LEGO has started to include more female minifigures in their sets over recent years, but there aren’t nearly enough. I’m not talking about the weird-shaped and overly pink LEGO Friends packages, I mean the original blocky designs. Alatariel took note and designed a few female scientist minifigs and shared them on LEGO Ideas (formerly LEGO Cuusoo). The response to her designs were overwhelmingly positive.
If you’re not familiar with LEGO Ideas, it’s basically a platform LEGO creators can use to submit completed builds and sort of propose them to LEGO. Once projects gain 10,000 votes from supporters, the LEGO review board examines them and considers turning them into official sets. Alatariel’s plans featuring miniature labs with an astronomer, a paleontologist, and a chemist made the cut. As you can see from the above picture, the sets are no-nonsense but effectively show women working in scientific fields.
LEGO just performed a regular review of projects submitted through Ideas, and they’ve decided to move ahead with putting the female scientist minifigs on shelves. It’s an exciting move, and the minifigs even beat out Sherlock and Adventure Time sets. They’ll be released under the project title “Research Institute” and will be available in stores as early as August 2014. You can watch the official announcement:
As the video notes, LEGO designers are still determining the final look for the minifigs. My hope is that they stay close to the looks Alatariel developed. I can’t wait to see how many kids (and adults!) purchase these minifigs. I know I’ll be pre-ordering them as soon as I can.
What do you think about this new LEGO Set? Let us know in the comments.
HT: Geekosystem
i think it is a good set.
I hope that it is not the last set in this style and that in some years no one will discuss about “female scientists”
WANT!!!!!
Would like to see at LEAST one woman of color.
All Lego (except those based on movie characters) are yellow. They have no race.
Seriously, the fact that this is news shows the dearth of respect women have in pop culture. Still, an excellent move forward. Though, I can’t help but think that if the chemist had blond hair and wore a Victorian era costume, she’d be the spitting image of Agatha Heterodyne, Girl Genius. 🙂
Very awesome, im definately buying a set, but what about male scientists? Surely to normalise women in science there should be both men and women scientists?
great idea — but how about they just call it “Scientists” instead of “Female Scientists”? You know, as if it were normal? (Because, guess what — it IS normal!!)
(reread more closely… “Research Institute” works for me!)
Given the low representation of women in the higher levels in STEM fields, this move is great. I hope it engenders both girls to be more interested in this fantastic toy set, and boys to be more accepting of the idea that science and technology are places for both men and women.
Are you claiming that boys aren’t already accepting? I think most boys are more than accepting; the problems are elsewhere.
I wil order at least 10 sets, for grandchildren, gifts and myself
SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY!
OMG! I have been WAITING FOR THIS! All of them! I need all of them! I have two girls dying to do LEGO but we are all sick of pink! Thank you!!!
….they can use normal legos….is there some sort of vampire effect where they can’t use something that isn’t gender specific? I “did” lego as a child when they just came in a big, awesome bucket.