When you think about LEGO toys, what do you imagine?

Is it LEGO City, Bionicles and Hogwarts Castle or the Millennium Falcon?

Fun for all kinds, Right?

In recent years, LEGO has delved away from gender-neutral sets. Now they are creating toys exclusively for girls. Launched in 2011, LEGO Friends sets includes suburban beauty salons, horse shows and lemonade stands in the town of Heartlake City.

The characters are called “mini-dolls” and are essentially more human-like minifigures. Note, this set evolved from LEGO Homemaker of the 1970s and 1980s, which was designed with much less attention to gender (and you can tell).

Following the release of LEGO Friends, a few upset mothers started a petition for LEGO to be more gender-neutral in their marketing strategies. A 2011 Businessweek article titled “Lego Is for Girls” argued that

Unlike tiaras and pink chiffon, Lego play develops spatial, mathematical, and fine motor skills, and lets kids build almost anything they can imagine, often leading to hours of quiet, independent play.

Peggy Orenstein, author of Cinderella Ate My Daughter, was quoted in the article saying

The last time I was in a Lego store, there was this little pink ghetto over in one corner. And I thought, really? This is the best you can do?” The goal was to give little girls another option when they reach the “princess phase,” at around four-years-old, the time when boys their age enter their “LEGO-phase… They might as well have a No Girls Allowed sign.

Yet angry soccer moms are not the only stakeholders upset by the lack of gender-neutral toys – check out this video of 4-year-old Riley who shuts toy companies down with this message:

Some girls like superheroes, some girls like princesses, some boys like superheroes, some boys like princesses. So why do all the girls have to buy pink stuff and all the boys have to buy different color stuff?

This image above is a LEGO magazine advertisement from 1981. Pictured is a child with her building of bricks – perhaps it’s surprising that the child is a girl?

Instead of wearing pink and purple and playing with LEGO dolls, she represents all children with the universal look of pride after completing her masterpiece. The focal part of the ad points to the differences in age, not gender, when children play with Legos.

The difference sets were designed to best cater towards the interests of children 3 to 7 and 7 to 12: “Younger children build for fun. Older children build for realism.”

This isn’t a spiteful maneuver to force girls to only play with girl toys – it’s a marketing strategy used by dozens of companies (seriously, this Dora the Explorer doesn’t look like a five-year-old – she looks like a sorority girl). Or perhaps the angry soccer moms are overthinking it and just finding something to complain about.

What do you think about the way that LEGO is playing with gender roles?