Debbie Sterling was one of the few female engineers in her classes. She made it her mission to teach young girls how fun and exciting the subject can be.
Sterling bristled at the idea that princess toys were meant for girls and construction gadgets were for boys. She also saw a bigger problem. Construction toys help develop motor and spatial skills, which meant kids who play with them have an advantage in engineering.
Sterling had personal experience as one of the few female engineering majors at Stanford University. During projects, “a lot of the guys in my group would steamroll right over me,” she said. “I felt like I couldn’t contribute any ideas.” When two instructors embarrassed her in class for not grasping the material, she almost gave up.
Years later, Sterling set out to change the stereotypes that keep women out of science, technology, engineering, and math. She invented GoldieBlox®, a line of toys, books, videos, and more to encourage kids from diverse backgrounds to enter these fields. She came up with the idea when a female classmate mentioned that her interest in engineering stemmed from playing with her brother’s construction toys when she was young.
“It felt almost like this life calling kind of moment,” she said.
Because Sterling did not have any background in the toy industry, “I spent a ton of time playing with kids, observing how girls and boys play differently,” she said. She found that girls often want a purpose or a story, while boys simply enjoy building.
“That was my big insight,” she said. “The idea was to blend storytelling with building to get girls more interested in construction toys.”
Her first product was a storybook about Goldie, a girl engineer building a belt drive to help her dog, Nacho, chase his tail. It came with a kit of construction pieces so kids could recreate the same device. Sterling tested it with more than 100 kids. The results she saw from the testing gave her the confidence to keep going when toy industry insiders told her the product would never sell because girls wanted to be princesses.
“I realized that a lot of people in the toy industry were mired in the past,” said Sterling. “I knew deep down it was a good idea.”
She started raising funds on Kickstarter in 2012. “By the end of the campaign, I had almost every major toy store begging for the product,” she said. Sterling came up with the name GoldieBlox® — a twist on Goldilocks — in the shower and ran out with soaking hair to check if the name was a registered trademark. She also holds patents for some of her unique construction pieces and copyrights for her books.
One of Sterling’s proudest moments was delivering the keynote address at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing in 2017, a conference for women in technology. When she finished, a line of young women told her one by one how GoldieBlox® toys had inspired them to pursue engineering.
“Kids don’t want to be put in a box,” she said. “I remember when people would laugh at my ideas and it made me second-guess myself. Finally, I realized my ideas were different, and that’s why they were so good.”
