It's Lego's 80th birthday party, but only the boys are invited

Only a few days ago I was with a friend who is a mother of four who was commenting on the way that Lego was very boy oriented now. With the special kits mainly turned to very gung-ho pirates and Star Wars figures there wasn't as much screaming out to the girls. While her girls busily use the boys' kits, the very few generic or girl-oriented ones often nothing over alternate toys. Ironically the girls may end up being better builders as they turn to plasticine and found objects to build things rather than following the strongly-templated kits marketed to boys.

If this is true it's sad

Put it this way: I don't want it to be true that the only way to make toys appeal to girls is slather on the pink and a focus on hair care. I always found Lego absolutely fascinating as a little boy, and I wish it all the best now.

as a child of the 80's lego (and then technix) was a huge part of my life. I recall having a mix of boys and girls as friends and the girls being just fine with lego. This predated most of the specialised packs of lego however, until technix you mostly just got boxes of pieces rather than more gender defined model packs. Lego was popular right up until we found more interesting ways to pass the time with each other (although given the chance I will still play with lego :-) ).

I would concur with those above, it is likely an inherrent gender bias in their products. The kits as so prefab these days they are likely to lose the boys interests as well.

Unfortunately...

Unfortunately, too many of today's LEGO sets for boys also "minimize... actual construction". So that part of the problem with the set in question seems to be a fault that isn't due to gender bias.

But. but.... but

What about the Playmobil?

Or didn't it happen

Two problems...

I played with LEGO a LOT as a child, but my elder sister wasn't interested. So I don't think it's a new phenomenon.

Now I'm a parent, I've got two real problems with LEGO. Firstly, it's REALLY expensive. Any model of any substance is £25 or more. It makes it very difficult to buy as a birthday present for someone else's child, because it's too expensive. The smaller sets are incidental "stocking filler" types, but are still too expensive to be bought as an incidental thing like a bribe for good behaviour. These two factors combine to largely eliminate the mass-aggregation of sets that I had as a boy.

Secondly (and this is something James May commented on when he built his LEGO house) too many of the pieces are single-use. In order to provide visual richness to the end product, the typical set has many parts that are suitable only for that set. This further dilutes the original aim of LEGO of it being "a new toy every day." Every set seems to be a model, an end-goal clearly in site. I remember getting sets that were basically big boxes full of bricks with a few ideas. Now you have multi-page build manuals, bagged component groups and a over-reliance on the construction being a process that must be followed exactly to achieve a pre-determined goal, rather than it being general principles of construction that allow the child to make what he (or she) has in their head.

Good on lego for taking care of business

Lego is a business and it's first concern is profit. To make profits you have to know your consumers and for Lego those consumers are boys. So what? The only reason that this article was written, especially with the tiresome sexism angle, is that the company was not launching a campaign for girls. If they were, this author would be singing the praises of a company so enlightened, that they were throwing good advertising money at a target group that would never make it worthwhile.

Lego would possibly have gone bankrupt if they had not reconnected with boys, the group that actually made them money, yet they are chastised here for daring to speak of it. May as well advise businesses to market footballs to girls and ballet shoes to boys and watch those companies lose profits accordingly.

Boys and girls are different and this is fine. One of the first lessons of parenthood, is that it's CHILDREN who decide what they like, NOT their parents. Parents buy trucks for their sons and dolls for their daughters because that's what they choose to play with, not what parents are forcing them to play with. Buy a typical boy a doll and he'll stick it in a catapult and fly it across the room.

My daughter will sit and play with my old Lego for hours, building all manner of things, from houses to cars, without any prompting from me. But then she is also quite happy to get covered in oil helping me fix my Land Rover, so maybe the environment she grew up in was against her :-)

She is, however, definitely not a "tomboy", as she has the usual fascination for all the pink tat that is nowadays thrown at young girls, and the usual clothes, makeup etc that is "normal" for a girl of her age.

On another note, when I was young I used to have some lego-like construction bricks which belonged to my dad, which were made of a type of rubber, rather than hard plastic. Anyone else have anything similar?

1982 ad...

That plane is going to bomb, 1944 style, the crap out of that 'train/village people entrapment vehicle.

sample of one

well two, actually - a girl of 8 and boy of 6. Our daughter definitely prefers "crafty" to "constructive" toys despite my hope that she would be grabbed by the idea of building stuff. Her most recent toy purchases was one of the 'Friends' sets but I was disappointed that she didn't go on to raid the Lego box to build a house for the little plastic princess. She definitely prefers 2D and fantasy, while our son prefers 3D and facts... they're almost stereotypically girl and boy, and have been since they were toddlers.

Best article

This is one of the best articles on the Register I have ever read. Well written, supported and tragically relevant. I would love to see it taken up and reported on by more mainstream media. It's painfully insightful and I hope the people at Lego are made aware of it and read many of the intelligent comments here as well.

Thank you for writing this.

love LEGO but ...

I loved the little packs when they came out (I remember a little pirate set, especially, and one with a wizard and a dragon) but I was already well into adulthood by then; when I was but a wee lad it was Lincoln Logs and Tinker Toys. OMG, I suddenly feel so old, I think I'll have a bit of a lay down now.

Odd

Strangely enough, I was the one that constructed all manner of crafts, buildings, cities while my brother used lego as missiles. My father would try and encourage him to engage with him in building all manner of things but the boy wasn't interested while I'd pick up the bits and see how things could be constructed (without instructions or pictures as he had torn them up).

My brother ended up being a burly strapping policeman while my sister and I ended up in technology. Together we managed to escape the gender role pressures.

My own children, two girls and a boy all created things with equal enthusiasm using all manner of materials and played with all manner of things while enjoying their little selves. That was in the 1980s when the gender stereotyping pressure started to ease off, or so we thought.

Seems that we haven't progressed, but somehow we have slipped back into the 1950s sexual stereotyping, which is most unhealthy and unhelpful. Is it due to a failing economy, or the media brainwashing that the masses are being subjected to with the "pink-girlie-sparklie" images like "certain celebrities" being pressed upon females. I found it much worse coming back to the UK from Holland, where people were treated equally and the emphasis on people developing their own personality.

My sister lives in Denmark and it seems that they don't have the same marketing approach for the Danish market, which is closer to the Dutch than the British profile. I wonder if the same results have been found in Holland.

Probably not.

I blame Lego

Modern "archittecture" is abominable: the vast majority of buildings are Lego-like rectangular blocks of cement and glass, complete with flat roofs and apparently made from identical kits. They look ugly, are inhuman in scale and look shoddy within a couple of years of completion.

I theorise that this is because the modern "architect" spent his or her childhood playing with Lego and so formed rather dull ideas about how buildings should look and be built. Even if there is a proper roof or some sort of variation on blank concrete and glass walls, very often the details are still jagged, as if constrained by the shape of Lego blocks.

some of the kits seem to cross over the gender boundaries

I have two girls, ages 8 and 6, and they both love lego sets. In fact we enrolled them in a summer Lego class. They really like the old kits I used to have (from the '70s), and they like the new kits with all of the specialized pieces.

For some reason when I was a kid all of my legos used to end up as cars or rockets. My daughters' end up as houses or farms. Granted some of that is due to the kits they gravitated towards. Now they're asking for "Olivia's House" and that looks like it will have even more specialized bricks.

They do manage to turn them into other things and configurations. Last week they built me a Lego-sized!

Lego-sized pub!

somehow my words got dropped - last week my girls built me a lego-sized PUB!

Minecraft is an online clone of Lego

but I've just tried to order the physical Lego version of Minecraft - which is sold-out nearly everywhere on the globe! I suspect there might be a continuum paradox here .......???

Barbie says...

Lego and vi are for wimps. Real women build with Meccano and emacs.

Subtitles

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQ2xrnyH2wQ

Marketing can only do so much. Genes do the rest.

Meh

I don't see why they think girls don't play with Lego, and need pretty pastel sets. My sister used to love the medieval Lego sets that they used to make and we used to create all manner of different things out of Lego (which we kept organized by type, not set). Then again, I've been told that my youth was unusual I used to have some of those littlest pet shop things which apparently are for girls. I honestly think it may have been my parents just not typecasting this stuff.

Lego's 80 years old. lets write a 4 page article about how it's sexist.

So what if they create a line for girls. Girls who are interested in lego will still ask their parents for other stuff.

If you want to complain about anything, complain about how much it costs. I'm an adult earning a full wage and i still can't afford to indulge.

Everyone seems to have forgotten Lego's primary purpose:

Seeing how loud you can make your father swear when he inadvertently kneels on a brick while helping you build something...

Sanctimonious BS... Is the writer even familiar with LEGO sets? Because then he would know that the LEGO City sets, for example almost always feature at least one, often several female figures. And guess what, it's LEGOs! Want to have a politically correct police station with a fifty-fifty gender distribution? Just swap out the male policemens heads with female heads, and knock yourself out with policing the kids playtoys for any signs of gender bias.

Of course as anyone who actually HAS kids will know, even when you try to raise them in a gender neutral way, as soon as they get to be four or five years old, they start to develop politically incorrect interests. Boys will be interested in machinery, and girls in more complex ways of playing, based on social interaction. (and of course princesses). The difference between males and females of the species. It's one of those nasty facts of life that the PC brigades yet have to develop a solution for.

Oh, and what's up with the whining about buckets vs. sets?

Yes, there are probably more sets available now than 10 or 20 years ago. Thank god for that, as they're also much more detailed and of higher quality.

But surely it can't have avoided the LEGO ludites attention that, ehm... Well... You can still buy LEGOs as a bucket of bricks if you so choose! (There are even several sizes available!) Sure, your creations will most likely not be nearly as detailed and impressive as those of the sets you buy, and your kids will probably think you're a sadistical weirdo for insisting you build your OWN police station, but hey... The option is there if you want it!

So let's sum up... You can STILL buy LEGOs in buckets, and no ones forcing your daughters to play with sexist LEGOs, and heck: You can even choose to make an all female LEGO city if you so choose,

What's everyone upset about, really?

(Besides the fact that kids these days have it too good, and when YOU were their age blah-blah-blah...)

Lego IS for girls (the old Lego, anyways)

I am a 40-something female, who loved to play with Lego as a kid. I even a had a few lego technic sets, and a lego train set, of which I was very proud of. My daughter (who is four now), loves to play with her Duplo, and she will inherit my Lego sets latest next year.

I hate that there is this obvious gender bias in Lego nowadays - and lego friends is NOT an alternative for girls. But then, as has been pointed out before, gender stereo-typing has become more and more prevalent over the last few years - maybe to counteract the fact that in real life, women do what men do?

Stolen

Wasn't lego a stolen invention from us?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiddicraft

BTW, for anyone who does not like the special pieces, you can do what I did as a child, if I needed a 6er and only had an 8er well out came the hack saw (I was only 6 at the time). I can still remember the smell - it was fairly awful..... (this technique also works with the "poop" pieces

Is anyone surprised?

"Here at Vulture Central, that seemed really odd. Not only did everyone in the office, regardless of gender, remember playing with and loving Lego throughout their childhood, for the most part, their kids, both boys and girls, love it as well." In combination with Lego's research, this just proves than anyone of a non-male gender hanging out at Vulture central, and all children of said denizens of Vulture central, must be really odd. Is anyone surprised?

I started off with a big bucket of bricks.

Later specialised sets followed, such as F1 style race grid/pits, houses and vehicles such as a boat, cargo plane, cars, motorbikes. Even a castle from the medieval range.

While the sets were specialised, they did allow for the building of other things, which is where the imagination and ingenuity of lego kicked in, making something from what you have. Especially when you end up with a big tub full of generic and speicalised blocks. Heck I was even in the lego club one year to get ideas. Even old Duplo bricks could be used, such as tower bases or train chassis, using 4x2 blocks as shims to interface with the lego.

I recall from one of their brochures they did have a range to cater to girls - something like Bellevue or something? Seemed to be mostly pastel colours and palm trees and a lot of stables with horses.

I also had some of the compatible sets such as Mega Bloks. Mostly compatible, though the bricks were usually about 3/4 the height of a comparible standard Lego brick. Some non-standard bricks made interesting vehicles / houses.

Moved on to Technic, the Lego answer to Mecanno. Had the big V8 supercar before I passed my lego on to younger relatives.

(Oh, and for our US cousins, it is "Lego" singular, as in the brand, and not "Legos" which is like talking about Mecannos or Hornbys)

Why do focus testing?

Really, I do wonder if these focus testing systems are doing it "wrong"?

"We asked children 5 years old what they wanted to eat, they said '3 tubs of ice cream', so that's what we gave them for dinner."

*facepalm*

To paraphrase Homer

What I wanted most as a kid was a lego train set. When my parents bought it for me it was the happiest day of my life.

Bye bye Lego

Lego is trying to be playmobil. And they are losing. The little figures are worthless for building or making imaginary worlds, one might as well play with actual dolls. I bought my kids kennex instead because you can build things. And try buying a tiny bucket of bricks: its costs a fortune, plus you get ripped off as some "bricks" are useless tiny bits coming probably from unsold spaceships. Sorry Lego I loved you, but you screwed up badly and you took your customers for a ride, so now you can pay and disappear. :(