L.A. NowLiving near freeways makes people sick. L.A. keeps building next to them anyway Build your own female scientists with this new Lego set, coming soon! In August, Lego will produce a limited-edition box set called Research Institute, featuring three female scientists in the act of learning more about our world and beyond.If you buy the set, your little one (or you) can build an astronomer peering into her telescope, a paleontologist using her magnifying glass to examine a dinosaur skeleton, and a chemist mixing solutions in her lab. (Do you like how many "hers" were in that last sentence? Research Institute was designed by Ellen Kooijman, a geochemist at the Swedish Museum of Natural History, and a self-confessed Adult Fan of Lego.She has been playing around with Legos for more than 10 years now, but it wasn't until 2012 that she finally made some of her designs public on the Lego Ideas website. This is a place where fans can suggest new ideas for Lego sets and vote for other ideas that they like.
If a proposed set gets 10,000 votes, Lego will consider putting it into production.It took about a year for Kooijman's set to get 10,000 votes and another year for Lego to decide to put it into production. But this week the project got the green light. "We’re very excited to release Ellen Kooijman’s Female Minifigure set, featuring 3 scientists, now entitled 'Research Institute' as our next Lego Ideas set," the company said in a statement. "This awesome model is an inspiring set that offers a lot for kids as well as adults."Lego added that the final design, pricing and availability are still being worked out, but said the set is on track for an August release. Kooijman originally designed 12 vignettes featuring women doing all kinds of interesting jobs -- all on a 6-inch-by-4-inch base plate. If you click through the images above, you can see some of her other ideas, including a female judge, a female falconer and a female robotics engineer designing a robotic arm."As a female scientist I had noticed two things about the available Lego sets: a skewed male/female minifigure ratio and a rather stereotypical representation of the available female figures," Kooijman writes in a blog post. "
Back in January, young Charlotte wrote, "Today I went to a store and saw LEGOs in two sections the girls pink and the boys blue. All the girls did was sit at home, go to the beach, and shop, and they had no jobs but the boys went on adventures, worked, saved people, and had jobs, even swam with sharks." She then requested the brand produce "more LEGO girl people" who go on adventures. An even younger LEGO-fan, 3-year-old Cecilia, took action by making her own badass LEGO girls by mashing up the male and female parts of her minifigures. “Her 'girl' LEGO recreations came out looking like warriors and soldiers. Most of them are her 'superhero girls,’" her mom told HuffPost after creating a Tumblr to house photos of all the toddler's creations (see photos below). Both youngsters came on the scene after many parents had already expressed outrage over the "LEGO Friends" line, made specifically for girls. While "Friends" has been a moneymaker for the brand, parents and women argue that it perpetuates gender stereotypes.
(The line features pastel minifigures enjoying a day at a beauty shop.) When LEGO itself released their own female model called "The Scientist," in September 2013, the response was favorable all around. “I think this figure is a positive step because it portrays a woman in a STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) career without resorting to gender stereotyping by making her pink or calling her a ‘lady scientist,’” Elizabeth Sweet, a doctoral candidate in sociology at the University of California, Davis, told LiveScience at the time. Adding a full set of ladies in science can only mean one thing -- a giant step for LEGO-kind.When it comes to stating the obvious, sometimes it takes a child to make the case.Take 7-year-old Charlotte Benjamin, who earlier this year wrote a letter to Lego to point out a major fault with its minifigures: "There are more Lego boy people and barely any Lego girls." On top of that, the female minifigures did things like go to the beach and shop, while the boys "went on adventures, worked, saved people, and had jobs."
Several months after Charlotte wrote her plea, the toymaker has come out with its first minifigure set featuring scientists who are also women, designed by geoscientist Ellen Kooijman. The three tiny plastic figures are a paleontologist, an astronomer and a chemist, and they come with props that include scientific instruments, such as a telescope and a microscope. It turns out that Charlotte was onto something: Shortly after going on sale, the $19.99 minifigure set is already sold out at the Lego store.It's hard to condemn a company for producing a toy that reflects the ambitions and workplace realities of girls and women, but some are asking why it took Lego so long to produce the design. Mattel's (MAT) Barbie, love her or hate her, actually became an astronaut in the 1960s, four years before Neil Armstrong touched foot on the moon. She also ran for president in the 1990s and was a CEO in the 1980s. Lego, meanwhile, found itself in a hotbed of controversy by creating its Friends line, which critics said reinforced gender stereotypes such as focusing on girls' looks.
Instead of kits featuring professions or active characters such as fighters or rulers, the Friends line offers models of a catwalk and a shopping mall. But that doesn't jibe with the aspirations for many girls. Today, more women in the U.S. than ever before are earning degrees in so-called STEM fields, or science, technology, engineering and mathematics, Janet Bandows Koster, the executive director of the Association for Women in Science, tells CBS MoneyWatch in an email. Women's employment in STEM fields has increased since 1970, although within computer-related fields it's declined recently, according to a U.S. Census report. While women remain underrepesented in all fields, they are nearing parity in some fields, with the Census Bureau noting that 47 percent of mathematical workers are women. Koster notes that women in the STEM workplace face additional issues, frequently "forced to choose between starting a family and having a career in STEM. Couple this with the prevalence of sexual harassment as outlined in numerous recently published studies, it doesn't always paint a pretty picture."