For whatever reason, the NPR article (
http://www.npr.org/2011/12/15/143724644/ith-new-toys-lego-ho...) doesn't bother to mention the "Inventor's Workshop" set (
http://www.brickset.com/detail/?set=3933-1) which, perhaps despite the pink & violet splashes, is at least a little bit encouraging, no?
The line that "Boys are easier to sell to than girls" is a simple statement of fact: namely that the marketers at Lego back in 2005 (many of whom were probably men themselves) had more ideas about how to sell to boys. I don't think that's necessarily sexist, it was just a recognition of their limitations. There are other companies that find it easier to sell products to girls than boys.
Deliberately selling to a smaller market was how they chose to try and build a healthy business at the time, and it certainly seems to have been very lucrative for them. You might read that as narrow-mindedness, but to me it just sounds like they were trying to focus. Anyway, the whole point is that Lego now appears to have outgrown this approach! The people at Lego actually do want girls to buy their products.
The Business Week article (http://www.businessweek.com/printer/magazine/lego-is-for-gir...) mentioned in the NPR piece goes into considerably more depth about why Lego found it more difficult to create products that appealed to girls. It also talks about how Lego have actually recognised that simply splashing pink over something isn't a guaranteed way to sell to girls. They're actually trying to look beyond the superficial stuff like colours, at the psychology of play and how that differs between boys and girls, and they genuinely seem (to me at least) to be trying to be as inoffensive about the way they go about that as they can.
Some of the stuff the Lego researchers found is actually quite interesting too: that girls particularly hated the minifig, for instance (something which would have never occurred to me!), because they found it harder to project their personalities onto something so abstract.
I don't think it's fair at all to say that Lego is in any way to blame for any of this. Their products are (mostly) designed for kids of 4+, by which time it's impossible to say which gender differences have been externally "imposed" by society and which may be gender-innate. As a father of both a girl and a boy I am aware that there are differences of both sorts, but that they're so entangled that objectivity about the subject is nearly impossible for a lay-person. My wife and I both try to discourage the superficial gender stuff as much as we can, but we're not going to stop our 3-year-old daughter from owning a Barbie (I bought her the computer engineer one) or declaring that her favourite colour is pink if that's what she wants (FWIW, she's also very interested in Daddy playing StarCraft II - she likes the Zerg).
Lastly, here's a quote from the BW piece that is sadly absent from the two follow-up articles it spawned, “There is no reason to think Lego is more intrinsically appealing to boys.” I'm really not sure why the news that Lego are trying to market their products to girls is being given such a negative spin here. I look forward to buying Lego for both my kids when they're older.