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Survey Says ... Where are the Girls? This summer, you may have seen us asking a random (but representative) sampling visitors to fill out a survey - part of our constant effort to continually improve. We had great responses (and if you didn't fill out a survey, feel free to email me with your thoughts!) - with one puzzling response: Visitors reported bringing almost 50% more boys (343) than girls (240) to the Museum. We looked back at the past few years of surveys, and realized this is a consistent result. You may know the fact that there are actually slightly more girls than boys overall, so this isn't some weird population quirk. No, it seems that parents are more likely to bring sons than daughters to the Museum. We have some theories about this - but we want to know what you think. Are you more likely to bring boys to play here? What can we do to attract an equal number of girls and boys - after all, the creative, unstructured discovery play that happens here is equally important for girls and boys. Share your thoughts in the comments - or email me directly at jcaleshu(at)badm.org - as mom to a boy (3.5) and a girl (7 months), this is a really important issue to me! Share this page Comments
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I wouldn't be too worried. I've been to BADM over the years mostly with a boy (as a caregiver), and now I have a daughter. Every kid is different, but gender does impact learning style.
Fern spends time with the puppets and doing art, hiding and doing pretend play in the willow house and ship. The boy I brought mainly wanted to climb and run. He never even wanted to go inside to the rotating exhibition hall since there's usually nothing high enough to climb in there!
There are fewer places like BADM that are boy-appropriate. Standard playgrounds are fine, but apart from that, many venues that are great for girls -- art museums, say -- are less interesting to (most) boys until they get older.
So it's not that BADM is *less* interesting for girls -- I can attest that that's untrue -- but just that caregivers of young girls have more to choose from when planning outings.
Posted by: Graham Charles | October 02, 2008 5:33 PM