Exterminas said:
This is not a step into the right direction.
Gendering Toys to appease "the gender people" is not the way to go.
Which is why adding a single set dedicated to women is nice to have against a majority of sets having only men.
Here is a crazy idea: Produce Lego sets with roughly equal distribution of genders across professions. Stop making "Girl" and "Boy"-Sets. Then we might get rid of these silly gender stereotypes like "Women inheriently bad at math, because of brain stuff" or "Boys like engineering more than girls because of brain stuff!"
That would be a good argument if there weren't already an overwhelming majority of "boy"-sets.
I understand the gesture, but it is executed poorly since the marketeeing folks behind it clearly don't understand the issue.
Though I don't intend this as insulting, I honestly don't think you do either.
The core problem is not that women are poorly represtented in children's toys (though that is a problem). The core problem is that markeeting folks pick and choose gender and profession combinations for Toys in order to meet certain boardroom-demands without realizing that Toys can have an enormous effect on a child's mind and the way it views the world as an aduld.
...so, why are you against a Toy set that portrays women in oft-underrepresented roles if those toys have an enormous effect on children's minds? We certainly have many similar sets for boys.
Right now I see a certain danger of society putting pressure on women that do decide to become a Vet, a Nurse or a Teacher, because more and more sources keep bombarding women and girls with messages like "It is unenlightened to not puruse a career in sciences/engineering/buisness".
I don't know how you can come to that conclusion. You're basically saying that, somehow, encouraging women to pursue careers in normally male-dominated career paths is a bad thing because women who choose to not do that are somehow being devalued, which I just can't see as being true in any way. It is not devaluing to encourage women to pursue careers that they are often systematically, societally, and culturally excluded from by virtue of their gender. It's like saying that encouraging men that it's okay to be stay-at-home dads is devaluing to those who pursue work in the military, its insulting to all genders frankly.
Of course I am not saying that people should stop encouraging women to do that, I just think switching from one extreme form of gendering to the reverse extreme form is a poor way to go about that.
But you're expressing concern over a company encouraging women to pursue career paths that are not normally filled by women, or at least not as represented. That, to me, sounds like you're saying that Lego
shouldn't be doing that because "oh no, it's extreme gendering by encouraging women to go for the opposite career of what society generally tells them! Don't do that!" which is faulty logic.
I honestly can't quite fathom why you'd be so intensely against a single Lego set that happens to want to focus on women in less commonly portrayed roles in our media as a method of encouragement to girls.
Most importantly, these are toys. They are directed at children and the sets include telescopes, labs, and large dinosaur skeletons. The figures offer multiple facial expressions, to help convey those stressful moments. Kooijman gives an example of a story children may create as her astronomer "spotted an asteroid plummeting towards Earth, the impact of which caused the T-rex to come alive."
