• by Ellie Edwards-Scott , March 10, 2014

It’s not every day that pink, plastic princess castles hit the headlines and are the star attractions in a blockbuster advert, aired in one of the most sought-after TV ad spots in the world, but 2014 so far has pushed the envelope when it comes to surprises around children’s toys. In the past year, the retail and advertising industries seem to have decided to take a long, hard look at the way they targets one of the most sensitive and impressionable groups of people – young girls – with newsworthy and, potentially, politically charged results.

It’s well-documented that society persists in segregating children into two, very separate camps: everything pink, sparkly and non-educational for girls, and the invariably action-packed for boys. I see the disastrous split between kitchen-related toys for girls and Lego kits for boys whenever I go to shop for my two children – one girl and one boy – and to me, it speaks volumes about how the modern world perceives our young people of the future, their roles within the world and, crucially, their future worth to industry. The outrage we feel about how girls and boys are treated differently in childhood, according to their perceived strengths and weaknesses, is hardly new.

Early feminist writer Mary Wollestonecraft’s inspirational work A Vindication on the Rights of Women was published in 1792 and features some of the most hauntingly recognisable themes from today’s power struggles within female politics. Her lament that women are “taught from infancy that beauty is woman's sceptre”, or their power, is so very true of today’s world where it’s thought to be acceptable to launch a game called Plastic Surgery for Barbies aimed at young girls where they can act as a surgeon to enhance, slim down, and beautify the cartoon people.

Wollestonecraft’s main argument women are not naturally inferior to men, but appear to be only because they lack education, is something that perhaps still perpetuates today but if not in the lack of education, it’s the type of learning and focus that we now should be calling into question. A cohort of companies today are working to subvert the traditional roles of children, using various approaches within advertising, targeting and teaching practices to inspire young girls in particular from an early age to get interested in the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics – areas that are still sorely lacking a strong female presence.

Two mini films that will go into my hall of fame of favourite, groundbreaking adverts were both created by Goldieblox who specialise in “toys for future innovators”, including construction and engineering kits for little girls. The California-based company, just named as Fast Company’s 40^th Most Innovative Company, won a public vote to take a TV advertising slot at this year’s Super Bowl worth a whopping $4m US. Goldieblox chose to air an ad in which young girls collected up all of their princess castles, kitchen sets and other pink-coloured girlie toys, and pile them up to make them into a space rocket.

Their previous effort, which featured the engineering genius of The Rude Goldberg Princess Machine and the soundtrack of “Girls” by the Beastie Boys (a band notorious for being against the licensing of their music for advertising purposes), was a stroke of genius. An engineering masterpiece, the ad served to inspire anyone who watched it by showing young girls inventing their own elaborate contraption. With any luck, the TV spot will have sparked ideas among the millions of little girls and mothers it was aimed at.

Having worked at the cross-section of the technology and media industries for nearly two decades, I have been watching the media and marketing industries with a keen eye to see how the female narrative has progressed in recent years. The clearly ineffective “pink it and shrink it” approach to female-targeted product development and advertising seems to have been replaced by data-driven approaches to finding out what women actually respond to within advertising. Dynamic creative advertising – where online ads change their creative content, dependent on the user that’s accessing the website – and real-time data feedback methods mean that technology is pushing forward this discussion of how to be relevant to, and interest, women in the 21^st century.

This, in addition to a truly innovative approach to changing the female narrative from an early age, and how we perceive the worth and abilities of our young girls, makes me so very hopeful for the next generation of women. With a bit of luck and a shift in perceptions their focus will be on diving into whatever challenge awaits them – be it building bridges, nursing, firefighting or becoming the CEO of a Fortune 500 company. Whatever it may be, we should be following the example of entrepreneurs who want equality by inspiring girls from a young age to take on any challenge they want to, alongside men.