Who doesn’t love playing with LEGO sets?
The LEGO company has a fabulous system for launching new “niche” sets. They allow ordinary people to submit ideas, and when an idea has 10,000 supporters, it goes through their official process to become available for sale. This is how my favorite set, the Women of NASA set, came to market. Pics:
I absolutely adore this set. Guess what? A new one has been proposed honoring women who have made great contributions to computer science. (Links go to bio threads of these ladies on the Great Women of Mathematics twitter account.)
The proposed set would include Admiral Grace Hopper (who is the reason we call it ‘debugging’ among many other contributions), Dr. Gladys West (who earned a PhD at age 87 after doing much of the math that led to our having GPS) and Annie Easley (whose work gets you around town, if you drive a hybrid car). The set is also of a similar size as the Women of NASA set and would be ideal to display alongside it.
This set would do good in the world in several ways, but the one I like best is this: it is hard, even for someone like me who is well aware of the dangers that a victimhood mindset represents, to resist that mindset. The culture rewards it and reinforces it constantly. Having another STEM-themed LEGO set available to inspire girls and women with STEM interests is not just a fun project—it’s a constant reminder than women can and do overcome obstacles, and there are many fewer obstacles than there used to be.
Because I grew up fairly starved for high-achieving female role models (the most powerful and educated woman I knew as a child was the pastor’s wife) these things mean a great deal to me. There is a way to bring needed representation to people whose achievements have historically gone overlooked without sinking into full-blown identity politics and competing in the oppression olympics.
It’s tricky, but it’s both doable and important, and supporting a project like this is one way, in my view, to take action on the right side of that balancing act.
You can go here to support the project just by registering on their website (no money is required or anything like that), and if you like LEGO in general there’s no downside to it, because you can look through the many wonderful ideas that LEGO fans have proposed and vote to support the ones you’d like to see come to market.
For those of you on Twitter, follow the proposed set’s official account here.