Spider-man, Snoopy and Garfield will be joined by a new friend in Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade this year: Goldie Blox, the girl inventor.
Debbie Sterling, a Stanford engineer who launched the Goldie Blox toy company in 2012, said she was amazed and proud to be in the parade, which marks the official opening of the festive season and was watched by 25.2 million people last year. “It’s one of the coolest feelings,” she said. “This is such an iconic, historic event.”
Goldie Blox was developed to encourage girls to become more involved in science, technology, engineering and math. According to the company, just 14% of the world’s engineers are women. “Parade floats are engineering marvels in and of themselves,” she said. “I think ours is the first in history to actually celebrate engineering.”
“I remember when I was growing up watching the parade and dreaming of being a princess on the top of one of the floats. Now I have the opportunity to build my own float and show every little girl there are things you can do other than wave from a float: you can also build your own.”
The Macy’s parade comes a week after Barbie maker Mattel ran into trouble for its depiction of women in tech. A book called Barbie: I Can Be A Computer Engineer, originally published in 2010, went viral last week after author and Disney screenwriter Pamela Ribon discovered the book at a friend’s house and wrote an appalled blog about it (note to parents, blog contains swearing).
In the book Barbie comes up with the idea for a game. “I’ll need Steven’s and Brian’s help to turn it into a real game,” she says. She also gets a virus on her computer. Steven and Brian ride to the rescue again.
“That was really disappointing. It highlighted in so many ways what is wrong. The decisions we make as toy makers can be very influential for children,” she said. Goldie Blox has its own coder, Ruby Rails, who is a gregarious African American who codes her own websites “without any help from the boys”, said Sterling.
“Children’s toys and media play a major role in shaping how we look at things. And when you look at them, and Barbie’s snafu is a perfect example of that, it’s outdated. The modern parent, and the modern girl, expects more,” she said.
The float will be literally “girl powered” – a woman dressed as Goldie will power a contraption on the front of the float by riding a bicycle. Women in hamster wheels will power a middle section. “There’s no smoke and mirrors here. We had to cast a girl who’d done a lot of spin classes,” said Sterling.
