An Introduction

Lego. It scattered the bedroom, kitchen and lounge room floors my entire childhood. It imprinted the bottom of our feet as we ran through the house. I guess payback for letting the hundreds of bricks float and scatter across the house. It provided hours upon hours of entertainment as we lay focused on the floor searching through the piles and piles of bricks for the right colour and shape. It provided an outlet for our imagination and creativity. It helped our ability to sit still and concentrate as well as our hand-eye co-ordination.

I often built and rebuilt the sets that had been given to me and my brothers over the years. But I also remember letting my imagination take me away building anything and everything that came across my mind.

After a rather long hiatus from the joys of Lego, I have recently rekindled my love affair with Lego as an adult. It started slowly, but amped up after a visit to Legoland in Germany on holiday last year. A shelf in my room is slowly filling with and becoming dedicated to Lego sets. I even created a Lego winter wonderland over Christmas. Discovering the Winter Village subtheme, Advent Calendars and pulling out the Lego box from my childhood to spelling out Merry Christmas. The remnants from the Advent Calendar still scatter my work desk surrounding me with Lego every day at work. Building Lego has become an incredibly calming experience, a needed break from an incredibly hectic life and the hustle and bustle of city life. An exercise in mindfulness.

During the intervening years of my childhood Lego experience and rekindling this love affair, I spent many years studying, working and travelling. Throughout this time, my passion towards gender equality evolved from a mere interest to my passion. Enough to pull me back into the four walls of university to expand my knowledge of gender.

This blog is an attempt to combine my passion for gender equality with my Lego love affair.

Thinking back, combining Lego and gender first occurred to me after watching a feminist frequency video on Lego during one of my classes last semester. The potential gendered nature of Lego had never occurred to me before. To me, Lego hadn’t been gendered. It was simply coloured bricks that almost seamlessly fitted together, to build anything and everything from caravans, to boats to houses to space ships. Whatever the imagination dreamt up. Whilst watching this video, my memories of Lego being gender-free were shattered. The millions of unconscious thoughts and attitudes that people hold around gender and almost everything else even permeate through to Lego. Through to children’s toys that have found to have huge educational and developmental benefits. I started to wonder, how far does this go. Where are the unconscious bias represented in Lego. How does Lego reproduce gender norms.   

But where my journey into the analysis of gender and Lego really started was when I received a Deep Sea Exploration set as a thank-you. There are three mini-figs included in this set. Not immediately, but pretty quickly what struck me was that of these three mini-figs, only one was distinctly identifiable as a female. And from the picture of the story on the box she was given a supporting role to the other two figures. This mini-fig was designated as the photographer,  to sit on the peripheral taking note and documenting what the other mini-figs did. The other two male mini-figs were given primarily roles, one with a radio organising, communicating and running the show, the other with a crowbar discovering and opening the treasure chest full of coins.

This scenario is representative of most western societies where society teach girls to fill the support role. Doesn’t encourage them to run their own lives, to take charge and lead, but rather girls are mostly encouraged through observation and society to be the support role to men. To rear children. To clean and cook. To support husband and partner ventures not pursue their own. To be vice-presidents not president. To be shop cashiers rather than shop owners. Whilst on the opposite side, teach boys to be leaders, to take charge, to be heard.

This sparked my interest, is this story of female mini-figs fulfilling the supporting role consistent across other Lego sets and themes. Is the male and female ratio consistent, where the majority of mini-figs are distinguishable as male. Does this ratio vary across years, across themes and sub-themes.

When analysing gender and Lego first occurred to me, I was simply going to count female / male mini-fig. But this has been done before. A quick google search comes back with thousands of results in less than a second. These were mostly newspaper articles questioning Lego’s decision to release its Friends theme exclusively to girls and other gender issues around Lego’s design, manufacturing and marketing decisions.

However, I did discover two different analysis relating to mini-fig gender.

Firstly, David Eaton, a AFOL since 1998 and former Lego Ambassador asked ‘What is the sex ratio of Lego minifigs?, how many of the minifigures that have been produced are male, female and other?’ here. Eaton notes a number of issues in undertaking an analysis of mini-fig gender, particularly not being able to control for the production number of each mini-fig nor using the binary of male / female to determine the gender of mini-figs perfectly. However, Eaton doesn’t provide breakdown for different themes and sub-themes nor an in depth analysis of role the male / female mini-figs are given.

Secondly, David Pickett, a social media marketer and a Lego animator wrote a four part blog ‘Historical Perspective on the LEGO Gender Gap’ here. This blog series takes a trip through the history of Lego and gender, particularly their efforts to market separately to boys and girls as well as the segregation of Lego into masculine and feminine sets from 1989. There is also discussion on the evolution of mini-figs from being considered largely gender neutral with little to no distinguishing gender features to distinctively male or female.

From reading this newspaper articles and blogs, my interest has grown. I want to look at more than just the simple anatomic distinctions of mini-figs, I want to look at the roles they’re given, whether they’re given any accessories, find trends across years, find trends across themes and sub-themes. I plan to blog about what I discover about Lego and gender in my attempt to answer my questions above. I also want to tie what I find to other studies and beliefs about child’s acquiring gender.

I acknowledge that gender, including the experience of gender is not uniform. Nor is there any benefit in striving for all people’s experience of gender to be uniform. Where is the fun in the world, if everyone is the same and has identical experiences, both positive and negative. It is experienced differently and plays out completely differently across the world in different times, places, contexts. Whilst acknowledging this difference, my main focus is simply whether the mini-fig is identifiable as a female or as a male. It does not go as far as Lego mini-fig skin colour, although of the sets I have looked at so far, all mini-figs are majority yellow skinned. With little to no acknowledgement to various skin colour.

The process of collecting all relevant data, is long, tedious and on-going. The collection of all relevant data will not happen overnight, but rather across time. The following blog posts will likely reflect the process of data collection rather than any particular affiliation or meaning with particular themes or sub-themes. Further, the more recent sets will be grouped on the binary of female and male, as with most recent sets this is possible, if not by the face given helmets and glasses, then by Lego’s description of the mini-fig, for example fireman or policeman. When I get to the older sets I will make adjustments for mini-figs that I believe are truly gender neutral with no discernible features to distinguish them as female or male. But with most things, there is an element of personal judgement.