Stay up to date with notifications from The Independent

Notifications can be managed in browser preferences.

Lego magazine branded sexist for saying girls would ‘stick out’ among scientists

'The sexist characterisation in this is horrible in 2019'

Thursday 19 December 2019 12:12 GMT

(Lego

Lego has been criticised as sexist for featuring a comic strip that said girls would “stick out like sore thumbs” among a group of scientists.

The cartoon featured in the latest issue, number 66, of the Lego Friends magazine, which is targeted at girls aged between seven and 11.

The scene shows two characters having a conversation about going to a meeting.

“I think we should secretly go to the meeting too, just in case Carter tries something sneak,” one says.

The other character responds: “You’re right, but we won’t be able to just walk right in. A group of girls among researchers – we’ll stick out like sore thumbs.”

The actors fighting against sexism in Hollywood

Show all 12

1/12The actors fighting against sexism in Hollywood

The actors fighting against sexism in Hollywood

Anne Hathaway

The 32-year-old actress said she has already experiences job rejections because of her age. “Now I'm in my early thirties and I'm like, 'Why did that 24-year-old get that part? I was that 24-year-old once. I can't be upset about it, it's the way things are,” she told Glamour.

EPA

The actors fighting against sexism in Hollywood

Helen Mirren

On news that Maggie Gyllenhaal had been turned down for being ‘too old’, aged 37, to play a 55-year-old man’s partner: “It’s f***ing outrageous. It’s ridiculous. Honestly, it’s so annoying. And ’twas ever thus. We all watched James Bond as he got more and more geriatric, and his girlfriends got younger and younger. It’s so annoying.”

Getty

The actors fighting against sexism in Hollywood

Maggie Gyllenhaal

Gyllenhaal revealed she was told by a Hollywood producer that she was too old, aged 37, to play the love interest of a 55-year-old man. “It was astonishing to me. It made me feel bad, and then it made feel angry, and then it made me laugh,” she said at the time.

Getty Images

The actors fighting against sexism in Hollywood

Meryl Streep

Meryl Streep has helped fund an all-female screenwriters group called The Writer’s Lab to encourage more women to pen Hollywood scripts. She previously told Vogue in 2011: “Once women pass childbearing age they could only be seen as grotesque on some level.”

Getty

The actors fighting against sexism in Hollywood

Emma Thompson

The actress said she thought Hollywood is “still completely s***” when it comes to treating women equally to men. ““When I was younger, I really did think we were on our way to a better world. And when I look at it now, it is in a worse state than I have known it, particularly for women, and I find that very disturbing and sad.”

EPA

The actors fighting against sexism in Hollywood

Elizabeth Banks

Banks said she was driven from acting to directing due to the lack of roles for older women in Hollywood. “"[Industry sexism] drove me to direct for sure. I definitely was feeling that I was unfulfilled and a little bit bored by the things that were coming across my desk. I mean look at Gwyneth Paltrow who has her Oscar [for Shakespeare in Love] and played fifth banana to Iron Man,” she told Deadline.

PA

The actors fighting against sexism in Hollywood

Viola Davis

“I had never seen a 49-year-old, dark-skinned woman who is not a size 2 be a sexualised role in TV or film. I'm a sexual woman, but nothing in my career has ever identified me as a sexualised woman. I was the prototype of the ‘mommified’ role,” she told The Hollywood Reporter.

Getty

The actors fighting against sexism in Hollywood

Liv Tyler

The Lord of the Rings actress said she only get cast in roles where she is treated as a “second class citizen” at the age of 38. “When you’re in your teens or twenties, there is an abundance of ingenue parts which are exciting to play. But at [my age], you’re usually the wife or the girlfriend - a sort of second-class citizen. There are more interesting roles for women when they get a bit older,” she told More magazine.

Getty Images

The actors fighting against sexism in Hollywood

Cate Blanchett

The actress famously called out sexism on the red carpet at the 2014 Screen Actors Guild Awards. When a camera operator scanned her up and down, she said: “Do you do this to the guys?” In her Oscar acceptance speech for Blue Jasmine, she reminded the film industry that movies with leading women can still be successful. “And thank you to... those of us in the industry who are still foolishly clinging to the idea that female films, with women at the centre, are niche experiences. They are not -- audiences want to see them and, in fact, they earn money. The world is round, people.”

Gareth Cattermole/Getty

The actors fighting against sexism in Hollywood

Ellen Page

Asked if she had ever encountered sexism in Hollywood, Page told The Guardian: ‘Oh my God, yeah! It's constant! It's how you're treated, it's how you're looked at, how you're expected to look in a photoshoot, it's how you're expected to shut up and not have an opinion, it's how you... If you're a girl and you don't fit the very specific vision of what a girl should be, which is always from a man's perspective, then you're a little bit at a loss.”

Getty Images

The actors fighting against sexism in Hollywood

Zoe Saldana

The actress says she refuses roles where she has to play the generic girlfriend, wife or sexy bombshell. "It's very hard being a woman in a man's world, and I recognised it was a man's world even when I was a kid. It's an inequality and injustice that drove me crazy, and which I always spoke out against — and I've always been outspoken,” she told Manhattan magazine.

Getty

The actors fighting against sexism in Hollywood

Charlize Theron

The actress spoke to ELLE about negotiating equal pay for the Snow White and the Huntsman sequel: "This is a good time for us to bring this to a place of fairness, and girls need to know that being a feminist is a good thing. It doesn't mean that you hate men. It means equal rights. If you're doing the same job, you should be compensated and treated in the same way."

Andreas Rentz/Getty Images

The group of girls eventually decided to dress up as bakers and give out muffins so that “nobody will suspect a thing”.

The comic strip has since come under fire from social media users, with many taking issue with the fact that the group of girls were shown to dismiss any involvement in the science industry and chose to do baking instead.

(Lego)

A number of people on Twitter called the scene “sexist” and said that Lego should be “ashamed”.

Tweeting at Lego and the organisation Let Toys Be Toys, which campaigns against gender stereotypes in the toy industry, one person wrote: “Both my children love Lego, and this makes me want to run in the opposite direction.

“Sort out your magazines, this is an embarrassment to your brand.”

Another agreed, adding: “Would you please stop telling my daughter and other girls that they can’t become scientists, that research is boring, and that they’d better bake and cook? It’s 2019, not 1959. Remove this #sexist crap”.

A third person commented: “This looks like someone has written it to try and wind people up. Really surprising from Lego. More like a parody of old, tired, sexist clichés.”

A spokesperson for Lego has since apologised and admitted that the comic strip “missed the mark”.

“We believe that LEGO play is for everyone and our magazines should reflect that,” the spokesperson said.

“With this story we were trying to show that girls have lots of different interests and passions including science but we appreciate that some of the language we used missed the mark this time and we apologise.

“We will certainly learn from this and do better in future.”

Earlier this year, a four-year-old girl wrote to Lego asking for better female representation in its magazine after she discovered that of the 29 characters who spoke in the magazine, only one was female.

“To Lego Magazine people, can you put some more girls in your magazine please?” she wrote.

Following the complaint, the toy company revealed that it would be inviting the young girl to help edit an upcoming issue of the magazine.

“Providing her parents allow her to do this, we’re confident that she can help us improve the magazine and that we can learn a lot from her… after all, children are our role models,” a spokesperson for Lego said.

Join our commenting forum

Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies