Discriminination - not overt, but there all the same

In the United States of America, girls can be anything they want to be - in the sense that there are no laws that say - "If you enroll in school, we will kill you" which is the case for women in Afghanistan and Saudi Arabi, for example.

Yet there are gender gaps of girls in the sciences. Is it because girls lack math sense, or is it because girls - and boys - have been trained since day one that girls exist as eye candy for boys, girls are worthless unless they have a boyfriend, and girls can't keep a boyfriend if they're too smart.

Which is what girls - and boys - are taught in cartoons during their formative years all the time.

From Sequential Tart: Mad Science for Girls (and Boys),

Part 1:Traditionally, mad scientists are usually male. This has been the case ever since the Frankensteinian dawn of meddling with things man was never meant to know -- although, ironically, the pioneering mad doctor and his patched-together reanimated namesake were both created by a woman, nineteenth century novelist Mary Godwin Shelley.

Despite Mary Shelley's seminal (ovarian?) role in creating the concept of the mad scientist as occasionally unwitting Faustian anti-hero / supervillain, trailblazing female computer visionaries like Ada Lovelace and proto-nuclear chemists like Marie Curie continued to be widely regarded as the exception that proves the rule in real-life STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) fields for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As a corollary of this, the more exotic and problematical realms of fictional super-science have remained an almost exclusively male domain well into the more recent era of archetypal comic book geniuses such as Lex Luthor and Dr. Doom (mad, bad and dangerous to know) and literal "science hero" types such as Marvel's Reed (Mr. Fantastic) Richards and Hank (Ant-Man / Yellowjacket) Pym (who are sometimes none too stable or morally reliable themselves).



Up until the last decade, this tradition of male predominance has also been reflected in the portrayal of kids as mad scientists. Perhaps the best known example of this is Dexter, the elementary school-aged title character of Dexter's Laboratory, which initially aired on Cartoon Network from 1996-1999, with an additional two seasons' worth of new episodes released from 2001-2003. The irritable, antiheroic prepubescent protagonist of this series is a bespectacled, lab-coated junior version of the stereotypical mad scientist, right down to his quasi-Slavic foreign accent.

Since the rest of Dexter's family all act and sound like ordinary suburban Americans, this accent makes little sense within the context of the show except as a deliberate affectation on the boy genius' part. As series creator Genndy Tartakovsky told the New York Times Magazine in a 2001 interview, "[Dexter] considers himself a very serious scientist, and all well-known scientists have accents." However, as the interviewer prodded him to acknowledge, the fact that Tartakovsky's own family immigrated to the U.S. from Russia when he was nine years old suggests that to some extent, the mysteriously Slavic-accented Dexter is "an upgraded fantasy version of your boyhood self."

Dexter operates out of an elaborate Batcave-like, high-tech lab he has somehow managed to construct beneath his family's otherwise ordinary suburban home. This lab features a helpful interactive A.I. of his own invention in the form of the Quadraplex T-3000 Computer. However, neither the soothingly female-voiced A.I. nor any of Dexter's elaborate security measures seem capable of preventing his ditzy older sister Dee Dee from repeatedly gaining access to the supposedly secret lab, frequently swiping and misusing untested new devices or wrecking her brother's experiments by playing around randomly pushing buttons.

Dexter's purely mechanical inventions run the gamut from a flying saucer with pincer-tipped mechanical arms, prominently featured in the show's title sequence, to a variety of robots. These range from a flattery-spouting mechanical parrot, to a "Mom-droid" designed to fill in for Dexter's sick mother, to Dynomutt X-9. The latter is a four-legged android Dexter created to replace his favorite superhero Blue Falcon's fallen canine sidekick. Unfortunately, the robot dog proved to have an excessively severe and ultra-violent Judge Dredd / Punisher-type interpretation of how to enforce the law, so Dexter and its superhero master were eventually forced to destroy it.

Dexter also makes frequent use of various self-created robotic battle suits such as the Dexo-Transformer. This is an imposing pilot-operated mecha that is closer in basic size and function to the towering Transformer-sized Gundams in the anime Gundam Wing than it is to Iron Man's form-fitting high-tech armor, although it is capable of dramatically increasing or decreasing in size. The Dexo-Transformer grants its pilot sufficient artificial super-strength to whale on his similarly battle-suited archrival Mandark, a somewhat more actively evil boy mad scientist who attends the same school, more or less in person. The suit's other offensive capabilities include cannon missiles, dodgeball launchers, and electrical shocks.


The Multi-Forming Megabot, which the Dexter's Laboratory Wiki describes as the pint-sized scientist's greatest invention, is also a giant fighting robot. In this case, the final robot is formed by merging several normally separate piloted vehicles together, in what the Dexter's Lab Wiki refers to as "a parody of the Super Sentai Robots in the East, Power Rangers Zords / Megazords and...other Disney / Hasbro Mecha." With superior balletically-agile maneuverability (perhaps due in part to one of the subordinate pilots being the unintellectual but graceful ballerina-wannabe Dee Dee) and an arsenal that includes twin swords and an energy-ball attack, this immense conglomerated mecha eventually enables Dexter to successfully defeat the giant mutated monster Badaxtra in Japan in the episode "Last But Not Beast."

The boy scientist has also come up with an assortment of much more improbable allegedly scientific discoveries that are virtually indistinguishable from magic. These include a so-called life potion, which Dee Dee appropriates to bring her stuffed animals -- and, eventually, even small appliances and pieces of furniture -- to life, and a hypnosis pen, designed for writing notes that will compel anyone who reads them to follow the writer's instructions (to go do all his household chores for him so he can complete his experiments in peace and quiet, in Dexter's case). Naturally, this, too, falls into the wrong hands. Like a slightly more benign variation on the deadly cursed notebook in the manga Death Note, the pen winds up being thoroughly misused by Dee Dee, by Dexter's secretly sentient pet monkey, and by Mandark, who gleefully scribbles instructions for Dexter to destroy his own lab and for Dee Dee, the object of Mandark's decidedly unrequited crush, to reluctantly kiss him.

As the author of the Dexter's Laboratory Wikipedia article points out, "Despite her hyperactive personality, Dee Dee sometimes makes more logical decisions than Dexter, or even gives him helpful advice." However, Dee Dee's standard "destruction in a pink tutu" M.O., coupled with the fact that she appears to be the only human female member of the regular cast -- with the exception of the siblings' mom, a woman so cheerfully clueless that she wears her trademark apron and rubber gloves even to Dexter's chess matches -- have an inevitably undermining subliminal effect on the show's presentation of gender. With the polar opposites Dee Dee and Dexter as the essential yin and yang of the show, a feminist viewer would be hard pressed not to conclude that the series' underlying philosophy is that boys are -- or at least potentially can be -- intellectual world conquerors, while girls are more apt to be birdbrained fluffballs who routinely ruin Important Stuff with their silly pirouetting nonsense.

In the course of researching this article, I did discover one Dexter's Laboratory episode that at least initially appeared to strikingly contradict this impression -- "School Girl Crushed," storyboarded and written by Charlie Bean. In this 2003 fourth-season episode, Dexter and Mandark's Dr. Doom / Reed Richards-esque archrivalry is unexpectedly disrupted when a new girl student named Soyen Chen beats out both of them for first prize at the school science fair with her Unified Theory of World Domination and Destruction -- "It's just a simple equation, really" -- displayed on posterboard. "She's beyond technology!" Mandark breathes reverently. "Dealing only in numbers!" Dexter agrees. "A much higher intelligence!" the two of them conclude. "She must be destroyed!"


The admiring and envious boys agree to team up to eliminate this new threat. But every time they get together to set up an ambush for their unwelcome girl-rival, they wind up spending the next seven or eight hours attacking each other with giant tanks, mecha, satellite-based laser cannons and other high-tech weapons instead. Meanwhile, Soyen saunters by on her way to and from Huber Elementary School, making comments like "I thought you guys liked school!" and blithely noting that they've missed an entire day of classes, including a math test on which she got an A+.

After several days of this, Soyen nonchalantly shorts out the electric-powered giant robots Dexter and Mandark are currently facing off in by turning on the sprinkler system on her lawn. Both scorched and singed boys collapse in defeat on the grass, despairingly acknowledging that she has them outclassed at science. Soyen responds, "Science? I'm not even into that stuff any more!" When Mandark uncomprehendingly exclaims, "What else is there?", Soyen flirtatiously replies, "Boys!" This prompts both Dexter and Mandark to make a panicky high-speed exit, pursued by Soyen making kissing noises.

The events of this episode do establish that, contrary to what the airheaded example of Dee Dee might suggest, mad science is not a male-dominated field in Dexter's world due to some sort of inherent intellectual inferiority on the part of the female half of the population. Unfortunately, Soyen's abrupt loss of interest in science once she has discovered boys tends to reinforce the sexist assumption that, I.Q. equality or not, girls are seldom found in the exacting, concentration-intensive STEM fields because they are too prone to distraction over frivolous preoccupations such as chasing boys.