those who don't.
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
:P thanks for that clarification i just couldn't make the connection before.
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.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
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.
I can definitely see where this could become a problem. A lot of the "girl" toys are playing directly into the gender stereotypes to get girls interested. If you want girls to like it, make it pink and put flowers on it. Instead of working to actually make it something that would actually interest girls (or god forbid both boys and girls) they just slap some paint on it and give it a girly name.
The bigger issue though is that they have to make "girl" things because most of them are specifically geared towards boys. That is why the answer they come up with is to make it girly. There is no reason we need special Legos in a pink box with cats and houses specifically for girls. Just stop specifically targeting boys with your marketing and girls will want to play with it (see the ads from the 70s that have both genders in the ads). More stereotypes are not the answer to the current stereotypes.
"Information wants to be expensive" - Stewart Brand, the same guy who said "Information wants to be free"
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.
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".
"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.
... reinforces gender sterotypes.
The means are the ends. If you want people to not take gender seriously and just treat each other as equals then you need to not take gender seriously and treat each other as equals.
If you take gender seriously and treat the genders unequally then you'll create a system were people take gender really seriously and treat the genders differently.
Be the change by being the end. By matching your means to your end, you create your goal.
The current idea is increasing gender tensions and racial tensions. IT is not creating equality because it is trying to create racial and sexual quotas.
You're not going to get an equal society by creating quotas or pseudo quotas.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Toy manufacturers, like any other business, take their best guess as to what they can sell. If they're right, they make money. If they're wrong, they don't. This doesn't need to be debated or agonized over.
If you don't like something, don't buy it.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I finally realized what all this pressure for female coders is about!
The powers that be want to be able to eliminate all their male competition: (e.g. like schools of fish or Dr. Strangelove). Since the technocracy is rising, they can soon rely on robots for all the heavy lifting -- their only problem remaining is the maintaince and programming of the robots and systems they don't want to be bothered with -- so they still need some annoying technical people around. At the moment they're mostly male. :( Not good if you're trying to be the last man on earth!
Conclusion: if the goal is for the males that are now in power (or their great-grandsons who will be in power) to be the only males on the face of the planet: then for everything to keep going they must somehow inculcate females to code and eliminate the need for all (other) males entirely.
I finally realized what all this pressure for female coders is about! The powers that be want to be able to eliminate all their male competition: (e.g. like schools of fish or Dr. Strangelove [imdb.com]). Since the technocracy is rising, they can soon rely on robots for all the heavy lifting -- their only problem remaining is the maintaince and programming of the robots and systems they don't want to be bothered with -- so they still need some annoying technical people around. At the moment they're mostly male. :( Not good if you're trying to be the last man on earth!
Conclusion: if the goal is for the males that are now in power (or their great-grandsons who will be in power) to be the only males on the face of the planet: then for everything to keep going they must somehow inculcate females to code and eliminate the need for all (other) males entirely.
Than they did in the early 80's? No, not significantly, not enough to account for the massive drop (especially given the orders-of-magnitude increase in the size of the field).
That "massive drop" is almost exactly countered by the rise of women veterinarians, doctors and lawyers. So, you see a 25% drop of women in CS, then you see a cumulative 25% rise in those three fields listed above, and you still come up with "OMG SEXISM"?
You're exactly the kind of sexist of moron I referred to. When all else fails, you'll stoop to making shit up to justify your nonsense.
The fact that there are more CS women (%) in female-oppressed countries than CS women (%) in liberal countries is not made up. You are free to use that fact when forming an opinion, but note that the existence of a contrary opinion is not enough to change that fact.
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.