Some while ago now I casually, without quite enough thought, responded to a tweet from Souxie Wilesabout the lack of female figures in Lego. I suggested that she swap the hair, since it was pretty much the only distinguishing feature.
In my defence I don’t think I was the only person who told her that. And I didn’t mention the witches’ hat.
She tweeted back to say I had missed the point.
Well, obviously. I had approached the issue from the perspective of the small bits of plastic the Danes use to add value to their air-in-cardboard-boxes export industry. The point was the lack of female role models in science and engineering. She pointed me to a Lego website that showed that simply replacing a hard hat with a pony-tail wasn’t going to do the job these days. Pretzel Girl and Grandma vs the Scientist and the Barbarian as gender role models, complete with lipstick and facial hair as required. Full biographies on collectable cards in case you misunderstood anything.
Serve me right for trying to show off on twitter.
I’m clearly not qualified to comment on gender politics but I do have two children’s worth – two 144 litre bins full – of Lego in storage. One Christmas morning I was woken at six o’clock to start working on the new Lego pirate ship and not allowed to start cooking lunch until I’d finished. Lunch was very late even by Christmas standards. I have read Lego themed books aloud, played Lego games and watched hundreds of hours of Lego promos in Toyworld while children agonised over which set to have me buy. So I feel qualified in Lego.
The Lego Company was started in 1932 making wooden toys and the classic Lego brick introduced in 1958. As I child in the ‘60s I didn’t have Lego. I had the cheaper (and British) Betta Bilda but loved it none the less[1]. It didn’t come with human figures, male, female or otherwise. Bricks, doors, windows and roofing tiles (that were better than anything Lego had) was all you got. But at that point Lego didn’t have any figures either.
In 1963 the founder of Lego listed the 10 characteristics of the product:
- Long hours of play
- Development, imagination, creativity
- The more LEGO, the greater the value
- Extra sets available
- Unlimited play potential
- For girls and for boys
- Fun for every age
- Year-round play
- Healthy, quiet play
- Quality in every detail.
It’s a good list. Now that Lego shows up on x-ray its more healthy than it was, points 3 and 4 look a little self-serving but point 10 is indisputable – I’ve never had a set with a piece missing and the only piece that didn’t fit, it looks like it got caught in something while it was still soft in the factory, is still blu-tacked to my wall in celebration. A recent article in the Washington Post looked at toys that inspired women in science and engineering and Lego got a good few mentions, so point 6 had some currency.
In 1978 the first Lego mini-figures were introduced.
By 2012 (the latest year figures are available) Lego’s revenue was more than $NZ 5 billion and net profit over $1 billion. In my weaker moments I used to feel I was single headedly responsible for Denmark’s GDP growth through the early part of the century but I was astonished when I saw those numbers. The equivalent of the whole New Zealand meat industry. In profit.
Lego hasn’t always been that successful. In 2003 the company lost $NZ400 million and was on the verge of bankruptcy before getting bought out from its family owners. Faced with a crisis going back to the early ‘90s, as children turned from Lego to video games, the company had struck a series of licencing deals to produce ‘Star Wars’ themed sets and a whole lot of other film and game related items. They asked for suggestions of what figures people would like to see and made them. They even started their own games website. Classic business school-taught open innovation to try to manage a changing marketplace.
But it all turned out to be too much of a good thing. Lego wound up manufacturing a huge range of pieces for their kits many of which didn’t sell consistently and all the research and game production ate money. I read somewhere (which now Auntie Google isn’t letting me find) that Lego were producing 15 different chef models which was way too many for the pre-reality TV Cooking Show era. In 2004 Lego fired their chief executive, went back to its core business, bricks, and adopted a seemingly radical new strategy – only making things that sold.[2]
And that has turned out pretty well for them with compound annual growth of close to 20% over the last decade.
I rather went off Lego in amongst all this. As my children grew up they got more involved in the figures and the little collectables with cards that you build once, play with a few times and drop into the nearest 144 litre bin when you need to vacuum. In the end I think they got tired of getting a lecture along the lines of “In my day we built things with our construction toys…” every time they spent their pocket money. They moved on to Pokemon and Magic the Gathering cards. Games that are too incomprehensible to provoke more than a weary head shake from the old man (although the business model is fantastic. And I really hope that Souxie Wiles never looks at the gender politics of them.)
So. Lego could paint two faces on each figure. They have the machinery and used to do it for the manga-looking figures with the robots I forget the name of. They could print two biographies on each card. They could even produce a range of mini-figures providing good female role models for Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths based careers. But they probably won’t. Because they won’t sell.
And that is the problem.
Lego is in the business of selling air in boxes with a little bit of plastic to persuade you to buy and incidentally increasing the GDP of Denmark. Not changing the world. People want to buy disappointingly sex-biased toys. It’s upsetting but there it is. Lego give them what they want. The people who are going to complain about Lego are already converts and I don’t think there are enough of us to make a difference.
By the time children are making up their minds in Toyworld they are already segregating themselves into the pink and blue aisles, the boys getting more comfortable with how things work and the girls more comfortable with how people work. And then the career cycle reinforces itself.
I model my posts on the New Scientist story arc; a personal encounter raises an important question which is broadened and discussed in the bulk of the article before returning to the personal and an uplifting or enlightening conclusion. I’m a bit stuck now. Sex disparities in the Sciences? Too big for one blog post. It’s true that things were getting better for a while but it seems to have stalled. I’m not even sure that my generation dying off will do it.[3]
We’ll just have to keep leaning on the door until it opens. Emailing Lego feels like a start but it isn’t going to be a happy ending in the near future.
