Lady Lego Pirates or Why My Mom is AWESOME

Pirate Legos

My sister and I opened our Lego gifts and were delighted!  What kid wouldn’t be excited to get a huge box of Lego pirates!  After we’d opened the boxes, Mom told us she was not happy that all of the pirates were men and that she’d written Lego a letter and received a response back.  “They actually do have lady pirates, they just hadn’t started making them yet.”  She showed us a letter she had received on Lego corporate stationary.  “They are sending us some lady pirates, but they won’t be here for a few days.  You two are getting some of the first lady pirates.”

Photo by Mom

We did, indeed, receive the lady lego pirates and enjoyed the pirate lego set.  In fact, we entered a Lego contest at the Kmart down the road and my sister won!!

 

This would certainly make a happy end to the story, but life is not a fairy tale and moments like these feed into what happens to us later in life.  At the time, I did not know that I would eventually be getting a BS in Computer Science or that I would spend a lot of time questioning why I was one of 5 women in the BS program at my school.

 

After listening to presentations and reading research papers passed around the Vancouver Grace Hopper conference, the conclusion I reached is that, at least in the U.S., girls are trained and messaged away from math and science at a very young age. The message is that we don’t want to play with erector sets or to take apart our computers.  According to the marketing, the only thing we’re supposed to want is an E-Z bake oven and a birthday party at the American girl store.  Don’t mistake what I say as a 100% rejection of those things.  I think it’s fine to learn how to bake or play with dolls. I do, however, reject the way it’s shoved down our throats as “what girls like to do.”

 

When I hear people say girls don’t stick around in math and science because they are not interested, I’d like to point them to the commercials that play on Saturday morning cartoons or to the faces they see on the boxes in the toy aisles.  If you have kids, take a minute to look around the next time you are buying toys. You might find it eye-opening.  Although I haven’t seen it, I hear the documentary “Miss Representation” deals with this topic.

 

I was prompted to write this post after reading Legos, Spaceships and Breasts by Kate Bachus.  Kate appears to be a mom who shares some of the frustrations my own mother experienced years ago and so I decided it was time to share my family’s story.  These types of choices and voiced frustrations reverberate long after the legos are put away.

 

I do think that there has been some progress although I feel extremely conflicted about some of the progress. While I understand on some level it’s good that lego is trying the “girl” lego thing (kind of like Barbie made a “Computer Engineer” Barbie), I also think it’s great that there are moms out there wanting to know why the girl legos aren’t better, and encouraging their kids not to care about whether their legos come from the pink aisle or the blue one.  My mom gave me the same encouragement and this is part of the reason why MY MOM IS AWESOME.

 

(With the Barbie…does anybody seriously wear pink cat eye glasses or carry a pink laptop?  I better change my vim color scheme to Flamingo or the Barbie police will arrest me.)

 

 

10 thoughts on “Lady Lego Pirates or Why My Mom is AWESOME”

  1. (1) You should definitely watch “Miss. Representation”

    (2) I (a guy) have a notebook with a pink flower pattern on the lid, and a padded “Hello Kitty” sleeve for my work notebook. Sorry, no cat-eye glasses. But yeah, Computer Engineer Barbie could have been better.

    Thanks a lot for the post.

  4. Well personally I really like my computer engineer african american barbie doll, er, plastic sculpture. I suppose you are right about the pink, but the basic barbie series is always pink it’s sort of a trademarky sort of thing, people expect it.

  5. Good story, but let’s remember not to stop there. The Lego pirate designer was quite probably a man and didn’t think to design pirates that didn’t look like him. Likewise, we should be careful not to make the same mistake ourselves.

    For example, I see you have zero black pirates, despite how common they actually were (e.g., more than half of Blackbeard’s crew was black). (It looks like Lego does have one black pirate now.)

    Today, I know few women who are programmers or engineers, but even fewer black people who are. What other groups are we forgetting to include, simple because we are not in them?

  6. > But yeah, Computer Engineer Barbie could have been better.

    Oh, I don’t know. When I first saw the pic, I immediately thought of a former colleague who used to sling Java code competently.

    The real one used to wear better glasses and clothes, though.

  8. I taught my 8 year old daughter how to program rock, scissors, paper in Ruby, she constantly builds complicated Lego sets, taught her to count in hex, and she helped swap out the garbage disposal last summer with her own set of tools. Why? Because she wanted to. Not everyone buys society’s balony.

  9. I was a lecturer five years ago, teaching broadcast technology, it was a minority course in comparison to the media arts courses but was well supported by major broadcasting companies because of the constant demand for new engineers in the industry. It was really difficult to recruit young ladies into the course, a course which was cool (in Engineering terms) because you worked with expensive stuff and saw celebrities, but we struggled to recruit females. One time I recruited an intelligent young lady on to the course, but she was actually making a cunning ploy to transfer on to the difficult to get in media production course.

    I wish I knew the secret, I wish I knew how I could make a proactive difference to the industry. But despite wondering this for ages I have yet to figure out what I can do other than not discriminate in what I do.

    I am now back in industry because of the BS in the senior academic circles, but I remain in hope.

  10. Hi Bob,

    This is the messiest issue I know of in Computer Science which is why I am encouraged when people even care. Everyone who works on this issue at some point gets blamed for having the wrong attitude in some way so I’m always extra-generous at giving people points for trying to do the write thing.

    Probably the best action you can take is to learn about providing a safe classroom environment and working at setting the example for that.

    This means possibly learning what constitutes sexual harassment and/or gender discrimination. I often found that the classes where I felt the safest were the classes where the teacher held everyone to a high standard.

    As I said, I give you points for caring at all and hope that this information will help you out. Thanks for your comment.

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