Girls in Engineering- Comic that explains it all

[JaneYoung]

Originally Posted by JamesBrown

I have a question for the women who have posted. There is no question that boys are more likely to buy engineering type toys than girls. I mean things like robot sets, Lego sets, etc. Why is this? Is there something in our culture that tells girls that building things is not feminine enough, or is it just marketing and branding?

A lot of it is in the packaging and what the product is capable of. I'll give 2 examples that I've witnessed:

1. our team has developed a camp that we offer several times a year to children of different ages. This amounts to about 1/2 of day for the 'beginners'. They are in small groups and each group works with one of our students as their mentor. Last summer I was at one of the camps and took some photos and I kept returning to this one small group - all girls. That's just how it worked out. I noticed that they had taken the legos they were using and made a face on the floor - big large face - and I was concerned about the actual building and programming of the project but the mentor seemed fine. Later, I asked about it - one of the girls had just started moving the pieces around to create the face while they were still working on their robot. The group had that as well as a robot, plus one of the girls had programmed it to play Happy Birthday. When they left the camp, the girls skipped out of the shop - happy. They had had a very productive and a very fun day. And their mentor had given them the space and guidance they needed to have that.

2. We sold Hexbugs as one of our fundraisers. I worked the table a couple of times and I noticed that the boys would come up and say, 'cool' and go running off to find the adult with the money so they could show them. The girls would watch/observe and then ask, 'what does it do?'. The girls seemed to want the bugs to perform a task rather than just move. When told what they would do, the common movement that I saw was a shrug and they'd kind of slide away, still thinking. One of our parents is really great at explaining the different Hexbugs and what they were capable of doing and it appeared that many of the young girls wanted a small task involved. We sold to both, boys and girls, but the girls seemed to ask more questions.

Many children are problem solvers. I think that is one reason that puzzles are so fun. That said, I have seen parents decide that a problem can only be solved a certain way and tell the child how to do it, rather than present the problem to be solved (or the opportunity) and let the child/children go for it.

You also have to look at the part of the marketing that sets up the product to be sold and how that impacts the sales in the media and also in the aisles of the stores. The team was doing a demo in the lobby of the movie theater when Wall-E was showing. I was standing over by the area where families were lining their children up to drive one of our BEST robots. A little girl had been waiting very patiently with her mom and I was getting concerned that our batteries were just about out of power so I began talking with the little girl about what she liked about Wall-E. She immediately, without any hesitation, said, 'he has a toy like mine - a square.' She was around 4. The toy she had that her mother said she has almost worn out was a Rubik's Cube. Did she find that toy on the Barbie aisle in a toy store or was she (or the giver) in a different aisle or area?

Jane

Edit: Mikell, high five!

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Regarding the high maintenance comment.
Many girls and women are not high maintenance, have never been, and will never be. It is frustrating to hear, read, and contend with that comment/mentality. If males seek a high maintenance image/icon/role model as their ideal of what a woman is, then they are only looking at a small subset of the diverse interests, skills, talents, and demands that are available to women. If young girls and women are looking at icons to emulate that fit within that mindset, they are often looking at a role model that works in the extremes.

Over the past few years, I've heard the philosophy about not giving power to a word or a phrase. I don't buy it. If the suggestion is to listen to the phrase and then order the person who said it to go do something, then what messages are being encouraged/sent and - are they mixed messages? Why make the situation worse or add drama?