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Comment by EncipheredBy | Hacker News Reader

I also was pretty gender-agnostic in my choice of toys as a child, and get annoyed at parents who I assumed pushed "girly" stuff on their kids.

But then I got to know parents who were trying to actively discourage their kids from like princess garbage, but they couldn't stop it because the kids learn from their friends. I'm no child psychologist, but there's probably some age where what their peer group thinks is more important to them than what their parents have introduced at home.

I don't know how to avoid that when having kids myself besides being careful that I'm not plopping them into a school full of girls who are being told which things they should and shouldn't want to play with.

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The solution for my parents was to send me to an all-girls school with a feminist bent. That had its own drawbacks in plenty, but the upside was an upbringing relatively free of gender stereotypes.

And talk to them about it. If they're hearing one thing from their friends and another at home, they will experience cognitive dissonance, and they will wonder about it, even if they don't know to ask about it.

Edited to add: pinkification and genderization of toys seems to have accelerated since I was a kid. Entire aisles of toys in pink boxes instead of a single shelf of barbies. The explosion of Disney princesses hasn't helped either. (I remember being a teenager going to see The Little Mermaid and my mom explaining that it was a big deal because it was Disney's first animated feature in decades.)

I think maybe to some degree people are subconsciously frightened that women are now able to wear anything men can wear, do anything men can do. The reaction is to make sure that there are still differentiators between men and women (because, OMG, how can you interact with a person without being able to define you understanding of them based on gender? [never mind that we do it all the time in places like HN]) - and the easiest way to do that is to make sure the girls are pink! That way you can tell them apart!

Or it's just data driven marketing.

"Research shows that sales and profits go up when we make girls' toys pink."

"Okay then, make girls' toys pink!"

Anyway, my guess is that whatever strategy would encourage the majority of women to go into programming isn't necessarily something women on hacker news would like, because women on hacker news are part of the self selected minority who already buck gender trends. You don't need pinkification because, if you were the type of person who did, you wouldn't be here.

You make a very good point!

I'll just note that some of us who might have been most attracted to the profession would be turned off by pinkification, and that we may be harder to recruit into recruiting efforts that we perceive as ghettoizing. I quit a women's organization dedicated to a specific technology because all the meetups they organized seemed to be oriented around manicures.

Someone mentioned above that law and medicine have evened out (or even begun to invert) their gender ratios over the past generation. They didn't do that by pinkifying the profession - by giving little girls pink stethescopes or gavels. They did that by changing expectations of who turns out to be a doctor or lawyer - the expectations of both children who hadn't yet chosen their profession and of the adults who guide their choices; choose whether to admit them into study programs; and eventually hire them.

You touched upon something that's critical to the whole issue: the perception of traditionally female stuff as inferior. The feminist movement has come a long way getting women through the door and into traditionally male-dominated fields. What still remains as an enormous challenge is the elevation in status of traditionally female roles and norms.

For as long as we think of silver and black and blue as high status and pink and purple as "ghettoized", we have a problem. Just as we have a problem that nursing and teaching are low status compared to other professions.

For as long as we consider care work to be inferior to business work, women will never be truly free.

Absolutely, I agree with that. But I also think that misses the point that we need to eliminate the notion that pink is girly and blue is boyish - or rather, that there are colors, interests, and pursuits that are masculine and others that are feminine.

That's effectively how Lego Friends came to be. LEGO wanted to expand their market to hit the same market segment as Barbie. After years of market research, focus-testing, and development, they released Friends. It quickly became the fastest-selling line in the company's history.

For reasons that I'm not even going to attempt to speculate upon, a non-trivial number of young girls really like that stuff. Pretending it's not true, or casting judgement on the morality of this won't change the fact that it's effective. If it helps spark children's creativity, imagination, and passion for building things, then that's great in my book.

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