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.
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.