An advert has gone viral recently, an ad so wonderful that I don’t have enough superlatives to describe it, it’s an ad for a product called GoldieBlox, check it out.
Good eh? A truly fantastic couple of minutes telling us that young girls want the option of being more than princesses and that they don’t want to be sold products just because they’re pink – I can feel the pride and sense of agreement swelling inside me!
Then, I remembered what the GoldieBlox product itself looks like. It’s stereotypically girly; pale purples with pretty characters on the front encouraging girls to build a beauty pageant float made of ribbons. Sigh. There’s such a disconnect between the advert and product; it’s Lego Friends all over again. Girls are allowed to play with things that aren’t dolls, but only if it’s the pink version of it.
There is a lot of conversation at the minute about getting more females in to STEM subjects and a lot of people recognise that the problem begins with the toys we’re given as children; a friend sent me this comic that makes the point about the traits toys introduce.
The other side of the argument doesn’t always get talked about as much, but it’s as important; we’re doing just as much disservice to young boys. Sure they’re given the original Lego, the cars, the trains, the trucks, the robots, but where do they get to learn about being caring and taking care of others? In fact, I think that a young boy would face much more mocking for playing with a doll and pram than a young girl would for playing with K’nex.
But I guess if you follow the logic that girls naturally choose the pink toys and dolls then boys just instinctively don’t want such things. Well, this is my nephew, he’s two and half, he loves Peppa Pig, and he has a cuddly version of Peppa’s little brother George. Last week he started looking after George like a baby when my sister found one of his old bottles. He asked for a nappy to be put on him, he changes it and he feeds him his bottle regularly. He looks after George and takes care of him, just like both his mummy and daddy do for him, and that makes me so proud.
One of the articles I’ll link to later makes such a fantastic point; we divide our children when they’re very young then years later try and convince them the genders are equal. It doesn’t make sense. “Hey girls, you weren’t allowed to build things before, but now you can”. “Hey boys, you weren’t allowed to look after babies before, but when you have them you can start then”.
My overall point is that the problem isn’t with the toys, it’s the advertising and it’s us. We need to stop discouraging kids from playing with things because of their genders. We don’t need pink lego, we need to show girls they can play with the original version. The only benefit of the pink one is marketing.
Is this realistic? Can we trust children to learn what they like to play with? OK, maybe I am just a dreamer, maybe this is something it’s going to take decades to solve, maybe we have to have small steps and make the girls version pink before they’ll accept the original.
Here’s the reason I know the excuses are nonsense – it used to be better.
Maybe it’s something we can keep in mind with the impending season of giving.
Links
Let Toys Be Toys – a great campaign actively trying to fix things
Blog: Stop Using Stereotypes to Sell STEM to Girls (Author @CarmelOfford)
Blog: The Sly Sexism of GoldieBlox (Author @Glosswitch)
GoldieBlox – if you want to see it for yourself
Rosie Revere, Engineer – a great book, that isn’t all pink!
Danielle Topping 