Lego's old line of toys for girls

A couple of weeks ago, Mark told you about Lego's new line of products aimed at girls. It includes new minifigs that look more like dolls and cutesy playsets with names like Heartlake City. This week, Cory introduced you a little girl who is very frustrated with excessively gendered toys.

I played with a lot of Legos when I was a little girl. And, while I certainly liked dolls, that wasn't really what I used Legos for. (And, frankly, going shopping, playing house, and being "just like me" wasn't what I used dolls for. In my experience, games of playing house tend to involve a lot more violent interaction with pirates, Darth Vader, and Nazis than advertising to girls would lead you to suspect. First you put the baby to bed, then you defend her with your mad karate skills, right?) Ads like this old one from 1981 appeal to me a whole lot more than modern girlvertising. I've seen this ad passed around the Internet before. But the contrast with those recent reminders of who advertisers and toymakers think girls are strikes me as particularly timely.

Thanks, L0!

Maggie Koerth-Baker is the science editor at BoingBoing.net. She writes a monthly column for The New York Times Magazine and is the author of Before the Lights Go Out, a book about electricity, infrastructure, and the future of energy. You can find Maggie on Twitter and Facebook.

Maggie goes places and talks to people. Find out where she'll be speaking next.

MORE: advertising • Culture • girls • happy mutants • toys

More at Boing Boing

Eurovision 2013: An American in London

The technology that links taxonomy and Star Trek

ferd

Ah, from the good old days of the middle class and feminism. Don’t need either of those anymore. The girls of the 1% don’t have time for anything as plebian as imagination or God forbid, dirty hands.
http://www.nathanhornby.com/ Nathan Hornby

“I played with a lot of Legos…” AAAAARGH
http://twitter.com/sofiaoh Sofia Ortiz

Maggie, I agree with you entirely (I played with my brother’s Hotwheels and Legos more than I ever played with my American Girl doll), but I have to point out that the reason toys are so gendered is because it’s the easiest way to sell them. Toys are products.
I’ve asked social science and child psychology researchers, and they’ve all told me, even sadly, that tests consistently show most little girls will go for tutus and tiaras and most little boys will go for cars and trucks when given a choice. WHATEVER this is due to (nature or nurture or both), it’s just a fact that marketers don’t get much profit out of trying to sell “boy toys” to girls or vice-versa. I’ve seen interviews with disappointed marketing specialists who tried (they said, “Imagine if we COULD sell Barbie dolls to boys – we’d make a lot more money!”) but failed miserably.
Of course there’s a good minority of girls and boys who happily cross over (I had one friend when I was younger who owned more Barbie dolls than I did), but those are rarer. It must be hard to target such a wiggly demographic.
- raikou
  
  I had read the opposite in studies. They had said that very young children when left alone will play with whatever they want to (even if it crosses gender lines). So boys and girls would play with “boy” toys and “girl” toys roughly equally. The would go with whatever their preference was for toys. The study hypothesized that sticking to “correct” gendered toys happens when children are enculturated into a society that polices their gender. I wish I could find the study to back me up…
- Antinous / Moderator
  
  I’ve asked social science and child psychology researchers, and they’ve all told me, even sadly, that tests consistently show most little girls will go for tutus and tiaras and most little boys will go for cars and trucks when given a choice.
  
  Where did they find children who had never watched television or interacted with anyone who had ever watched television?
  - Tess
    
    Yes. “Study finds that most children like what they’ve been socialized to like! News at 11!”
- sarahnocal
  
  Has anyone tried just marketing to children…all children? That seems like a much bigger demographic.
MrWednesday7

It’s Lego bricks or pieces.

http://www.ericharshbarger.org/lego/faq.html
- dculberson
  
  I don’t let companies dictate my language or grammar. Why would you?
  
  For the same reason, I love calling BMW cars “Beamers.” It drives their adherents nuts, they rant about how the BMW cars are “Bimmers” and the motorcycles are “Beamers.” So much fun. Poke, prod.
  - MrWednesday7
    
    Completely disagree. Yes, I am an adherent if that’s what you want to call me. ;-)=
MelSkunk

This ad might explain why my parents bought me lego at an age I was really too young to enjoy. They saw things like this and said “She’s a smart little girl, she’ll love this!” (I was 3 or 4, I’m not one to be overly cautious but there were a lot of tiny bricks. My dad basically played with it until I was old enough)
- Wreckrob8
  
  A lot of lego.
  It is a mass noun which does not require capitalization! Or so I always thought. Fuck the sensibilities of the manufacturers! Lego belongs to the people.
  - GeekMan
    
    People REALLY do need to learn about the concept of “mass nouns”. Maybe then we can get people to finally stop saying “these data”.
    - Wreckrob8
      
      Datum is singular. Data is plural.
  - MelSkunk
    
    No, I mean a lot of tiny bricks. Like the one square pieces or the half flat pieces. Those are tiny bricks.
- GrrrlRomeo
  
  If you were under 5, your parents probably should have bought you DUPLO Legos. They’re extra large bricks designed for little kids. I started playing with regular Legos when I was about 5, and Technic Legos when I was about 8. As far as I can recall, Lego sets always had their recommended ages for different sets on the box.
http://twitter.com/yogasuz Suzanne LaForest

The reason that Lego insists that it be called “Lego bricks and pieces” is that a copyrighted name must always be used as an adjective. For example, “Kleenex tissues” or “Band-Aid bandages”. If the company does not use their name very consistently following the guidelines for usage, their brand name can go into general use. I know about this because I worked at BellSouth and had a special class on the subject of protecting their copyright, particularly the Bell symbol. The reason they had this class is that they had lost one of the most valuable copyrighted brand names in the world, the Yellow Pages brand. The loss of that brand name alone was estimated at millions of dollars.

Lego is one of those brands that the company absolutely must protect itself from losing its copyright, just like Kleenex and Bandaid. However, since Maggie doesn’t work for the company, it’s really not her job to protect their copyright. Only the Lego folks have to worry about that.
- marilove
  
  Except both kleenex and band-aids (as they are almost universally called) have become general things, now. Post-its is another example. Legos is now, too. It’s very common. Crock-pot! Did you know that’s a brand name for slow cookers? Most people don’t.
  
  American Proprietary Eponyms: http://www.searstower.org/rkrause/brands.html
  
  Language evolves. It is flexible. And it doesn’t matter how big your company is or how many lawyers you have: You can’t stop it. And I’m not sure they’d really want to, either.
holyalmost

I was about to jump and respond that it is definitely nurture, and that it’s a parent’s willingness to follow advertising in their shopping choices that decides whether or not a child grows up with a far less gendered outlook on the world. I had no brothers and my parents always bought me ‘boys’ toys as this is what I seemed to like. How they came to that conclusion, I have no idea. All my lego buildings looked like the ones in that photo, I was that little girl right down to the clothes she is wearing.

This doesn’t explain my little sister though, who despite growing up with a tomboyish older sister that liked to get dirty and who had a toy chest pre filled with male marketed playthings, turned out to be a Barbie loving fashion princess all on her own. Despite our night and day differences, we shared our toys with each other and I think we became pretty gender balanced adults in our outlook on the world.

I like to think that a child will play with whatever there is on hand to play with, but in terms of want and desire, that’s effected by a multitude of different factors which can’t be replicated in product testing.

Long story short, I think Lego is headed in the wrong direction with their “Girl” line of lego and it’s imagination crushing design. They are removing the choice for girls by imposing their own views of what a girl should like on these toys. I wouldn’t trust ANY corporation, even one as historically awesome as Lego, to decide what a girl should be.
- CH
  
  But they have already, for a very long time, decided what little _boys_ should be building. So what’s the difference with having Lego sets aimed at girls?
  
  Most of the Lego toy sets are not really “neutral”, they are aimed to appeal to boys.
ill lich

As a boy, the joy of playing with Legos was not that I would or could build typically *boy* things like cars and planes and guns and (I guess), footballs, but just the whole joy of BUILDING stuff. Usually we would build the object on the box cover, then after a few days dismantle it and build something else. It’s not like we would build a helicopter so we could have a helicopter to play with, we built stuff because the act of building was the goal. I was never interested in putting together a jigsaw puzzle so that I could look at a slightly larger version of what was on the box cover, it was the stimulus of figuring out the puzzle, and in that sense Legos are like an infinite number of puzzles you can build.
- http://twitter.com/csismeiro Carlos Sismeiro
  
  I feel the same way.
  
  The thing with lego was to solve a puzzle whose solution was stuck inside the head, making other people see and feel my own imagination.It was sculpture without limits created by joining pieces of standardized formats.
pkpk

I don’t see what everyone is so upset about. The new “Friends” line has scientist and fashion designer sets. The “girly” factor means that more people will buy them for girls, which means more girls will be introduced to toys which are “good” for them and improve their cognitive skills, unlike foofy princess crap. Give Lego credit, they didn’t capitalize on the icky “princess” fad. Also, don’t get why people are upset about the “curvy” dolls. I had boobs when I was 10, so I find concern over the dolls’ boobs to just be ludicrous.

Yeah I was a tomboy growing up and liked he-man and more traditionally boy-ish stuff like many of the commenters here — however as the aunt of well-adjusted, over-achieving, and incredibly girly nieces I don’t find fault with girls having “girly” taste in stuff.
- Cefeida
  
  Well, for starters, regular lego minifigs don’t really look much like boys and men, either…they’re only very vaguely human. Now the new line can’t even be put together with the old line- it’s just as bad as Belville. Girls can’t play with both, they have to choose, and now they’ve been told which is the girly option, they have likewise been told, officially, which one isn’t.
  
  Oddly enough, that’s the one that’s more creative, more flexible, and has a wider range.
  - http://fallsastar.com Crashproof
    
    Yes, it’s an example of the bias that says male=default human, female=something else.
- http://about.me/rosemwelch Rose M. Welch
  
  The new ‘girl’ figs aren’t even the same size as the regular figs, and they emphasize a ‘girlish figure’ that doesn’t resemble any of the women in our family’s life. My daughter would be much happier if they just made the ‘girl’ colors and hairstyles more available for the traditional minifigs. (There are over a dozen female minifigs available now, compared to hundreds of male minifigs.) She always buys a girl minifig when we hit the Lego store, but we’ve been unable to purchase any packs or find any deals on the current girl figs, while I can buy dozens of the male figs for cheap. :(
jimmoffet

I have to admit, that is a great ad. It’s easy to forget that toys used to be marketed to parents rather directly to children. Ah, for innocence lost…
http://profiles.google.com/loosexleaves Ashley Coats

I don’t see anything wrong with Lego having girl kits. Girly girls like legos too and maybe they don’t want to build cars and spaceships. Though if they do they can still play with the regular ones too. There’s nothing wrong with liking princess and sparkles.
- L.Cecilie Wian
  
  Liking princesses is just fine, if you like princesses. But this is not about the choice children make. It is abut the ideas they are told to fit, about what they are told to do.
  
  Children do not get to make independent choices, they look up to their parents and trust the caretakers judgment and lessons. And that is why we should take great care with what we show and teach them. For is not the goal of little boys and little girls to grow up to be all they can be? With the variety that comes with it.
  
  Instead of shaping them fo fit a mold to make identical little girls, that they have to fight so hard to break away from.
GeekMan

Great statement. I did sense some unresolved tension from certain recent boingboing posts. Thanks for weighing in, Maggie. :)
raikou

My problem with the new “gilry” sets is that they were designed for imaginative play. Lego did a ton of market research with little girls and asked them what they wanted, the response was that they wanted to identify with the minifigs…so Lego made the new sets. The problem is if you want to engage children in imaginative play, then why give all of the girl minifigs prewritten back stories? That totally defeats the purpose.

That and each of the members of the “cast” are categorized, there is a “smart girl”, the “athletic girl”, the “animal loving girl” and the “girl who loves fashion” which implies that you can only be one of those things and not the other, which is not how the world works (it is not even how toys marketed at boys work). This is sucky in the long run but slightly more sucky in mean time since from what I remember of playing with kids in elementary school, when you played pretend in a group, the group usually assigned you to play the character that looked most like you. Wouldn’t it be nice if the girls could pick up a doll and decide what kind of personality she had for their imaginative play? What Lego is doing seems to be missing the point that they so clearly want to be driving at.

Another problem is that the town Lego has created for these girls is all pink and purple (There is nothing wrong with liking these colors but no one lives in a pink and purple world, not literally or figuratively AND I have issues with these colors being designated as “girl colors”). That and the town consists of things like Cafes and animal hospitals which isn’t bad on it’s own but but there are no fire departments, post offices or police stations. Lego city has all of these things which teach childeren about the workings of society and opens up whole new opportunities for imagination and learning. Oh and the “girl” lego sets really can’t be much else that a cafe or animal hospital, since there are a limited number of pieces and have many custom pieces that don’t really work in other contexts (this defeats the purpose of imaginative play and lego ENTIRELY)

Final issue, the “girl” lego set’s minifigs are too big to interact with the ones from lego’s “old” sets. They are by design segregated from the old lego toys. Honestly, I think the cheaper and smarter solution for what Lego discovered in their market research with little girls is that they should make more female minifigs for the regular lego sets. When I was a young girl who loved lego, that was all I really ever wanted.
- Cefeida
  
  “Final issue, the “girl” lego set’s minifigs are too big to interact with the ones from lego’s “old” sets. They are by design segregated from the old lego toys. ”
  
  That’s the worst thing about it. Why not add more girly minifigs to the standard lego instead of making another, separate line?
http://twitter.com/plural jason gessner

related to http://sinker.tumblr.com/post/14267087602/im-starting-to-think-lego-is-evil
http://celesteagnes.blogspot.com/ Sekino

This ad represents in a nutshell everything that LEGO used to be for me: Just a girl, her imagination, a few hours of spare time and her bricks :D
http://twitter.com/jeremysear Jeremy Sear

Is there anyone other than the north Americans who try to pluralise “Lego” with an “s” as if a single brick is “a lego”?

It’s not the Lego company that makes the rest of us baulk at that – it’s the utter weirdness of hearing someone call say clay bricks “clays”. It sounds daft.
- knappa
  
  Tell you what, you give us legos and we’ll give you maths.
  - Alan Goulding
    
    Are you suggesting that there’s a singular of mathematics? “A mathematic”. Lego, maths. Thread ends.
    
    ;->
    - http://about.me/rosemwelch Rose M. Welch
      
      Are you suggesting that people commonly pluralize abbreviations? :P
http://twitter.com/a_w_young a_w_young

How could any self-respecting writer call them “Legos”? You’re better than that, Maggies.
atimoshenko

The only reason a company would change its ads is if its old ads were not resulting in sales. It’s not about what “advertisers and toymakers think girls are” but about what advertisers and toymakers empirically discover to sell best. Products (and advertising) reflect society, rather than shape it.
- http://about.me/rosemwelch Rose M. Welch
  
  Products (and advertising) reflect society, rather than shape it.
  
  Products (and advertising) reflect what advertisers think about society, which helps to shape it.
  
  FTFY
  - atimoshenko
    
    Sorry, but no. Companies and their marketing departments are not there to please themselves, but to make money. They are 100% mercenary, pushing what sells, even if it is not something they agree with or believe in. Marketing is empirical, not ideological.
    
    You think that everyone at BP and their ad agencies thinks that oil is the best thing in the world? You think McDonald’s executives eat nothing but Happy Meals?
    
    Let’s not try to outsource our responsibility to where it does not lie, even if doing so makes us feel better. The most successful company will be the one that best reflects (and least challenges) the preferences of those groups that it chooses to target.
    
    Businesses certainly do not encourage society to change for the better, but they are a mirror, not a motive force. If we don’t like what we see, we should change ourselves.
    - http://about.me/rosemwelch Rose M. Welch
      
      Sorry, but no. Companies and their marketing departments are not there to please themselves, but to make money. They are 100% mercenary, pushing what sells, even if it is not something they agree with or believe in. Marketing is empirical, not ideological.
      
      Sorry, but yes. A profit motive doesn’t absolve them of their sins or remove my ability to criticize and critique them. They may be 100% mercenary, but they are not omniscient. They can only push what they believe will sell, and they frequently make those choices based on their own preconceived notions. Marketing strives for empiricism, but rarely makes it. Ideology is a strong, strong current and it’s hard to measure the effectiveness of other ads if your ideology won’t even let you try them.
      
      You think that everyone at BP and their ad agencies thinks that oil is the best thing in the world? You think McDonald’s executives eat nothing but Happy Meals?
      
      This is what I think: “Products (and advertising) reflect what advertisers think about society, which helps to shape it.”
      
      How do you extrapolate your two questions from this single sentence? Regardless, McDonald’s, at least, is a good example of ideology tainting their marketing strategy. Last year, a very highly placed McD executive told me that they keep their ‘girl toy/boy toy’ lines, not because it’s better from a marketing perspective, but because it would be ‘too hard to change’. This was after my daughter complained at being repeatedly given ‘girl’ toys after we specifically requested ‘boy’ toys.
      
      Let’s not try to outsource our responsibility to where it does not lie, even if doing so makes us feel better. The most successful company will be the one that best reflects (and least
      challenges) the preferences of those groups that it chooses to target.
      
      Let’s not try to make excuses for marketers, even if it makes them feel better. The most successful company will be the one that does the best job selling their products, despite what their marketing department may screw up that year. By your logic, marketing never makes any mistakes, because they perfectly understand their markets.
      
      Businesses certainly do not encourage society to change for the better, but they are a mirror, not a motive force. If we don’t like what we see, we should change ourselves.
      
      Businesses are not mirrors. They are made of people, and you can’t ‘mirror’ yourself. Remember that people who work in marketing are exactly that: People. They are not gods, they are not omniscient, and they are no more motiveless than any other human being. They have just as many preconceived notions as you and I do, and they bring those to the table just as you and I do. Fact: Marketers are not immune to marketing.
      
      Businesses are not mirrors. They do not benignly reflect what we already are. If you cared to do a bit of research, you could find so many well-documented examples of marketers setting out to change public opinion, and quite handily succeeding. Hair color, for instance, used to be taboo, something for ‘low’ women. Advertisers didn’t just work with the status quo, they worked to change it and now sell tons of hair dye. This is just one example out of the millions that are available. Again, businesses are not mirrors.
      
      Set and match.
      - atimoshenko
        
        So your argument in support of companies changing society towards their own ideals is that they are not competent enough to reflect it perfectly? Instead they end up being accidentally effective at something they never really set out to do? You certainly retain your “ability to criticize and critique them”, but the most effective criticisms and critiques must be correctly targeted.
        
        Have you ever worked in a big corporation? No one there really cares about anything but making sure the numbers are satisfied. Your McDonald’s example is actually a perfect illustration – what they have ‘works’, and none of the competitors are succeeding more with anything different. So why even think about why it works, and whether it can work differently? They’ll experiment on occasion, when growth starts falling below targets, and if customers like the new idea, it will succeed in the market. If customers like the idea of a competitor more, the competitor will succeed instead. The only reason for corporations to change is when the money stops flowing – society shapes them.
        
        It’s not about being the best for all of society or for each member of society, it’s about being good enough for enough of it. In this way, companies are not there to mirror “people” (in some abstract sense) or specifically you or me, they are there to mirror the people who they hope to get money from.
        
        The hair colour story is another great example. Marketers noticed that enough people are more insecure about their physical appearance than they are proud or snobbish, and reflected that. Where people are more snobbish than expert, it is again reflected – look luxury wine and restaurant marketing, for instance. People who are fine with grey hair do not dye their hair, and people who want a deeply satisfying meal don’t go to 3-star restaurants, of course…
        
        Obviously, any given product cannot appeal to everyone – human beings are far too diverse for that. But when a product (or ad) does appeal to someone, it appeals to them because it reflects their interests, not because it has brainwashed them into changing their interests. I suppose there must be some small group of people who do get brainwashed by everything they see (as you’d have to be for your interests to fundamentally altered by advertising), but that’s really nobody’s fault but theirs, and how would you determine their “true” interests anyway?
        
        To go back to Lego, the reason they switched from the (IMHO quite awesome) ad above to the more dull and dollified version they have recently launched is because there aren’t enough parents today whose views the former reflects/who have raised their daughters in a way that they’d be attracted by it. The most we can blame businesses for is not challenging such parents, but do we really want to give businesses that responsibility?
      - atimoshenko
        
        On a side note, it also makes sense to distinguish between the product-side actions of companies (product design, advertising), and their other activities (lobbying, PR). The former is to make sure they sell what people like (the benefit for them is the money customers pay). The latter is to make sure that costs are low and competition is minimised (the benefit here is what rules of the game you agree to – in a sense you are not the customer, but the product they are selling their shareholders). Again, of course, at stake is not what they believe, but what they can make money on.
        
        Take smoking for example. The existence and marketing of cigarettes reflects the fact that many people find smoking tobacco enjoyable (the same way smoking other substances can be enjoyable too). On the other hand, publishing studies about the lack of negative health effects of cigarettes and lobbying against the inclusion of health warnings on cigarette packs isn’t there to make us more interested in smoking cigarettes or to make us less interested in good health, but to make it easier to continue selling cigarettes. In other words, it is not about companies trying to shape your interests, it is about them trying to keep you from undermining theirs.
        
        The distinction, I think, is an important one – what they make versus how they make it.
Mister44

I think a lot of the issues with LEGO and their lack of a girl market is that LEGO doesn’t want to be just a “building toy” – unless that “building” is for a brand.

The LEGOs of from the era of the add had very generic categories – city/town, space, etc. Now it’s stuff like Bionicles, Star Wars, Ninjago, Super Heroes, and Dinos — all of them want LEGO to be an action toy – not just a building one. In fact, in a lot of ways its more making a “model” because the kits aren’t great for making anything other than what is on the box.

So they do still have the City line, but in general I think they have strayed too far from the building aspect (which is much more gender neutral than the action oriented ones).
- pizzicato
  
  That’s what the BusinessWeek article emphasized, Lego the company was in bad shape, the turnaround was the marketing of gender oriented product lines (e.g. as you had provided), now that it is rolling in the money, time to market and advertisement to the other 50% of the market. Seem to me Lego is just doing the typical American corporation profit machine trick.
  
  Lego adult fan generally welcome the change, because of the new ‘girl’ colors that will be introduced. One guy mention it will allow him to build a ‘teal’ cartoon platypus, that how gendered Lego has become…
http://twitter.com/schubox schubox

Mister44 makes the most sense by pointing out that Lego’s original line was very generic simply because they were just colored blocks. Therefore anyone could build whatever they wanted whether dollhouse or space station.

Everyone else seems to be trying to promote the bizarre notion that the male and female sexes are somehow the same. I’m not entirely sure why someone would want to adopt this strange and anti-human philosophy that rejects the reality of masculine and feminine sexual identities. Strange idea indeed.
- Marko Raos
  
  I believe the problem is not in considering sexes “the same” but in stereotyping. Guns and blues for boys, tutus and pinks for girls. Of course they’re not the same – but neither is every boy and girl the same. My 8-yo daughter is totally sick of pinks and purples and has expressly forbidden us to buy anything in these colors. Where does that leave us?
  The corporate manufacturers would LOVE that every boy wears blue and every girl wears pink. It would save them so much headache.
- GrrrlRomeo
  
  Humans are diverse. Everyone is a unique mix of masculine and feminine. Yes, males tend to be more masculine than females and females tend to be more feminine than males. But no one is 100% masculine or 100% feminine.
  
  Besides that, we’re talking about pre-pubescent children who have not yet developed secondary sex traits. Their bodies are not yet producing adult levels of sex hormones and are closer to androgynous than masculine or feminine.
Palomino

In the 70′s and early 80′s, there was an amazing forward momentum happening, there were many self awareness shows for both sexes. Many children’s shows, such as Sesame Street, Free To Be You And Me, I like Myself, Zoom, The Electric Company, Romper Room, ABC After School Special and my favorite, School House Rock focused on seeing value in everyone’s uniqueness and sexuality.

Pantsuits became very popular for women during this time too. Funny that women couldn’t wear them on the senate floor (or in my dad’s church still) until after 1990.

What the hell happened? I think it has to do with the trillion dollar industry in makeup, perfumes, clothing, shoes, purses and accessories. Men and male oriented corporations have successfully defined what “femininity” means, you have to buy it and maintain it. Women, as a whole, would be the wealthiest segment of society of they didn’t have to maintain some others idea about who and what they should look and act like.
sam1148

It looks like the 80′s ad was targeted to “tomboy” girls. Worn jeans with dirt stains, the braids on the hair are entirely a stereotype of a ‘tomboy’ girl of the time, even the choice of red-hair and freckles for the child. Quite similar to the ads targeting boys for guns and BB Guns in the 50′s and 60′s. In which red-hair and freckles where a tom-sawyer archetype in advertising.
I think it’s sexist, but it in own way given the time period it was made, as the underlying message is that lego was not something you’d give to female that doesn’t adopt male gender identity in clothing and styles.
- http://celesteagnes.blogspot.com/ Sekino
  
  It’s a ‘little kid’ attire. Most 6 year-olds of either gender spend an inordinate amount of time crawling all over the yard or floor, riding bikes, kicking up dirt. If you have a kid with long hair, and you don’t want to pick leaves/knots/gooey stuff out of it all the time, you braid it. Calling an active little girl a ‘tomboy’ is just a remnant of the old notion that ‘proper little girls’ just sit around and stay clean. The word hardly makes sense anymore.
  
  This was the 80′s, not the 60′s. By then, girls were no longer expected to wear pretty skirts and sit around playing tea party all the time, which was rather convenient since there weren’t as many moms dedicated to laundry, cleaning and combing hair as a full time job.
  
  My own guess is that this ad was targeting practical, middle to working class people, who didn’t typically dress their kids in fancy, light-coloured clothing just to kick around.
- GrrrlRomeo
  
  I was a tomboy in the 80s and at no time did I adopt a “male gender identity.” It’s sexist to imply that wearing jeans and sneakers means you’ve adopted a male gender identity.
  
  A female bodied person with a male gender identity is a transgender man. Learn the difference.
sam1148

I’m also reminded of the 80′s fashions for Women in corporate offices where the trend was shoulder pads where considered ‘power suits’ for women. To give them more male like broader and a more intimidating (male?) look.
- Antinous / Moderator
  
  They had a cubic yard of teased-up hair as well. That de-masculinized the shoulder pads.
- GrrrlRomeo
  
  The broad shoulder pads were supposed to make your waist look smaller.
JhmL

Now that ad made me smile.
sean

I have it on good authority that they are called “Legos”, used as a noun. My daughter and her friends always said “Wanna play with my legos?” or something similar; at age 7 or 8, they NEVER said “Wanna play with my Lego brand bricks or pieces?” The legos were theirs, so THEY decide what to call them, despite what some overweeningly pedantic posters might opine.
fight4paece

It was a bit disappointing that I could not find any LEGO kits for girls to give to my daughter for Christmas. So I bought her a LEGO Kingdoms set because it had a female character, a farm house with animals and a wind mill along with the guards.
GrrrlRomeo

I’m gonna be an old woman that goes around saying, “I remember when Legos were androgynous.” I never thought that Lego people had an inherent gender. At least not when I was a kid. The only gender marker on the figures when I was a kid was hair, which was interchangeable. Want a female cop? Imagine it is a female cop. Want a girly female cop? Snap a long hair piece on a police uniformed body.
xtalman

Speaking as a dad whose kids love Legos, I love the above ad. We bought the 1600 piece brick set for an X-mas present for both to share. My daughter who is 10 loves the sets, mostly Harry Potter and my son likes the Star Wars and Ninja sets, he is 5 and his knowledge of Star Wars and Ninja’s come from looking at the Lego catalogs it is rather funny.

I showed my daughter the girl focused Lego article an she found it interesting and saw the reason behind it but did not really care about it too much. She just likes to build stuff and play with the HP stuff. She also is big in to American Girl, or as much as my wallet will allow. At her age we really just need to let them do what they find interesting. She is a self proclaimed nerd and I really need to start teaching her how to use tools as most people really should know how to use.

One of the problems I have with Lego now is he focus on the sets and not the free play, that is why we bought the 1600 piece set. Though my kids do do a fair amount of free play with both there sets and random bricks.

One other comment, having been to Lego Land a few times in Carlsbad CA the one thing I noticed is most the the boys made guns and the girls made all sorts of random things.
- http://pulse.yahoo.com/_CU5752HLGUD2AGVWB5A6OWFWEY Michelle Back
  
  You are a GREAT Dad. Bless your heart so much.
Jennifer Newton

Lego thinks that this new line will sell toys. Fine. The marketing gods have spoken (I still would like to see how the questions were framed in their market research). But how ’bout they add some female figures to the “boy” lines (firefighters, police, aliens, Hermione). Then girls who like the original sets can have some feminine figures, and boys can see that girls can be a part of “their” world. Seems like a great lesson for the 20 cents a mini fig probably costs to produce.

And a question. How many women work at Lego as Lego engineers? I wonder, my guess is less than a few.