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Comment by klipt | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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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