girls will be girls

You've probably seen it, the commercial for GoldieBlox, a toy company that "believes that femininity is strong and girls will build the future - literally."  Their YouTube ad has been showing up on the Facebook pages of many of my female friends who I would describe as strong feminists. 

My initial reaction to the concept was "hey great idea", then I watched the video and began to feel uncomfortable. I sat with this feeling for a few weeks, wondering why something that purports to encourage young girls to take up careers in engineering (a field that I've been in for almost 15 years) would be something I couldn't comfortably embrace.  I mean how could it be bad?  The founder of the company is a female Stanford educated engineer for god-sakes.

Slowly it came to me.... why are we pushing girls to play games and develop skills traditionally seen as belonging to boys by making the tools of that game more "feminine"?  Why are we pushing them into those fields at all?

Disclaimer: I'm not saying parents should limit toys and activities to those traditionally thought of as female or things that are pink, any more than I'm saying that women shouldn't be engineers or foresters or chose to wear pink.

This speaks to a bigger issue that I first became aware of after reading some of Ursula Franklin's essays on feminism in male dominated fields.  She tells a story of a sandbox that resonated with me.  To summarize, she says that in the beginning, the boys had their own sandbox where they built things, and girls were only allowed to stand outside the sandbox and watch.  As time went on, the boys invited the girls into the sandbox but the girls were told they were only allowed to use the boys' tools, and to build only what the boys were building.

Over time, the girls began to think that they wanted to use their own toys and build different things in the sandbox but the boys wouldn't let them.  So the girls left to play in their own sandbox and built their own things with their own tools.  The moral of the story obviously is that things can be approached from different angles and each unique result has the potential to be great.

The story resonated with me at that specific time in my career because I was struggling with trying to do things the way the men in my field did things.  To lead in the image of the men who were my highly respected mentors.  Even though it felt wrong and awkward to me I persevered, thinking that that was the way a successful person in the field of engineering operated.  After all, I had spent the majority of my adult life working in male dominated fields (first fighting forest fires and working in the bush, then in engineering) and playing traditionally male dominated sports (mountain biking, rugby, skiing, surfing).  I must be one_of_the_boys therefore what works for them should work for me...... right?  

One of my biggest pet peeves is the labeling of skills as "hard" or "soft".  To me this is the politically correct way of labeling masculine and feminine skills.  It took me many years to embrace the fact that some of my strongest skills are labelled as soft/feminine - the ability to communicate effectively by changing the delivery of the message to ensure that it arrives at that person's ears in a way that they can understand without feeling defensive, being a "fixer" by bringing off-track projects to successful completion, feeling empathy for my clients' needs, being compassionate when a coworker's personal life clashes with their career goals, etc.  I railed against these labels for years, thinking that it made me less valuable in the world of "hard" technical skills. Now that I've embraced these soft skills I'm a much more comfortable and effective, both professionally and personally.

I saw this reverse-role pressure when Natasha was in grade 11 and she decided to focus on the social sciences and humanities instead of the "hard" sciences and math pathway.  There was surprise, and often barely hidden distain for the fact that she's a girl who's really good at math and science, and yet she's turning her back on it.  It feels as if people think she's somehow a traitor to feminism by not following through in these male dominated fields. She once said to me that she'ss really good at math and science, but is passionate about the social sciences and humanities - law, global issues, history.  As she's stretching her arms to embrace adulthood I see her eyes looking around at the injustices/imbalances in the world and choosing university programs based on international relations, not engineering, not pure scientific research, not math.

Wouldn't it be more appropriate to expose our children, both male and female, to a variety of toys and skills throughout their childhoods and raise them to be confident enough to follow whatever they're passionate about?

I'm proud that I've raised a daughter to believe that whatever career paths she decides to follow, she should embrace all of her strengths - analytical reasoning, conflict resolution, aggressiveness, speaking and listening from the heart, empathy, compassion - and know that none of them is more valuable because it's labelled male or female, hard or soft.

And just in case anyone is wondering, yes I bought her Barbies and yes she loved dresses.  And no, I won't be buying the GoldieBlox toys for Andy's nine year old daughter as a way to encourage her to be more like the boys.