This reminds me of a blog post someone sent to me, Parody Pink, written around six years later by an internet-famous comic writer who raised money to personally buy and deliver Lego toys to hospitals on Christmas (video). Their post laments that the feminine Lego options were overly simple and uncreative, compared to the impressive functional mechanical options clearly marketed towards boys, and their struggles in picking a cool Lego gift for girls in their family which didn't make people ask "Was this gift meant to be for Joey?"

It really plays into what they said, "the idea of creative play as conducive to learning, or even formal education" seems to be minimised at the expense of focusing on that aesthetic beauty, forgetting that these aren't contradictory! I'm a little surprised that in a world already filled with plastic dolls, this strategy paid off, even if it was still a small progress in the direction of creative building.

And the article shows at the end that the team are painfully aware of how their products are affected by, and affect, stereotyping - perhaps being "ahead of their time" was too risky a position to be financially viable?

My daughter has so many Lego sets, mostly Lego Friends sets.

The premise of the whole article is belied by two paragraphs at the end.

“If it takes color-coding or ponies and hairdressers to get girls playing with Lego, I’ll put up with it, at least for now, because it’s just so good for little girls’ brains,” says Lise Eliot. A neuroscientist at the Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science in Chicago, Eliot is the author of Pink Brain Blue Brain, a 2009 survey of hundreds of scientific papers on gender differences in children. “Especially on television, the advertising explicitly shows who should be playing with a toy, and kids pick up on those cues,” Eliot says. “There is no reason to think Lego is more intrinsically appealing to boys.”

Target’s Stephanie Lucy, vice-president and merchandise manager for toys and sports goods, says the Minneapolis-based department store will introduce Lego Friends on an end-cap (at the end of an aisle), then shelve it with other girl-oriented toys, not with the rest of the Lego—all currently in the boy section. As long as girls find it, Lucy says, “I believe it will do very well.”

Lego has actively engaged in a culture of "boys toys vs girls toys", and exclusively targeted the "boys toys" segment. They had more than enough pull to shatter this idea, but instead they opted to manufacture an entirely new "girl version", cementing the idea that the other sets are for boys. They're no better than those toy companies that make "magic set" and "magic set 𝓯𝓸𝓻 𝓰𝓲𝓻𝓵𝓼" (the same thing but pink).

Lego was big enough that they could straight up tell stores that their products could not be housed in a "boy section".