PINK LEGO - Do products like this help to enforce gender divide...

This is not an easy question to answer!



I have two children, a boy (10) who has lots of lego and enjoys both building the kits models and free-style building/play and a daughter (6) who played with duplo when a toddler, but wasn't otherwise that interested.  However that all changed at Christmas as she was given a number of the 'Friends' range.  She builds and re-builds that with confidence and is after using her brother's lego to extend her play value! 



We don't have a gender-typical household, as I work full-time, with my husband at home picking the kids up from school and doing the cooking!  Mummy is best for maths/science homework, Daddy for history/geography and we split the rest!  My daughter is a very 'pink' girly girl and for her having access to pink Lego has got her engaged and then allowing her to expand her skills into constrction modelling that she wouldn't have done otherwise...



So in conclusion I think it does provide an opportunity to engage more girls, so is a good thing.

When I was a kid there was a lego range that was for building stables and such with lego horses. I wasn't that into it but in hindsight it was probably a nice thing for girls to play with. 

I agree with Maria.  Surely using items like this (Pink LEGO) is subconciously reinforcing the very stereotypes we are trying to dicourage.  I'm not saying that very Girly-girls cannot be engineers, but I think we have to be very careful here.  Images, and the use of colours in particular, to sub conciously reinforce social management (boys are this,  girls are that) are prevalent in modern society.  While we will never break these reinforced messages ourselves, surely we should not be blindly following along with them.  The use of pink LEGO, whilst yes maybe catching the attention of certains types of girls (I am NOT a pink girl - to the despair of my niece) also subtly reinforces the meesage that girls are pink - different - not meant to be engineers.  After all if women were meant to be engineers, would they not be using the blue LEGO (sorry I forgot boys get multicoloured LEGO, not just blue).

When I joined the IET womans network facebook page there was a lot of photos from an award ceremony and I noticed a lot of the lighting was very pink. Doesn't this also just reafirm the stereotyping as much as pink lego?

 

I found this petition, about not promoting toys only for boys or only for girls and though that it and the comments were interesting.

This is interesting too - ''Pink Lego is an abomination'' according to Jake Wallis Simons, Telegraph Feature Writer.



What are your views on this?