TIL that in January 2014, a seven-year-old girl named Charlotte Benjamin wrote a letter to Lego, pointing out the lack of female characters compared to male ones. A few months later, in June 2014, Lego introduced a “Research Institute” set showcasing female scientists, which quickly sold out.
Legos have typically sold more to boys. For a long time, Legos were meant to be gender neutral, but it didn’t work out and 90% of Legos sold were to boys. It was bad enough that Lego felt a need to create girl targetted legos in 2012, to try to capture some of that market. The “Friends” Lego sets were enormously successful, and tripled sales of Legos to girls in the first year it came out.
It’s also common to target an audience by having the characters be reflective of the audience. If you write a book targeted at elementary school boys, you usually want it to start an elementary school boy.
So I’m not surprised that most traditional LEGO figures are boys after decades of boy dominated sales.
A source on some of this.
They had Lego sets in the 90s that seemed to be designed for girls - the “Paradisia” line. These were like doll-houses (and doll-beaches, doll-horse-ranches, etc. - the sort of places Barbie might go if she were Lego-sized) with tasteful use of pink and plenty of Lego people with feminine outfits and hairstyles.
My sister would get Paradisia sets because she always wanted to do what I was doing, but she didn’t actually like playing with them very much. I would end up putting them together myself along with my robots and spaceships.
Which is pretty funny when looking at Disney vs Ghibli movies because Ghibli actually does that while Disney just goes “Here’s a young adult princess, enjoy girls!”
Ghibli movies always appealed to me growing up because their female protagonists were very grounded, weren’t hyper-feminine to a comical degree, and actually did interesting things, like go on adventures. Their stories also did not focus solely on falling in love with a male character, and focused a lot on their unique internal struggles.
I would strongly suggest that anyone with a daughter give them the opportunity to see Ghibli movies. “Howl’s Moving Castle”, “Kiki’s Delivery Service”, “My Neighbor Totoro”, “Porco Rosso”, “Whisper of the Heart”, “The Cat Returns”, and “Castle in the Sky” were important to me in my formative years. Boys may like them, too! My son particularly loves “Porco Rosso”, “Ponyo”, and “Spirited Away.”
Definitely give your kids a chance to see them.
I really dislike that kind of animation style, just isn’t my taste. But in Ghibli, I love it and the stories. I run a plex server for my family and had to warn my mom. My 3 y/o niece doesn’t need to see “grave of the fire flies” just yet.
As a boy I liked reading about boys going on adventures, but I also liked pirates, aliens, superheroes, knights, robots, etc. I think I liked all those more than I liked boys going on adventures. The ideal was a combination of the two, like Treasure Island. A girl going on an adventure was also more interesting if the girl was a princess, and in fact I liked Disney movies.
I don’t think I would have liked Ghibli movies when I was a kid. Nausicaa and Mononoke would have been too scary and the others would have been boring. (But I confess that as an adult I only like those two scary ones and I think the others are boring, which is an opinion other people tend not to share.)
“Porco Rosso” is a about an ex-military seaplane pilot who battles air pirates. He also, incidentally, has been turned into a pig. It’s both fantastically funny and very occasionally heart-breaking.
It also has one of the best lines in cinema: “I’d rather be a pig than a fascist.”
I love that proco being a pig is treated as mildly weird. His relationship with the fascist government is more important to the plot than that he is a pig. No one else is an animal. It’s just a thing that happened to him. You can tell it’s a big deal to him, but no one else really cares. You could remove him being a pig and the story still works fine. It just makes the regret and inadequatecy more obvious.
I think I like Howel’s Moving Castle more. But it’s close. That one gave me a whole author.
Even as a young boy, I kind of hated Disney Princess movies. All they did was sing. They were also dumb and would fall for the most obvious villainous stuff, or too apathetic to take a single action of self preservation.
The little mermaid was a notable exception. She did go out on an adventure, and the music wasn’t boring.
The old Disney princess movies (Snow White, Cinderella, and Sleeping Beauty with the exception of Maleficent although I suppose she’s not a princess. She should have known not to turn into a dragon because a Disney Prince can’t physically hurt a woman.) were not very interesting but that might just be because they’re old and we have different standards for movies now. Ariel, Belle, and Jasmine were cool (keeping in mind that Jasmine wasn’t the main character). Those were the ones I’m old enough to have seen as a child.
And how much were they sold to boys cause idiotic families pushed them only on the boys?
How many girls got told no and got dolls instead of Legos growing up?
There’s always been a bias here.
I know a few women now in their 40s who literally have a Lego room in their home. A room dedicated to playing with legos.
I don’t think past data reflects reality that would have occurred.
Sure, but what was Lego supposed to do about that? They could have started a multi-decade advertising campaign to try to change social perceptions of girls vs boys toys, and maybe that would have eventually paid off. Or they could just make specific “girl” Legos.
As a business that wants to make money, they went with the latter option and it worked really well. And realistically, I don’t think we should expect individual companies to try changing society instead of just targeting their products to society as it is.
It’s also worth mentioning that when Lego did studies on it, they found that girls played with their toys differently. The girl Legos were designed to be based around a different type of play, that was supposed to be more appealing. It wasn’t as simple as this is in pink and has girly lettering on the box.
Cracks me up that it took Lego several years to barely scratch the surface of your well-made point. This is what happens when you have a male dominated corporate world and and you know when they hire women, they’re either hiring women who will agree with them or they’re not actually listening to the women that disagree with them.
Yes, but boys like to play with girls. Checkmate.