Last year, Stanford engineering student Debbie Sterling founded GoldieBlox, a construction toy meant to "prove to the world that engineering for girls is a mainstream concept." The company strives to encourage little girls to remain interested in engineering by engaging them in story-oriented building (the way boys are regularly engaged by a slew of "male"-targeted toys.).
The GoldieBlox Kickstarter went on to raise $285,881 — well over its $150,000 goal — and now "GoldieBlox and the Spinning Machine" will be distributed in a variety of toy stores (including Toys 'R' Us!).
If that's not enough to inspire you, here's an incredible GoldieBlox commercial. It features a cast of little girls repurposing their needlessly gendered toys and then racing to an all-pink Toys 'R' Us aisle — while wearing well-worn "More Than Just a Princess" t-shirts — in order to celebrate riotously. It's the tenderest mob to storm a massive corporate chain store in possibly all of recorded history.
(H/t BUST)
DISCUSSION
How cool! I watched the Kickstarter video that explained what it was and what it looked like and I think it's a pretty neat idea.
When I was born, my dad had a pretty serious conversation with his side of the family that pretty much boiled down to: "Hey. No play irons or vacuums or kitchen sets. If you wanna get her things that use her cognitive skills like Legos though, that's fine." I always thought that was pretty awesome of him.
Sure, I got Barbies, because that's what everyone gets little girls as gifts, but I was always building little houses out of whatever I could find, and sometimes making little pulleys for little elevators to take my little hand-made people from the bottom floor of the house to the top. But there were never really any toys that were geared towards girls that would encouraged me to do that. That would encourage me to build or "engineer" anything. Any time I got a cool Lego thing or connecty/blocky/buildy thing, it was always very masculine looking, with a little boy on the package. So, I'm super glad this company is a go.
It's kind of freaky to look at girl toys, especially when compared to boy toys. Girls are conditioned from so early on to be concerned about beauty, motherhood, child-rearing, domestic duties, etc. Hence play babies (why no play babies for boys?), cleaning/cooking toys, and so on and so forth. Meanwhile boys are encouraged to build stuff and do science experiments (also, fight and shoot stuff, but that's a whole other story).