Comments on: How not to market science to girls

By: Female Engineers Design Toys for Girls That Aren’t Just Pink | Smart News

Wed, 29 Aug 2012 12:03:56 +0000

[...] toys for girls are often, well, terrible. While boys get cool explosions and slime, girls get “Beauty Spa Lab” and [...]

By: Avenue4Learning - Content-Specific Marketing

Avenue4Learning - Content-Specific Marketing — Sat, 14 Jul 2012 23:22:47 +0000

[...] Marketing can go horribly wrong, though, as evidenced here: How not to market science to girls [...]

By: Georgijs

Georgijs — Wed, 02 May 2012 04:05:07 +0000

Sigh… And here we go with gender stereotypes… again. Such stereotypes are long outdated and basically quite discriminatory towards both sexes. If not imposed (either by parents or society) a boy can play with either a girls toy or with a boys toy depending on his own personal free will and same thing applies to girls.

Kids don’t understand this gender role stereotype. It is induced into their heads by society. (much like religion). Thus it is baseless.

Heck, I like pink. I played with Barbies, plushies and ponies (that is when I was a kid, of course) and I also played with tanks, toy-soldiers, cars, transformers and the like. And back then I didn’t know nor understand this division. (I could write about this all day but I suck at organizing what I write so I’ll stop at this, since my point was made.)

By: Ruby

Ruby — Sat, 07 Apr 2012 01:48:57 +0000

I was given the perfume set as a kid, it loved it and used up the materials in the kit within a few weeks. This led me to figuring out my own ways to make ‘Perfume’. But I also received one of the Blue electronics kits, and head heaps of fun with that too. Me and my older brother used the blue set together all the time but he would NEVER make perfume with me. I think that even though the pink is pushing outdated stereotypes, it’s not little girls who suffer from the separation but little boys who are missing out on half the fun.

By: Perception is (y)our Reality | Digital: Divide and Conquer

Perception is (y)our Reality | Digital: Divide and Conquer — Sat, 03 Mar 2012 01:37:28 +0000

[...] How not to market science to girls (blogs.discovermagazine.com) Share this:TwitterFacebookPinterestRedditTumblrLike this:LikeBe the first to like this post. [...]

By: A Princess Does Biology « Grits and Purls

A Princess Does Biology « Grits and Purls — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 13:37:16 +0000

[...] and why does the art work on them have to be Barbie-style? (Links to a couple of those blogs: Bad Astronomy blog at Discover; Adventures in Ethics and [...]

By: Eden

Eden — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 03:25:19 +0000

Thank you for a great post. This is a subject near & dear to my heart both as a woman who was always into math & science (and continues to have a career in male-dominated fields) as well as a mother of a 4 year old girl. The cartoon you included is priceless!

Just yesterday I was thinking about good toys & activities to encourage my daughter’s early interest in math & building. With the help of some friends, I pulled together this whole list of toys, tips & activities that are great for girls. No need for pink & purple LEGO…just regular LEGO!

Toys & Tips To Feed A Girl’s Love Of Building, Math & Science
http://www.skinnyscoop.com/list/eden/toys-tips-to-feed-a-girls-love-of-building-math-science

By: ES

ES — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 17:32:09 +0000

We need more people interested and knowledgeable in science and technology.
The usual science books and kits that are out there appeal to the geeky kids who would probably turn to science anyway.
If pink science interests more people in science, what’s the problem?
If the pink science kits don’t work we will have more data on what does not work if our goal is to broaden kid’s interest in science.
If it does work, think of the other possibilities , Cool Science for cool kids, Gangsta Science for the badass kids, Jock Science for the wannabee athletes, Hip Hop Science…… possibilities are endless!

By: Dave

Dave — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 17:30:33 +0000

Bill Nye and Beakman got it right. These people have it all wrong.

By: oldfeminist

oldfeminist — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 17:30:09 +0000

Nigel Depledge:

Experiments on toddlers who have very little lnaguage (i.e. they do not yet talk, so their understanding of language is fairly limited) have shown that there is an innate component to gender preferences. (Socialising effects can be corrected for by having a toddler play in a room with an adult that does not know the child – in half of your experiment you can fool the adult into believing that the child has the opposite from its actual gender, and thus you neutralise any subconscious influence the adult exerts.)

Except that does not neutralize any gender-directed behaviors from the adults in the child’s life outside the experiment. Unless you’re proposing an experiment where babies are raised by people who don’t know their sex, which I kind of doubt!

You’re speaking as if children have to understand the concept of girls versus boys before they can learn what their preferences are supposed to be. This is wrong.

Children learn what they individually are allowed to do or not do, what they are encouraged to do, and for the most part try to comply with the parent’s wishes. When they are pre-verbal, they don’t know that the rule about never being loud is only for girls but the rule about not running into the street is for everyone. They just know what their parents approve and disapprove of.

Once a child becomes verbal, “what is” is the same as “what should be” and their ideas are very fixed and rules are very rigid. But by then they’ve already been quite socialized into sex roles and their little friends have been just as socialized. So girls wearing dresses and playing dolls and tea party is right, because that’s what they see. Boys playing trucks and guns in the dirt is right, because that’s what they see.

This is why you think it’s “just natural” — you learned it long before you could understand it. It is hard to reason oneself out of a conclusion one did not reach through reason.