Lego To Produce Three Box Sets Featuring Female Scientists 208
vossman77 writes: 'According to the Chicago Tribune, "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." The concept received 10,000 supporters on the LEGO ideas site. Creator Ellen Kooijman writes in a blog post, "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. It seemed logical that I would suggest a small set of female mini-figures in interesting professions to make our Lego city communities more diverse." LEGO says, "The final design, pricing and availability are still being worked out, but it's on track to be released August 2014."'
A "box" set about females (Score:2, Funny)
hee hee hee
I don't know what the fuss is... (Score:5, Funny)
There have been at least four different Princess Leia Lego minifigs.
Four!
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There...are...four....minifigs!
I don't know what the fuss is... (Score:2)
Also, you can totally take LEGO figurine apart and reassemble them with a female head on a doctor body...
Madame Curie (Score:5, Funny)
Will the Madame Curie set glow in the dark?
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Will the Madame Curie set glow in the dark?
Man, I would *SO* buy one of those. In fact I'd buy one for every kid I know, as well as one for myself, especially if it used those awesome new strontium aluminate paints.
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Damn, yes! My bag of glow-in-the-dark zombies sits sadly alone.
I'm the first to scoff at "diversity" nonsense, but for once I think this is a great change. America needs more girls playing with legos, if that's any hint at all they may become engineers. We're sadly behind nations like India and China when it comes to needless cultural obstacles.
Re:Madame Curie (Score:4, Insightful)
In e.g. India, being a software developer for a multinational is the best paying most prestigious job you can have (like anywhere, the fact that you have a job means you can never really be upper class). Boy or girl, if you show any talent you'll be not just encouraged but pushed into the career by parents and schools. Much like parents here in some subcultures lean heavily on their kids to become doctors or lawyers, regardless of gender.
That's not the culture here, sadly. There's still a theme throughout our culture that girls who prefer engineering are doing "girl" wrong, which you don't see with doctors or lawyers.
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which you don't see with doctors or lawyers.
Although with doctors, girls are often pushed to be obstetricians, pediatricians etc. Something where they will be working with women and/or children. You won't see a little girl that wants to become a penis doctor encouraged. IMO this is because women want women doctors working with themselves and their children - because the men might get some kind of sexual pleasure from it (in their minds, not in reality). I think the lawyer thing is because women want women lawyers, someone that they feel can relate to
Re: Madame Curie (Score:3)
Marie SkÅodowska-Curie was Polish. Her friends and family called her Panni as opposed to Madame.
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and served the French... army
Too bad they didn't send her out as a human WMD, irradiating her surroundings like some sort of atomic-powered cruise missile [wikipedia.org]...
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They did serve a tour in Japan. "It’s the Curies! We must flee!" [tumblr.com]
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Will the Madame Curie set glow in the dark?
I didn't see a Madame Curie, but it lools like there's a Susan Calvin!
The title is contradicted by the body (Score:2)
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if you click into the link, it looks like three sets, each with three figures.
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Plastic ceiling? (Score:5, Funny)
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I heard these sets would cost 30% of the sets with male scientists.
So they're still be an average over $30 for 3oz of injection molded plastic and 10 page instruction booklet?
Re:Plastic ceiling? (Score:4, Funny)
Can't imagine it would matter much, it's not like they'd want to fuck you either way.
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You mean the SILFs?
ITYM MILF, Minifig...
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For example I had a friend who was selling Mary Kay products and she wanted to show off how well a product like this worked [amazon.com] and after the demo I made a comment that it worked and smelled just like Gojo [amazon.com]. She wanted to know if I would buy it and I asked how much and then said no because I can buy a gallon of Gojo for something like $15 (this was years ago)
not skewed (Score:2)
reflects the real world
Is it a Complete Set? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Exactly. I think this kind of thing needs to be talked about more when people wonder "why aren't more girls going into STEM majors?", as well as other problems with STEM professions. For instance, if you're really interested in mathematics, what kind of career can you look forward to if you get a degree in that? Basically, you can help the NSA spy on everyone, in violation of the 4th Amendment, or you can work as a waitress. This country and the sociopathic companies in it don't provide good careers for
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If you're going to be a software developer or engineer, it helps to have a real engineering degree instead of just a math degree. Yes, you can write code without a CS degree, but it's better to have the CS degree because that shows you were taught about computer science principles like algorithmic complexity, data structures, etc. and didn't just try to pick it up on your own. Yes, it's possible to be an engineer without a degree, but the degree shows you were taught engineering principles. Math is an ex
LEGO (Score:5, Funny)
Reducing great women to objects! Mere playthings!
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Reducing great women to objects! Mere playthings!
...in a world of studs.
How do you make a lego character female? (Score:2)
Two curved lines on the chest? Eyelashes?
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It's just bundling female looking hair attachments in the same set as the scientist clothing minifigs.
Nominally you can get the female hair units by getting princesses or a few other sets that have kind of "specifically" female characters.
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It's two parts: the head (which is just a painted cylinder), and the hair (which sticks on top of the cylinder). This head assembly can be stuck on top of any generic LEGO body.
Re:How do you make a lego character female? (Score:4, Informative)
Serious answer: painted-on eyelashes and big lips on the minifig head piece, long hair piece on top. Male & female minifig leg & torso pieces are completely interchangeable.
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And you consider yourself politically correct! Hah! I'm one step further. That's not a female scientist, it's a transsexual scientist and that's just how he ... erh, she is supposed to be!
So there!
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Re:How do you make a lego character female? (Score:5, Insightful)
I was thinking something similar: why not get a Male Scientist package and just give it another head.
Because kids are no longer expected to be creative with Legos. You are supposed to follow the instructions and build the exact toy you were sold, and then buy a new set.
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Supposed? You just plainly CANNOT build anything out of the pieces but exactly what you are sold. Back when I was a kid Lego was far, far superior to all the other plastic toys for one simple reason: You could build whatever you wanted with them. Yes, you bought a set that was supposed to be some kind of space ship or castle, but you could simply lump them together and instead build something completely different out of them. That's what made them really powerful.
Today's Lego is no longer superior to anythi
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I'm not sure I understand your first point. Lego sells interesting models, and the pieces necessary to build them. For castles, this means a lot of blocks that are rectangular, and some special ones for things like gargoyles and drawbridge winches. For spaceships, this means a lot of angles and greebly-bits that you can make look like engines and weapons and exhaust ports. There's not some sort of "trick" where Lego is forcing you to buy high-margin specialty pieces; people want those pieces because they le
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Minecraft supplements, not replaces, Lego in the minds of creative kids. Minecraft is neat, and it lets you do a lot, but there's something special about being physically engaged with what you're building. You can't take your Minecraft creation out back to play by the stream (unless you recreate it with Legos?).
And now the inverse is also true [lego.com]
Re:How do you make a lego character female? (Score:5, Insightful)
You know, I read this sentiment in every discussion of LEGO that comes up... And it's never been true. Never. My son is now 16 and has loved LEGO his whole life. He still get gets it out to play with now and then. When he gets a new set the pattern has always been the same -- open the box, build the model as shown, tear it apart, add it to the pile of parts and build his own things. Current LEGO sets allow every bit as much creativity as the sets did when I was his age over 30 years ago. If anyone has problems building their own stuff it's entirely due to their own lack of creativity, not because the toys somehow discourage it.
You wanna piss and moan about the specialized LEGO pieces? How about the transition from full-sized, articulated figures to minifigs? The addition of specialized round and clear pieces in the first space sets? The Technics series, which were more single-build models than just about anything today? I heard the same damn argument when each of those was introduced.
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You're wrong about the technics sets. The 16 long bars with holes were the first to always run out. Of course technics are bad for sculpting.
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Have you tried? (Score:2)
Serious question - have you _TRIED_.
Me and my son have. We made all sorts of things. We had 2 sets - one had a beach buggy style car (with kick ass big wheels) - the other was a motorbike (with even bigger kick-ass wheels). We made a kick-ass Trike.
Yeah - we kick ass.
The way I remember it from 30 years back is I had only a small selection of things. Blocks, roof tiles, window frames, doors and some sort of fence. Fine if you want to make a house.
Now we do have an entirely pre-fabricated chassis and several
Just stop talking (Score:2)
If you cannot build new models out of m
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Several years ago, I would have agreed with you. Now it just sounds like you aren't looking hard enough, or haven't looked recently—check out the Creator series. Almost all of my newer lego collection is from those box sets, and they are very good about providing reusable pieces.
Re:How do you make a lego character female? (Score:5, Funny)
why not get a Male Scientist package and just give it another head
Because giving head to a male scientist would spark an outrage in feminist circles?
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why not get a Male Scientist package and just give it another head.
Calm down, Doctor Frankenstein.
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Nope, the head is different too. The mouth has lips with lipstick, unlike the male version which is just a thin, black line, and the eyes have eyeliner unlike the plain round male ones.
You could stick the long hair on top of a male head, but it'd just look like a long-haired man.
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In my day it was just the hair. Also the queen in the castle had a necklace.
Also, in one kit, there was a black stone statue with a cast-in-black plastic lego head so my kit had a bit of racial diversity.
Re:How do you make a lego character female? (Score:4, Funny)
Limited? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Why is it a limited edition?
Because Lego women are highly prized, precious, and rare objects of desire?
Especially for the target group of this product, Lego geeks who may or may not have problems obtaining instances of the other sex.
Re:Limited? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Though in truth, all sets are
Dang $500 collectors edition Millenium Falcon... if only I hadn't been a poor college student at the time...
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Because no one will buy them, well execpt for collectors. I sold "action figures" in my video store, we would buy them by the case and maybe there would be 1 or 2 female figures in a case. These were almost always already purchaced by collectors in advance of us recieving our orders. Boys never buy female action fighures, and girls rarely buy action figures Xena was an execption girls bought both the male and female figures. If we ever had an extra female figure it sat on the shelf until some collector noti
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Because once the next presidential election cycle is over, people will go back to not caring.
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You actually think people do care now?
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Good point, I should have said the media.
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The media only care about market share. They'd report about my latest dump instead of a presidential speech if they thought it would give them more viewers.
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That's the game now. If you want something, you get it when you can at a price that is acceptable to you. If you can wait, you might get a better deal but you might miss out. For many things, this is acceptable as the deal will come around again. For limited edition stuff, not so much.
If your apartment isn't safe for delivery, consider getting delivered to work. If that's not an option, consider a PO Box or a friend in a good neighborhood. Or moving.
Bet they are Hot!! (Score:2)
Science Its a Girl Thing
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v... [youtube.com]
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Lego definition of "science" (Score:2)
Based on my experience with Lego sets, the set will probably feature a lego shark in a cage with some kind of death ray looking thing pointed at it.
And with a more recent Lego shark [nocookie.net], you can indeed put a frickin' laser on his head!
Sexist URL (Score:2)
Girl scientist...
Boring (Score:3)
Is this lady taking credit? (Score:3)
My vote for Amy Farrah Fowler (Score:2)
When I was a kid ... (Score:2)
When I was a kid, you simply replaced the hair to make a male figure female. It worked fine for figures with fairly generic clothes (as a scientist would have).
I don't recall sets being a big thing either. Then again, that may be because my family always treated LEGO as a creative building toy rather than models.
Re:How is this news? (Score:5, Insightful)
Social Justice Warriors want to parade about the most trivial crap I tell you.
We'll stop when it's possible to release a female scientist Lego set without a bunch of benighted troglodytes whinging about it on Slashdot.
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Social Justice Warriors
I would watch that cartoon if it were done properly. Unfortunately, I bet the villains will be two dimensional with unrealistically evil intentions, like the polluters in Captain Planet.
"Social Justice Warriors, GO!"
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Yeah, man. And why do all those scientists keep working on pointless things that aren't a cure for cancer?
Re:Wow. (Score:4, Insightful)
No? I'd much rather give my young niece a lego set that has some female characters in it she can relate to. I can't in good conscience giver her one of those disgusting frilly pink princes lego sets, and that pretty much means all the figures are male. Same goes for most other toys.
Of course an even better solution would be just throwing in some extra female heads/hair into *all* the kits and let kids assign genders as they see fit. So it costs an extra $0.05 per kit, big deal.
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This... The LEGO Group has been failing miserably at trying to attract girls (well, I guess those friends sets are selling, probably purchased by dads who wish their daughters were into LEGO). The fact is, they get berated for for selling "girl" sets with pink and purple bricks, but instead of adding a decent mix of female minifigures into ordinary sets, they come up with things like "Friends," where we're right back to the pink and purple and "girl" jobs, like Vet and fluff reporter for TV (yes, she's not
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But 'murica!
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Given that we're talking about Legos, I assume you meant "misogynistic, homophobic yellow guy brigade"?
They already made a Lego of the GGP [toyark.com].
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I came from the days before they made female looking faces with lipstick and long eyelashes. The basic emoticon-like smiley face could be male or female. The major identifier of gender was the hair. If you wanted a female police officer, take a male one and swap out the hair.
Or maybe you don't. Leave the hat on, and just SAY that is a female officer. What? Can't women wear hats? Gender was left to the kids' imaginations. And isn't fostering imagination what Lego's about?
The way I see it, this move kills creativity and entrenches the preconceptions of how a woman "should" look like more than it would encourage girls to be interested in science.
Agreed. The latest trend for "feminizing" minifigs has been to draw curvy figures in paint on the female bodies. It gives the image of a woman with a skinny body drawn on her T-shirt.
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My wife is an engineer and I trained as a cognitive scientist. When my daughter was born we both fully expected her to have no interest in 'girly' things, especially as the house was already full of interesting 'boy' stuff from her brother. My wife has no make-up, a couple of dresses for formal occasions, no shoes with heels... hopefully you get the picture.
At every step she has chosen the stereotypical girl toys, the colours pink and purple, fairy stuff, pretty dresses and so on. She nagged us for make-up
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I'm rather glad it turned out that way because she is popular at school and I know she won't suffer some of the cruelty my wife did as a child growing up slightly different to the other girls in her class.
I hope that's true, but popular kids can be just as cruel to each other.
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I used to carry a pink, flowery screw driver around for just that reason.
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Unfortunately, this is the only way to reconcile the existence of both sexes with political correctness. This is why it's so toxic to both.
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I actually remember way back when, when Lego had their own ideas instead of licensing every bestselling movie franchise they can get their hands on.
Lego pirates that weren't Pirates of the Caribbean branded! Lego space stuff that wasn't Star Wars branded! What madness!
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And I remember when The LEGO Group was about to go bankrupt... you know, before they started licensing Star Wars?
For the record, they've released a number of space themes, city themes, castle themes while doing these licenses... and for the other whiners out there, you always still buy tubs of just bricks.
You people will complain about anything.... you sound like your parents and grandparents now, I hope you realize that! "When I was a kid...!!!!"
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It's the same problem with almost every movie that gets made these days. They're all relicensings, reimaginings, or sequels.
I don't think I'm being curmudgeonly. Back a decade or two ago, they actually produced original ideas. This is verifiable fact.
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They still do! That's the problem... you probably just don't know they're out there because LEGO is largely off your radar these days.
Examples:
Forest Animals (new this year) [brickset.com]
Bike Shop and Cafe (new this year) [brickset.com]
Twin Rotor Helicopter [brickset.com]
Palace Cinema [brickset.com]
Horizon Express [brickset.com]
The Emerald Night (the most beautiful train set LEGO has ever made) [brickset.com]
Green Grocer [brickset.com]
Haunted House [brickset.com]
None of these are licensed, and they are all awesome LEGO sets. Yes, it'd different from when we were kids, but it's certainly not worse. On top
Licensed bricks are still bricks (Score:2)
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It's true but, nevertheless, SW has been one of the best selling lines since it's introduction and, personally, while I don't like every license, I'm glad they licensed sets - I think a lot of them are absolutely awesome.
In fact, one of my favorites was this fairly simple steam engine from The Lone Ranger: Constituion. [brickset.com], I put the figures away, I just liked the train. I never even saw the movie.
Re:Mmmm (Score:4, Informative)
I can look at that two ways... I can watch TV and it requires no thought. Or I can choose specific interesting things on politics, nature, or other sciences, and actually think about it.
So LEGO sets come with instructions, and require little thought to put the sets together the way they've laid it out in the book. That doesn't differ from how it used to be. Oh, you used to be able to just buy buckets of bricks, though! Which, of course, you can still do. The imagination happened when you took those bricks, and you took those sets apart, and made what you wanted instead of what you were told you could make.
That's the same as it is today. Why don't you visit the ideas site (link in TFS) and see where people's imaginations take them. They're not all works of art by any stretch, but some of the sets offered there are phenomenal. Also take a look at ReBrickable [slashdot.org] for other models people have created.
It's true they make some simpler sets aimed at younger kids, things with big molded pieces that "real" LEGO enthusiasts hate, but that's not representative of all that's available.
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As an adult LEGO enthusiast, I actually like a lot of the friends sets... except, as the poster you're responding to pointed out, it's all pink and purple and the minidolls (as opposed to the minifigs) are terrible, IMO. At the same time, that same post made some wildly inaccurate claims... it was never the case that, given the entire "library" of sets released in any year, that it was 99% male, even given that licensed sets reflect the movies (mostly males).
Still, for those of us that make town layouts, w
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Oxford, a Korean Lego clone, actually had the foresight to make sure their girls sets used the same bodies. Even their hello kitty line uses large heads attached to regular bodies.
Despite Oxford bricks being lego compatible (and as good quality wise) sadly their minifigs aren't totally the same. The bodies are slightly different. You can swap hands and heads but that's it. They are the same size though, so outside of some slightly off looking legs they can mingle
They also didn't completely overdo it in the