Lego Responds To Gender Questions By Announcing New Sets

When Lego released the new Lego Friends line, they started selling like crazy to girls, of course, but many adults (and even some of those girls) wondered why the colors were mostly pink and purple. When you look at the sets, they are very clearly for girls, and most boys would just say “ew” to them:

While sets like this one may have attracted some young girls, many already loved Lego. And yes, Lego was just trying to hit a new target audience they probably felt they were missing out on. But many were a bit upset that they seemed so incredibly girly. Then again, some people may not have even noticed this.

But then, with one of the Minifigures Mystery Pack series, they released a female scientist, and this brought them rave reviews. This got Lego thinking that maybe, just maybe, they were going about this all wrong.

And so, this past week Lego announced they were coming out with a new series of sets called Research Institute. The date is set for August 2014, and will include three sets that include a female minifigures working in the sciences.

It’s still unclear if this is what the final product will look like, but here’s a general idea of the set:

“The motto of these scientists is clear: explore the world and beyond!” said Swedish creator of the set Ellen Kooijman, who is herself a scientist. “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,” she stated. “It seemed logical that I would suggest a small set of female minifigures in interesting professions to make our LEGO city communities more diverse.”

The set comes from Lego Ideas, formerly Lego CUUSOO, which brought us such great sets as the Back to the Future set and the Ghostbusters set, which just came out a week ago.

Personally, I am super-excited for these sets and will be buying them as soon as they come out.