You Can Give a Boy a Doll, but You Can't Make Him Play With It

I honestly appreciate the efforts of Swedish people to promote equality, but they're a little misguided. Boys and girls just are different, and it's not only a matter of culture; in fact, I've always thought that cultural differences between men and women arose almost exclusively from biological differences that result in different behaviours (of course, each culture evolves those role differences in varied ways). Sociology sure has better insight to that than me.

The thing is, there are a lot of gender-neutral toys and games. Just not every one is. It's OK to me: the point of equality is not to remove differences, but to avoid mistreat and discrimination because of them.

This article misses two absolutely critical points to the gender neutral debate.

1. Removing (or reducing) fixed gender stereotypes allows individuals to express themselves withut fear that they are different, or that some how their behavior is wrong. Weather girls prefer Barbies and boys prefer GI Joes is not relevant here. There are a significant number of kids who don't conform to gender stereotypes, and this is expressed through out someones life. The harder we make it for them as a kid to express preferences the more repressed they will be. The fact that some (but not all) of us break through this (women in technology...) is evidence of this problem.

2. That gender stereotypes are detrimental to the world, and the less we subconsciously enforce them, the easier it is for us to create a world where gender is not a factor in equality any more. We attach huge value to the gendered attribute of things, and we do it subconsciously because of the immense amount of gender biased media we have been exposed to over the years. The shock that (some) people express when they hear that a man they have met is a nurse, or that the woman they have just met is a truck driver causes fear of self identification.

You don't have to make a boy play with a doll, but you absolutely should make dolls available to him, without biasing the media he sees so that he thinks only girls play with dolls. Only then can he make a decision on what toy to play with without the influence of millennia of patriarchy.

I'd like to think that most HN readers are enlightened and are intellectually sensitive enough to not see gender biases by default, or at least work hard to over come them. And that this is a symtom of the uneducated, but I know that is not that case with everyone. I have seen it a thousand times in technology, and the only way we can ever change this is by starting young and eradicating gender bias where ever we see it.

Would be awesome if the article actually represents Sweden in any way. It doesn't. It takes a few fringe institutions and proposals and pass them as some kind of Swedish norm. They are not. It is true that gender equality is hotly debated and sought after here, but this article does not reflect reality.

The party Gudrun Schyman represents had 0.40% of the vote 2010; not passing the 4% bar for a mandate in the parliament. Tanja Bergkvist is a vocal anti-feminist, and not just "a mother".

The opinion piece by Christina Hoff Sommers, a well known critic of contemporary feminism, has little basis in fact and has almost nothing to do with hacking. Boys will be boys is a terrible way to argue about this important issue. I am disappointed to see it here.

I think the Lego Girl products are unfairly maligned. They're not Technics or MindStorms, but from what I can tell they have similar amounts of building as similar Lego sets for that age group.

And my 7 year old daughter, who loves pink but also has a punch bag, loves them.