How to Get Girls into Engineering? Let Them Build Toys

http://online.wsj.com/articles/how-to-get-girls-into-engineering-let-them-build-their-own-toys-1408912053?mod=LS1

by sonabinu • 12 years ago

35 49 12 years ago

online.wsj.com

jdimov2• 12 years ago

Girls.. toys.. sounds good to me!

sonabinu• 12 years ago

I checked out the website at http://www.roominatetoy.com/ and it looks promising

jdimov2• 12 years ago

I'd like to know who are the perverts who downvoted me.

andrewfong2• 12 years ago

Is it just me, or does it seem weird that we need a gender-specific way to get kids interested in engineering? Building toys seems like a way to get kids interested in engineering in general.

shurcooL• 12 years ago

I agree, but I may have a biased POV. I would prefer to see "How to Get People into Engineering? Let Them Build Toys."

deciplex2• 12 years ago

It can seem weird until you realize it's to counteract gender biases everywhere else. We need gender-specific ways to get more girls into engineering, to fight against all the other bullshit that's keeping them out. When/if that bullshit is gone, we won't need the gender-specific stuff anymore.

andrewfong2• 12 years ago

Sure, but I wonder if marketing a pastel colored build-your-own-dream-house is counter-productive as far as counteracting gender biases go.

rimantas2• 12 years ago

How do you know that we "need"? Maybe we just want, but don't need? Did you ask the girls first? Or did you assume, that we need to get them to 50%? Are you sure you are not fighting bullshit case with bullshit means?

grimtrigger• 12 years ago

There's a whole industry that tries to convince parents that they can change their child's future by supplying them with the right toys - but there's little to suggest these toys actually matter [1].

I'm glad these two are trying to get more kids into engineering (female or not), but their thesis is pretty hollow on a few fronts. Most importantly that engineering toys lead to engineering kids. But also that engineering toys that currently exist (lego/knex) have some kind of implicit feature that keeps them out of the hands of girls.

[1] http://content.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1650352,0...

hkmurakami• 12 years ago

I have this completely unsupported personal hypothesis that role models and peer groups are critical in shaping the path of children. Certainly much more critical than toys.

Of course, how to provide such nurturing environments for all but the most fortunate in circumstance is the question :(

analog312• 12 years ago

I largely agree with you, and can only think of one minor argument: Perhaps the implicit feature is the booming message from the toy industry, not to girls, but to the parents and grandparents who buy toys. The latter may be the people who need to be reassured that engineering is OK for girls. (Or science, math, music, whatever).

watwut6• 12 years ago

Fully agree. It is more about attitude of adults who often tend to assume the girl has not build stuff potential and treat them as such.

Just stop marking every single toy as boy or girl one. Most boyish engineering toys are actually perfect for both sexes, as long as you stop telling girls "it is boys toy, you are not supposed to play with it, see the coloring on the box?". And I heard the last one in toy store and it was idiotic on multiple levels. (Why should anything non-pink be for boys only, really?).

Girls do not need special toys build for them. We need to stop teaching kids that every damn toy is either inherently boyish or girlish.

Broken_Hippo2• 12 years ago

I agree completely. I liked legos as a kid, and cars and stuff, but i was keenly aware that these were 'boy toys'. Changes in advertising and presentation are needed: 'girlified' legos always turned me off (really, the boys are manning spaceships and the girls are shopping?), but I'd have liked a mix of male and female characters doing fun stuff. Neutral.

It gets more intense than just the color changes in toys: Last Christmas gifts I bought my niece and nephew, there were a lot of toys in various price ranges for my nephew, all of which were actual playable toys and selection of types of toys. For my niece, however, mostly dolls, and many of the cheaper toys weren't useful by themselves - they were all accessories for the dolls.

tow21• 12 years ago

The "implicit feature" is all the other kids and adults around any girls, who consciously or otherwise suggest that they shouldn't be playing with Lego/Meccano etc.

My daughter's only 15 months old - and already I can see other parents treating her differently from the boys. If she's in a crowd of children, she'll get given dolls instead of building blocks.

Obviously I do what I can to counteract this, but she's not always with me. If toys like this encourage other parents to let my daughter play at engineering, I'm all for them.

2muchcoffeeman• 12 years ago

Is having pastel coloured building blocks really going to help here?

Serious question.

In an attempt to reduce sexism in STEM, women have come up with sexist engineering toys. Goldie Blox has cute little animal character pieces, and now with Roominate, "[once] the building is built, they can decorate it with the included paper and other embellishments and use the motor to add electrical appliances". Both of them come in colours that are distinctly girly.

Lego used to market its product as unisex[1], but has changed to be more gendered over the years. I assume market research indicated that this would result in greater profits. [1] http://i.imgur.com/xwAsW56.jpg

loup-vaillant2• 12 years ago

Your link have nothing to do with toys. TV is a completely passive medium, that you can only watch, and over which you have no influence.

The fact that Baby Einstein DVDs don't work (worse, they are harmful) tells you nothing about whether engineering toys help or not.

ivanca• 12 years ago

I wonder how to get girls into coal mining? If you think I'm "trolling" you would first have to explain on what logic does *equality" means to balance the gender gap only in the top grossing jobs.

theworst2• 12 years ago

You bring up an interesting point -- the gender equality efforts really only focus on jobs deemed glamorous or noble.

There aren't many campaigns to get more men into Nursing, AFAIK, although it is a very important profession with an extremely heavy gender skew.

paulv• 12 years ago

http://aamn.org/. 2nd result if you google "men nursing".

watwut6• 12 years ago

I just googled "more men into nursing" with no quote and some are actually working on it.

watwut6• 12 years ago

Isnt it the case that coal mining requires considerable physical force?

slowmotiony• 12 years ago

There are too many male truck drivers! Equality!

empressplay• 12 years ago

The problem here is really media portrayal of who should be playing with what. If Lego / KNex / etc. were actually marketed toward girls as much as boys, more girls would eventually try / use them. That they aren't is due to simple top-down cultural re-inforcement of sexist stereotypes.

I suspect that sadly it will ultimately take legislation to regulate media (in particular the advertising industry) to solve the problem, by mandating that gender-specific marketing of a product toward children is illegal, period. (And yes, I mean the toy dump trucks and dolls as much as the technical toys.)

It sounds heavy-handed, but there doesn't seem to be much else that will fix it. Certainly not "niche" small-scale products that are essentially mice attempting to balance against the toy company "elephant". The elephant likes the status quo and will only change if you hit it with a cattle-prod.

Vjeubvjshdhr• 12 years ago

Talk about throwing the baby out with the bath water.

Afforess• 12 years ago

Yes... Legislating gender-neutral advertising for children's toy is clearly the solution for the tech sector gender gap.

Give me a break. That is a violation of the first amendment.

I don't "get" why anyone cares about the "gender gap". Who cares? If there is overt sexism, obviously that is wrong, but there is no law (nor should their be) that every field of employment should be an even 50/50 gender split. Men and women are different, and differences should be embraced. We shouldn't be legislating society to fit a utopian ideal of exact gender equality. Biologically human genders aren't equal.

analog312• 12 years ago

I wonder if separate markets for boy and girl toys has a couple of straightforward economic benefits:

1. Two isolated markets are less competitive than a single consolidated market -- possibly enabling higher prices.

2. It's a sort of planned obsolescence, due to the fifty-fifty chance of having to go out and buy a whole new set of toys when the second kid is born.

starky• 12 years ago

I would be interested in seeing if there was any difference in rates of girls that played with Lego growing up and whether or not they went into engineering.

I remember sitting with my class of 120 on the first day with my Mechanical Engineering class. One of the profs asked us how many of us played with Lego growing up. I believe that every single hand in the room was raised to that question (about 20% of those were women).

My suspicion would be that Lego is pretty much universal and that very few children grow up not playing with it at least occasionally.

watwut6• 12 years ago

Isnt lego more art then engineering through? I liked engineering toys as a child (mostly merkur), but found lego less interesting. It is more about building something good looking then about solving problems and being technical.

kragniz• 12 years ago

It depends on what you're building. If you're playing around with minifigs and the basic bricks, then yes, mostly. However, Lego Technic is much more about solving problems, particularity the Mindstorms [0] range. I had the RCX when I was around 9, and programming it and making things that move really started an interest in robotics. I've helped out at some local FIRST Lego League events [1], which are very engineering-focused.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lego_Mindstorms, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lego_Mindstorms_EV3

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FIRST_Lego_League

owenversteeg• 12 years ago

I think much better than one specific silver bullet toy, give kids (or girls specifically) batteries, sensors, LEDs, motors, and a good toolset and see what they build. Not only is it a hell of a lot cheaper (a drillpress you use for several years costs as much as a nice lego set you use for a few months) but it also gives them directly applicable life skills.

[Warning: the Surgeon General indicates that anecdotal evidence may be detrimental to your mental health] Of a few little girls I know, this has worked well.

k-mcgrady3• 12 years ago

The only problem with that is that children would have to be very closely supervised working with those things. Most parents give children toys to occupy them while they do something else.

watwut6• 12 years ago

Depends on the age of the kid and price of the item. By the time they are able to take advantage of sensors, LEDs, motors and resistor, they are fully able not to harm themselves with it. So it boils down to how expensive stuff you buy.

Even younger kids do not have to be very closely supervised when working with real tools if you remove dangerous ones. Three years old can safely play with few screwdrivers, pliers and cardboard box without close supervision.

prestadige• 12 years ago

Just have lots of different toys available to begin with and get more of whichever are played with the most. Don't restrict the use of computers.

Don't worry about outcomes or what people should be playing with. Actually "should be playing with" is almost a contradiction in terms since play is undirected.

Padding• 12 years ago

Our society has a weird and twisted notion of freedom. Have everyone do whatever they feel like (within the legal limits, of course) .. and no one thinks twice about it. Millions of people dying? Yeah, sure, ressources are scarce - not our fault the universe is so cruel. Right?

But then as soon as someone somewhere manages to twist reality in a way such that it actually impacts our emotions, e.g. by claiming that it could be your child to suffer this inequality in life, all of a sudden there's an outcry out for regulation to fix that one specific issue with rationality-be-damned and ends-justify-the-means methods.

How about instead we take a step back and look for structural causes for these issues. Chances are that if our society allowed for the tech-industry to be unjstifyably hostile towards women, it also allowed for some generic industry X to be unjstifyably hostile towards some generic group Y of the population. Chances are that if our society allowed for marketing to negatively impact the opportunities that women have later in life, it also allowed for some generic business practice X to negatively impact the opportunities that generic group Y of the population will have later in life.

Given this, what kind of madman would assume that providing an ends-justify-the-means hotfix that solves (or at least tries to solve) the issue for some y (in Y) is the right approach to this?

Or to put it more bluntly, what makes women so much more worthy of our attention compared to all those other groups of people that are struggling in life? Why do they get to fasttrack their issues, rather than have to wait for a structural solution that benefits everyone, just like everybody else too?

k-mcgrady3• 12 years ago

I think you're right. We need to start looking at the problem from further away. Fixing one specific lack of diversity doesn't help solve the others.

Take for example Google. In their diversity report[1] it shows that only 17% of employees in tech related jobs are women. That's something people have talked about for a while and shows a lack of women in tech. We seem to be ignoring the fact however that 94% of Google's tech employees are white or Asian. Only 2% are hispanic and only 1% are black. Why are we ignoring this? As you say we need to step back and look at the bigger problem - lack of diversity - instead of focusing on one specific area (women).

[1] http://www.google.co.uk/diversity/at-google.html#tab=tech

rimantas2• 12 years ago

And how many are bald? How many have blue eyes? My point is: how come we are so sure that diversity at some place X should exactly match demographics?

loup-vaillant2• 12 years ago

Note that this article doesn't talk about regulations. Just about selling construction toys that match the girl stereotype.

DanBC• 12 years ago

Women are not so much more worthy. They just happen to be a very large group that suffers a lot despite many years of effort to reduce that suffering.

But there are movements to reduce the siffering experienced by different groups.

drcross• 12 years ago

Women are far better complainers than men, it makes sense from an evolutionary standpoint to maximize resources from the traditional role bread winner when gathering resources was a priority. That's why no amount of diversity programs are going to satisfy this group and men should learn to deal with this. The exceptions to the notion that men dominate society (like Angela Merkel and Hillary Clinton) prove that there are no roadblocks specifically preventing women from achieving the highest positions of power and meritocracy is enough to allow you to be a reasonable success in your career.

Broken_Hippo2• 12 years ago

It isn't that women are more worthy: I shouldn't get any more than a man does, yet.. i shouldn't get less or passed over because I'm female. It happens, though. But my rights aren't more important than someone elses and if I absolutely had to, I'll pass on a right or two if it means that people are fed (within some reason, obviously, and facts to show me why I'm losing).

If there is a structural solution that is actually doable, by all means, please share. But until then, any pieces that are solvable we should, by all means, solve. Not because one group is more important, but because we shouldn't make people suffer or be discriminated against.

eng_monkey• 12 years ago

Those girls are going to be fairly disappointed years later when they start studying their engineering degree. By then, they will quickly discover how little engineering has to do with assembling stuff. And, instead, how it is mostly about developing (often novel) technology through the formal application of basic sciences, particularly physics, chemistry, and mathematics.

How to Get Girls into Engineering? Let Them Build Toys

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