I love this! Emily Haines from Metric voices a badass little girl for a badass company trying to change the toys our little girls play with. I have a 5-year-old niece and it’s a constant struggle trying to find things for her to play with and wear that don’t conform to traditional gender stereotypes. I want her to grow up thinking she can do and wear and be anything she wants to!
Emily explains on the Metric website:
“Attention all parents of kick-ass daughters! It looks like some real progress is being made when it comes to giving girls more imaginative toy options than princess castles and all things pink. As a kid I was way more into my Dukes of Hazard racetrack than any doll, so as you can imagine I am beyond happy to be part of what I hope will be a lasting cultural shift.
A couple of months ago I was approached by a start-up toy company called Goldieblox and asked to portray the animated voice of their scrappy anti-Barbie protagonist in a series of animated online videos. I had always wanted to do voice-over work, so when they told me the guiding principles of the company and that the character was partially inspired by me and my music (!) the collaboration was a go. Debbie’s Kickstarter campaign says it best, but the idea here is to address the fact that men largely outnumber women in science, technology, engineering and math, with girls tending to lose interest in these subjects as early as age 8. We’ve got to encourage these bright young girls to overcome whatever is holding them back and give them the tools they need to literally start building things! Watching Debbie set out to “disrupt the pink aisle” has shown me this whole other world I’ve never had anything to do with before and it’s exciting to imagine I might have a part to play in her vision to inspire a new generation of female engineers.
This morning Goldieblox released a new video featuring a song for kids called Lightning Strikes which I wrote as the soundtrack to one of the episodes. I gotta say I really enjoyed channeling my inner 10 year old and I hope you enjoy it too! If you have a young daughter, you might want to check this thing out.”
