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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.
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.
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.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
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.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
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