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Girls and Legos – Oh My!

December 22, 2011 By

When you think of girls playing with Legos do you think of this?

Or this?

It's probably no surprise that I like the top image better!  And I wish I could say the same for Lego executives. In the next few days Lego will roll out brand new sets designed for girls ages 5 and up, with the theme, "Friends."  The sets were developed with four years (!) of research into what girls want from Legos. Some bloggers I love are trying to raise Lego's consciousness and I'm backing them up. Powered by Girl - PBG started the ball rolling. Supporters include  Pigtail Pals Reel Girl  Spark Summit.

My research was admittedly with a smaller sample. My daughters loved and played with Legos constantly back in the days before any "sets."  They built their own people from the basic red, green, blue & yellow pieces because we didn't have any people in our tub of pieces.  This led to people with wheels for feet and people of all shapes and sizes.

My point isn't to be nostalgic. Let's ask Lego to expand their vision of girls and their interests in the next round of sets they design for girls.

Just a suggestion, Lego:  Take the four girls from The 4th Motor team of Wisconsin who won the 2011 First Robotics Lego League North American open robotics challenge (1st all-girl team to win)!

One of the team shared some of their experiences and hard work in New Moon Girls' March-April 2011 magazine and on newmoon.com.  And here's some video of them winning the N.A. competition. All this, and a little herstory about the first computer programmer Ada Lovelace, encourages more girls to do creative problem-solving with Legos - inspiration, pure and simple.

This winning team of girls should lead development of Lego's next set for girls. I'm more than glad to help Lego learn out how to share power with girls in developing great products for them without reducing to lowest-common-denominator stereotypes.  It can be done and sustained, as we've done for nearly 20 years now.

What do you say Lego?

If you want to share this idea with Lego write to them and also post your letter here or on Facebook:

LEGO Systems, Inc.
555 Taylor Road
P.O. Box 1138
Enfield, CT 06083-1138
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Filed Under: Communication, Creativity & Girls, Education & School, New Moon Girls News, Parents Who Advocate Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,
  • Bailey

    Thank you for cross-posting! Great article. I like the top picture better too – girls rock. :)  

  • ann @ my life as prose.

    completely agree. as a woman who works in the math world, we need to not overly feminize legos. the second picture looks like polly pocket for crying out loud! girls already have access to that kind of stuff.

    i will admit that i liked when legos came out in the softer, more pastel colors, in those gigantic bins. more colors = more flexibility to be creative.

    • http://www.daughters.com Nancy Gruver

      Thanks for your comment – we agree. I don’t have anything against pink – fuschia’s my favorite color! Problem with the new sets is the lack of imaginative, unstereotyped play they’ll encourage.
      Nancy Gruver
      http://www.newmoon.com
      http://www.daughters.com

      Sent from my HTC

      —– Reply message —–

  • http://twitter.com/ShapingYouth Amy Jussel

    Brilliant show and tell here, Nancy…STRONGLY support this idea, and think we could extend that invitation to ALL STEM communities of girls cyclebreaking and barrier tossing…

    Example? The teens Shaping Youth sponsored in building eco marathon race cars and pithily named themselves ‘ShopGirls’ to apply green engineering design, eco-mpg awareness and speed as the first ever all-girl racecar team. (see my post on Project Raceway: http://www.shapingyouth.org/?p=14567

    This post also includes a list of STEM orgs for outreach which I think would be heartily behind this concept and we truly need to make these waves with momentum NOW in order to ‘deprogram’ this drek seeping into the psyches of girls’ identity. We CAN make change, as you can see by the advancements from toy industry marketing already in these two recent turnarounds at Hamley’s/UK and at Edmund/US:

    http://www.globaltoynews.com/2011/12/big-story-hamleys-the-worlds-biggest-toy-store-goes-gender-neutral.html

    http://blog.scientificsonline.com/2011/11/girlsboys-novelty-kits/

    Onward in the battle for hearts and minds…thank you for all you do!

  • http://www.impatientoptimists.org Amie Newman

    Hi New Moon and Legos,

    My 9 year old daughter and her10-year old  friend wrote this letter, today, in response to the post above. Thank you for spreading the word – I hope Legos listens!

    Dear Legos,

    We are two girls ages nine and ten and we would like to give
    our opinions about your new “girl” Legos. What the heck are you thinking? Your
    new campaign is so sexist! Yes, it’s true that some girls like this but
    we’re just regular people and we’re not all obsessed with beauty. We care about
    our education and our life and just that we have faith in ourselves, not that
    we have to only think about combing our hair every day and looking in the
    mirror!

    This makes us very mad. Girls like different things. When we
    think of Legos, we think of building architecture and building cool things, not
    building something to make our hair look better. We built a whole city, with
    our brothers,  that had restaurants and
    boats and an ocean surrounding it. We used to build these structures with
    slides and pools and not once did we think about making a bathroom with hair
    accessories and a mirror, with perfume next to it…

    You’re probably not going to make much money from this
    because no one is going to buy it because it’s not really what girls like, in
    our opinion. We’re writing this to help you! We are just giving you
    constructive criticism. Thanks for your timeJ.

     

                                                         
    Sincerely,

                                                                 Aliyah
    Newman (9) & Rusha Bartlett (10)

     

    PS You might want to check your research!

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