This Is Your Brain "On Princess"
GoldieBlox, a toy company whose mission is to “get girls building,” has produced a witty video,“This is Your Brain on Engineering.”
In this video, we see that the traditional toys young girls are given are damaging their self-confidence in the long run. The video illustrates a brain on “princess,” loaded with makeup and fake hair rolling down a conveyor belt.
Simultaneously, statistics flash: “At age 7, girls begin to lose confidence in math and science” and “at the age of 13 over half of all girls are unhappy with their bodies.” This alarming data is presumably related to the superficial “princess” ideals girls are taught to strive for.
By contrast, a brain on “engineering” is more stimulated in the short term and profitable in the long term; as stats show, “Engineering jobs are growing faster than all other jobs in the U.S.” Despite the mental and financial benefits of engineering jobs, “only 13% of engineers are women.”
As Easter rolls around, the new GoldieBlox video asks you to question why one would buy Legos for a boy, inspiring innovation and enhancing spatial reasoning, and an immobile doll for a girl, promoting an unrealistic body image.