New girls-and-engineering video goes viral

A company that makes toys and interactive books designed to encourage girls to become engineers has a new video out that’s had more than a million YouTube hits in a couple of days.

The two-minute music video tells the story of three girls who are bored by typical commercials pitching pink girlie toys, and create a contraption modelled after the late U.S. cartoonist Rube Goldberg’s drawn inventions.

Their elaborate set of mechanisms, set up to trigger a series of motions in a colourful chain reaction, are set to a version of the Beastie Boys’ hit, Girls: “It’s time to change/ “We deserve to see a range/ Because all our toys look just the same/ And we would like to use our brains/ We are all more than princess maids ... ”

The final motion turns the channel on the girlie commercial to the GoldieBlox.com’s heroine, Goldie, who has blond curly hair and a love of engineering.

GoldieBlox is the brainchild of U.S. engineer Debbie Sterling, who set out to close the gender gap in science, technology, engineering and math, after she spent six months in 2008 volunteering at a non-profit in India.

The stories in the interactive books encourage girls to build and develop spatial skills.

“It’s fabulous,” said Anja Lanz, an “engineer in training” who earned a degree at the University of B.C. in engineering physics and is a year away from applying for status as a professional engineer.

“Why did it take so long to make something like this?” said Lanz, president of the Vancouver chapter of Women in Engineering.

Lanz and her brother, also an engineer, always played with the same toys growing up in Germany — trucks and equipment for shovelling and building sandcastles, thanks to her parents’ insistence they wouldn’t differentiate how they played.

“There was always lots of Lego in the house and technical books and magazines,” she said.

“It never occurred to me that I should be playing with the pink stuff they marketed to girls.”

After serving as an apprentice in a machine shop, where she was the only woman, and learning technical drafting, she came to Canada as a nanny under the foreign domestic worker program before enrolling in engineering.

Lanz aspires to senior management and hopes to serve as a role model for other women to join engineering and thinks GoldieBlox will help.

She said she liked that in the video “everything was pink and red and heart-shaped” to attract girls, but doesn’t think one video will alone or immediately inflate the number of female students entering into engineering beyond its current 20 per cent.

“It’s about the (increasing) exposure to (women in non-traditional roles),” she said.

“The more exposure we have, the more it becomes the norm. Kids mimic what adults think.”