Equality, lego-style
When we started buying legos, it wasn't too long before I noticed that the sex and racial balance was, um, pretty close to nonexistent. Not only were the vast majority of the legos pasty-yellow (with a small leavening of peach-colo(u)red figures), but the sex balance teetered between androgynous (the standard lego smiley face) to obviously male. This wasn't acceptable, so I went on a pretty extensive campaign to correct that hideous imbalance.
It is now, finally, finished(ish). Of 223(!) lego figures, 100 or so are female, 80 or so are black, 10 are peach, 17 aren't regular figures (skeleton guys, darth vader®™©, robots and robots, clone®™© troopers™®©, spongebob©®™ people, and the like), which leaves around 115 yellow figures and 95 male figures. And I've got a small stack of spare black (actually reddish-brown) and stereotypically female minifig heads stored away in the lego hospital so force the gender balance back the next time the bears buy a lego set that includes another batch of bearded and stubbly Men™! (I've got a small collection of anime-guy lego kits I've bought on sale, but they are tucked away while I decide what to do with them. If they join the lego mob in the library, there will be some sex and colo(u)r changing going on before the make it out of where I've hidden them away.)
The only obvious minority I've got right now are the peach-colo(u)red minifigs, but given that every movie tie-in series comes with peach figures, and the bears are in a mode of saving up their allowances to BUY MORE LEGOS!, this problem might not continue for very long.
Update: Russell did the counting when we added it up to 223, and he double-counted a row. It's actually on the order of 209 minifigs (the Heisenberg principle is strong here), divvied up as follows:
42 ... yellow guys 56 ... yellow women 33 ... black guys 47 ... black women 7 ... peach guys 3 ... peach women 21 ... robots,skeleton guys, etc There are slightly more yellow than black minifigs (18 more) and quite a few more women than men (28 more.) If you add in spongebob, squidworth, darth vader, mr crabbs, and the wookie monster, it shrinks the latter margin down to 23 and technically raises the peach guy count to 8, though the fetching pallid grey of the elder skywalker's head wouldn't be out of place on a Teen Titans Raven minifig, if not for minor details like the scowl, the eyes, and the duelling scars.
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