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by rtpg
3177 days ago
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I think you're both actually agreeing. The other coding toys are marketed towards boys ("aimed at boys"). That means that it's less likely for girls to get exposed to them overall, because media aimed at them is different, teacher's behavior towards them is different, even their own parents' behavior towards them is different. I get that marketing "for girls" might give credence to the "for boys" marketing... but if you look at the jewelbots page, the only point that is explicitly "girls" is the fact that the kids in the pictures are girls. Everything else has been brought in by us. The "jewel = girls" aspect, the "friendship bracelet = girls" aspect... though some other media is even more pointed at that. Bit mixed feelings about it. I feel like it's trying to operate within the weird gender divide that exists in our society |
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But you're right that the crux of my argument hangs on explicit "for girls" implying other toys as "for boys"
The reason I interpreted the "for girls" thing as explicit because: 1. When I first clicked the link, the HN title did say "for girls" in the title. It was edited by the time I had submitted my comment. 2. The GMA quote featured on the page advertises it as "One of the Smartest Gadgets for Girls" 3. The quote saying " Jewelbots serves girls. The future scientists, lawyers, mothers, doctors, and engineers of the world." at the bottom of the page. 4. The creator saying that other code toys were aimed at boys (which I agree could be a comment on the adverstising, but I took as a comment on the design of the toys).
Because I took "for girls" as an explicit design consideration for the reasons above, I also assumed that the "jewel" and "friendship bracelet" aspects were design choices to explicitly appeal to girls, rather than just parts of the toy that girls happen to like more than boys on average.
I would be happy to be wrong on this though. I just struggle to see how this changes the narrative of science/engineering toys for girls needing to be overtly feminine-themed while most functionally equivalent toys without those aspects are assumed to be for boys. Perhaps I'm not in tune with the market well enough, but I struggle to identify equivalently overtly-masculine themed coding toys from companies who say their mission is to help boys.