[Steve_T_online]

Agreed, although in fact I have found that the younger children tend to be pretty gender-neutral in what interests them when coding. It is only really when they hit 9 or 10 and above that I have started to notice the girls favouring pink or flowery items more than the boys.

[bigger_cheese]

An interesting personnel anecdote I work in an industrial plant the diversity statistics here are pretty bleak - we have an internal social media site - mostly it is just used for company announcements and that sort of thing. The most popular post I can recall from recent memory was a picture of a pair of purple steel-capped boots and a bit of a blurb that one of our suppliers was now offering a choice of colors. It generated hundreds of comments mostly along the lines of "wow how can I order a pair of those" a lot of the comments were from female employees the whole tone was overwhelmingly positive.

Now I'm a male and hardly what you would call fashion conscious I wear steel-capped boots because it's a safety requirement I couldn't care one way or the other what color they are. Does offering brightly colored safety equipment count as pinkify-ing my workplace? At least some portion of people seem appreciative of having the choice available.