Blue For A Boy, And Pink For A Girl?

[anotheoldgit]

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/genderneutral-toys-why-dressing-your-daughter-in-pink-damages-the-future-of-our-economy-9111397.html

So it would seem that if we want more women engineers, we need to do something about this gender segregation in toy shops.

/// Shadow minister Ms Onwurah has a personal interest in the issue. She worked as a professional engineer in three continents over two decades, yet despite this she only felt she was really experiencing gender segregation when she walked into a toy shop. ///

/// She told MPs there had been no increase in women undertaking engineering degrees compared with 30 years ago while the UK had the lowest proportion of female professional engineers in Europe at 6 per
cent. ///

[jno]

funnily enough, boys wore pink only a century ago. And here's a Mail story saying pink and blue really only came in after the war, which suprised me

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2337814/The-death-gender-neutral-clothing-New-book-details-history-blue-pink-gender-synonymous.html

Generally, anything that makes the most of the female half of the workforce is fine by me - good for them, good for the country.

[boxtops]

This has come up before, about not giving girls dolls and making boys play trains (when many like to have a doll or a soft toy). Nothing to stop girly girls becoming car mechanics or civil engineers.

[joggerjayne]

How utterly ridiculous.

And inventing a "serious sounding" meaningless phrase like "gender segregation" does not make it any less ridiculous.

[vulcan42]

I don't know many young girls but the few I do want to be dressed in pink, their parents certainly didn't force it on them.

[grasscarp]

I played with dolls as a child and did all usually girly stuff and was dressed in liberty bodice etc. My career is in a almost totally male world and at work today there are probably 60+ blokes on this floor today and 3 women.

[pixie373]

I didn't like dolls, but work in a 90% female environment. Why do we want to turn women into men, anyway?

[Old_Geezer]

Colours used to be assigned the other gender around, so I've read. One didn't realise a shade made so much difference. Or does it ?

[FredPuli43]

It's more subtle than that. Women engineers have always been something of a rarity but that's more to do with the culture in the workplace; it seems an all male environment, not welcoming to women. There was a time when the Bar was the same; if women practised it was understood that they would only do divorce and other family law, and not crime or anything else much, and the atmosphere in the criminal courts was decidedly blokey. Some chambers even had a quota, so, if a woman applied she'd be rejected because the chambers 'had enough women' meaning about three out of twenty. I think medicine had that tendency years ago.

While able girls see engineering as 'not for them' they will go off to apply their science and maths skills in some other profession.