LEGO Celebrates Women in Science With Upcoming Set
On the one hand, and I need to note this up front, this announcement means you won’t be getting the LEGO Legend of Zelda set, or the Sherlock, Back to the Future, and Macross sets that were submitted as ideas for the Winter 2014 LEGO Ideas competition.
But although previous winners in the contest have been based on licensed properties, the fact that LEGO would have had to make licensing deals lowered your likelihood of getting those anyway. And isn’t inspiring future female scientists more important than getting a tiny little LEGO Link that can you can build tiny little LEGO dungeons for?
Don’t answer that, hardcore Zelda fans. Some dark places are better left unexplored.
Instead of picking any of the licensed sets, or a nice-looking Japanese history set, LEGO went backed and pulled a still under consideration entry from a previous contest, the “Female Minifigure Set” concept by Ellen Kooijman.
Kooijman, a geochemist, was driven by her desire to see more relate-able female LEGO figures, as she wrote on her blog.
“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. It seemed logical that I would suggest a small set of female minifigures in interesting professions to make our LEGO city communities more diverse,” she wrote.
Concept art for this set shows a LEGO female astronomer, paleontologist, and chemist. And thankfully they’re not drowned in ridiculous amounts of pink, like computer engineer and astronaut Barbie.
The final set will be titled “Research Institute” an it’ll be on store shelves August 2014. The original concept also included female judges and construction workers and other professions, but it appears LEGO is only going forward with the science set.
[Source: LEGO Ideas]