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When my daughter said she wanted to go to a Lego engineering summer camp, I tried to hide my excitement. I’ve had an eye on gender gaps in everything from government to the sciences since giving birth to Frankie. As far as I knew, though, she played with dolls, not Legos, on play dates. Frankie’s sudden interest in engineering felt like a win.

“But,” she asked as I typed my credit card number into the registration form, “is this one of those things where I’ll be the only girl?”

I only knew a few children who had been to Lego camps and none of them were girls. “There’s a good chance you will be,” I said.

Pneumatics and monkey gears weren’t the concern – Frankie’s favorite aunt is an engineer. Her worries centered around Legos. Like retailers, grandparents and birthday party hosts everywhere, Frankie has come to associate Legos with boys. She is keenly aware that nearly all the plastic bricks are stacked in the “boy aisles” at toy stores and figures they’re considered uninteresting to girls. She’s right. Of Lego’s 31 city kits, only three are classified “gender neutral” on Target’s Web site. The 208-piece space shuttle is not one of them.

Instead, girls get Lego’s wildly successful Friends line, sets of purple bricks for constructing beauty shops or cafes, not celebrated feats of infrastructure and engineering like the twin-span and robotic tank promised at camp.

Experience told me the only-girl thing was a deal breaker for Frankie. I didn’t want days dominated by little boys to turn her off to a future in nanotechnology, so we signed up for horse riding instead.

A Facebook post made me reconsider.

A colleague, whose daughters were the only two girls in their engineering camps, posted a link to an NPR report about a top engineering school. There, women weren’t finishing even their first engineering class, which was designed to weed out all but the most dedicated. Those who made it through, a female student said, were men who had been in computer camp since they were 5.

Five? We were already three years behind. Engineering camp suddenly felt urgent to me.

So I pushed Frankie to give Lego camp a try. I knew that, as in the real engineering world, it would require more from her. She would have to get over being hugely outnumbered by boys and block out comments that assumed she would want her fortress to be pink. Since many of the camps used Jedi masters, superheroes and ninja themes, she would have to engage with movie franchises that didn’t write girls into the story line much less give them a starring role. All horse camp required was closed-toe shoes.

“I’ll totally make it worth your while,” I told her as we waited for the doors of the recreation center to open that first day. Her cheeks were streaked with tears. I promised late bedtimes and dessert every night. “Honey, wipe your eyes.”

As more campers showed up, all boys, I pulled aside one of the two counselors, both men. My daughter doesn’t know Sheryl Sandberg from Adam. I’d have to lean in for her.

“It was her idea to come, but she’s worried she’ll be the only girl,” I explained to him. He nodded. “She doesn’t want boys taking over her project. She doesn’t want to fight to be heard.”

I said it was up to him to make sure boys weren’t telling my girl how to make her fortress stronger, her catapult more accurate. If there is group work, he should make sure my daughter is allowed to contribute. “Sometimes that means telling boys to zip it.” I didn’t want boys telling her she didn’t belong.

I invoked President Obama’s call for increased participation in STEM — science, technology, engineering and mathematics — for all children. I might even have swept my hand in front of me and said, “The future of our national security is on you.”

Walking out, I stopped in front of a straggler. His twin sister stood next to him. “Are you staying?” I asked, hopeful. She nodded. “Over there is Frankie. Sit next to her.”

And she did. So did Kallie, the third and last girl to show up in the group of almost 20. Awful percentages for 2013, but enough to satisfy Frankie and give me hope.

Also encouraging? On the last day, Kallie smeared Braydon in the robot wars. One of the boys said Braydon must have let her win, because girls are easier to beat. But Braydon assured him, “No, man, Kallie’s catapult was way better.”