Legos are sexist

I'll concede that my niece is totally sexist. She's about to turn six and as long as she's been able to talk, she's been very concerned with whether things are boys or girls. All stuffed animals are girls. All her dolls are girls. She finds it traumatic that my car, George, is not a girl.

I'm not sure why it matters. All the women in her life are or have been professionally successful. The men in our family cook far more often than the women. She mixes up her My Little Pony dolls with her Iron Man action figures. Her favorite TV shows are "Fact or Faked" and "Ghost Hunters". We fully expect her to be scientist or an engineer.

Lego Friends

Which is fine with her, so long as her lab coat can be pink. When she plays, she wants to to be the sister or the mommy who is racing cars, building houses and going to the moon. In the interest of encouraging her STEM-femininity we bought her the pastel Legos for Christmas. At the time, I was thrilled to discover that Lego had taken a more girl-friendly approach with the Lego Friends collections. Little did I know.

Her folks recently bought her a tree house set. This is one of the first sets she's ever gotten with a traditional Lego Minifig. Unlike the Lego Friends (who are ALL girls), Minifigs are small and mostly shapeless. They also fit in all the standard accessories, like the tiny doors that come with Lego basic sets. When Tucker, my lovable furball, ate her Lego Friends, I asked her if she would like them replaced with more Friends or with Minifigs. There was no question. She wanted girl Minifigs.

Lego Minifigures

Of the dozens of relatively inexpensive Lego sets that line the walls of Toys R Us, only a few non-Friends sets had any female characters. In fact, of all the non-Friends sets (there must have been close to a hundred) sold there, I didn't find ten that had any girls at all. In the grab-bag style fig packs, only one of the five varieties had any human females. I think there were three females out of the 16 or 18 possibilities.

I lamented that fact to the checkout girl, as I bought a $12 fire rescue car set that came with a fire-dude and a woman who's cat needed rescuing from a tree. She agreed that the Lego universe was totally gender segregated. My next choice was a $19.99 set that had two princesses.

Thing is, while she might disagree, we don't want my niece to be a princess. Princesses mostly stand around get rescued. We want her to be a creator. That's the whole point of the Legos. So she can teach herself how much potential she has. Potential that will be realized in a world where boys and girls work side-by-side. Shame on Lego for acting like it's otherwise.