Posted on by Dunc

Eww, science!

An infuriating look at gender segregation at the Discovery Channel Store. Because nothing says science like sewing machines and jewelry and fairy dust! (via)

6 Replies to “Eww, science!”

  2. I was going to write “oh, couldn’t you just cry?” but then decided that’s way too girly for my point, which is that MATH AND SCIENCE ARE NOT GENDER-BASED DISCIPLINES, DARN IT!

    Excuse me, I hear an equation calling.

  3. I hate to say it…but little girls like sparkly things. They will go out of their way to create colorful, sparkly things, even if that’s not what you’re telling them to do. They have better color sense and sense of composition at an early age (I just got a graphic demostration of that with two-year-olds at a Head Start today.) Boys, meanwhile, do not. They will, however, build things out of any available material. Unlike girls, they will not obesses over how plausible or functional what they’ve built actually is. Girls get far more obsessed about the right way to do things.

    And frankly every little girl should get a sewing machine and learn to use it. It makes life so much easier when, twenty years down the road, no pants off the rack fit and you’re faced with either paying someone to fix the hem or running home to Mom. Men get way more choice in pants at the store. (Not to mention pockets. Let’s look at the real gender inequity: lack of pockets in clothing.)

    My statistical sample here is the by-now hundreds of kids I’ve worked with since last April. Girls are different than boys. Generally in pretty girly ways. There are exceptions, but I hate to tell you this, they’re the EXCEPTIONS.

  4. Yeah, but *why* do girls like sparkly things while boys don’t? Is it a natural tendency, or because every store gives them gendered crap like this? And that’s besides the fact that jewelry design kits are being marketed as educational.

    And yeah, every little girl should probably learn to use a sewing machine, as it’s damn useful. And so should every little boy.

  6. You know what I wanted at those kinds of stores when I was five? Dinosaurs. And books about dinosaurs. And those little rubber poison tree frogs. And Ninja Turtles action figures. Oh, and Legos and blocks of course, because I liked building things out of them. And I’ve known plenty of other girls who felt the same way, so it’s not that exceptional.

    But after getting pink sparkly things since birth, is it any wonder that a lot of little girls like pink sparkly things by the time they’re two? (Iirc, pink was considered a manly color about seven hundred years ago – close to red, the color of the heart and blood and courage and all that. I wonder if there’s any literature on whether it was “common knowledge” then that boys were naturally attracted to pink?)

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