Hi all! I’m super-sorry to come over here and be a ranting (and perhaps misguided) feminist, but I find a few points really rub me up the wrong way.
Firstly the inherent sexism in the title of the book (what about the electrical engineer mother who wants to teach her son/daughter/neighbour’s kid about making stuff? The implication here is that girls have a disadvantage which fathers are going to help fix, or that in my example the people involved are wrong-gendered?).
Then the less serious problem, which falls into the category of tired old trope where the girls’ toys in stores are in glaring-pink aisles… We should ask ourselves if a book aimed at ‘boys’ would include steps 1-4? I find they come off as condescending: implying girls are only interested in this project since they’re first lured in by non-functional fluff. If a (capable or not, irrelevant) female engineer at a company were to suggest equivalent steps for whatever technical project, I’m pretty confident a whole bunch of people would jump to call those things frivolous and would probably also bring gender into the argument. Let’s not, then, encourage that behaviour, or talk down to our audience.
I want to close by saying that I applaud the effort to go out and fill a niche, a book full of projects to get kids more interested in being creative, building stuff themselves, learning that electronics isn’t just iPads but can also be built from the ground up. I’m just really disappointed to see old-fashioned gender roles still so overbearingly in the foreground. Keep up the good work, and I hope this comment will be understood in the constructive tone I intend it.
