In this talk, Debbie Sterling recounts her post‑college search for a purpose, describing how a weekly "Idea Brunch" with friends sparked the insight that led to her mission of creating engineering toys for girls. A friend’s complaint about the lack of women in engineering classes reminded Debbie of her own childhood, where she and her sister never played with construction toys because they were deemed "boys' toys." This realization made her see how early play influences self‑identification as an engineer. The next day she visited a toy store and was shocked by the stark gender segregation: the pink aisle stocked domestic‑themed dolls and accessories, while the blue aisle offered math, science, and action‑oriented games. The unfairness of this division convinced her that girls need toys that encourage engineering thinking, prompting her to found a company to fill that gap.
Chapters
I had been searching ever since that day I graduated to find my passion. You know, like what that thing that Steve Jobs said, go out and find your passion. I wanted to find that for myself, but I didn't know what it was. And so I spent about seven years at different jobs, and finally I found it. And it happened one day. I had got together with a group of friends, and we had started this tradition called idea brunch, where we'd get together and each person would get up in front of the group and share their latest harebrained idea for an app or a company or whatever. Just like one of those things that you kind of muse about when you're driving in the car, of course, over breakfast. And in that session one day, my friend Christy, who studied engineering with me here at Stanford, got up. She started complaining about how few women there were in our engineering classes. And she said, you know, as a little girl, I got interested in engineering because I grew up playing with my older brother's hand me down construction toys like Legos and Erector sets and Lincoln Logs. And that's what got me interested in engineering. And I kind of, in that moment, thought back to my childhood growing up with me and my little sister. We never played with any toys like that at all because those were boys toys. And I remember in my engineering classes, a lot of the assignments that we did we built out of construction toys. And I realized that if I had grown up with this stuff, I might have thought of myself as an engineer far younger than by the time I was 18 years old. And so it sounds really corny, but the moment she had this idea at IdeaBrunch of engineering toys for Girls was the moment where it was like the fireworks went off. The lightning bulb. I just knew, oh, my God, this is what I was born to do. He knew it instinctively in that moment. And so the very next day, I decided, I'm going to go to the toy store and get a lay of the land here. I'm sure times have changed since Christy and I were kids. I'm sure there's got to be a lot of toys for girls that encourage engineering thinking. So I went to the toy store, and this is what I found. I couldn't believe it. The pink aisle. So this was, like the most disgusting dolls that look like street corner girls. It was fairies, princesses, tea sets, ironing boards. I mean, it was all about domesticity. It's all about the way that you look. Meanwhile, in the blue aisle was all of the smart math and science games, heroes action figures, and it just felt like, this isn't fair.
