"Barbie Career of the Year as a Window on Centrist Feminism"
August 28, 2021 10:28 PM   Subscribe

"I am not, nor have I never been, a Barbie collector, but I find the Career of the Year series fascinating as a metric of public attitudes toward feminism. .... Generally Mattel’s team wants to present Barbie as a feminist trendsetter but in a centrist way, a model of forward-thinking but non-controversial feminism, and it’s fascinating to watch that metric evolve." Ada Palmer (previously) discusses the decade-long history of the Career of the Year series, and notes, "Barbie’s 2020 Career of the Year is (for the first time) not a single Barbie but a team". And what happened in 2017?
posted by brainwane (39 comments total) 40 users marked this as a favorite
 
Interesting stuff, thanks for posting. I would like Game Developer Barbie's jacket and tee, please.
posted by ominous_paws at 10:42 PM on August 28, 2021 [5 favorites]


This was an absolutely fascinating article, thank you. I really appreciated the detail the author went into and the interesting analysis of why the marketing team might have chosen the various careers over the years.

But the mystery remains: what happened in 2017??
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 10:47 PM on August 28, 2021 [3 favorites]


One pair of flat shoes! Well, that's a start. (There might have been more but I didn't see them).
posted by b33j at 10:58 PM on August 28, 2021


Mattel and Barbie, no matter how hard their marketing team tries, will never be good role models for empowering women or for feminism.
posted by bendy at 11:10 PM on August 28, 2021 [2 favorites]


Very interesting article! I follow this kind of thing, and I still learned new stuff here.

A few weeks ago I was going through some old boxes and found the Barbie nun’s habit I made as a kid.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 11:35 PM on August 28, 2021 [6 favorites]


I'm rather bitter about the "body positivity". There is one Barbie who is just barely not extremely thin.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 12:03 AM on August 29, 2021 [4 favorites]


There is one Barbie who is just barely not extremely thin.

And apparently, if you are slightly less thin, you are also shorter. I wonder what that is all about.
posted by Too-Ticky at 1:38 AM on August 29, 2021 [1 favorite]


But the mystery remains: what happened in 2017??

Sabattical? Fed up with being a wage slave? Maternity leave? That glorious year in Thailand with Teresa? Studying for her MBA?
posted by fairmettle at 2:02 AM on August 29, 2021 [8 favorites]


In 2017 it was just a mirror. The Barbie Career of the Year was… you.
posted by oulipian at 3:07 AM on August 29, 2021 [9 favorites]


"And apparently, if you are slightly less thin, you are also shorter. I wonder what that is all about."

Possibly less bulk than if she were taller.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 4:18 AM on August 29, 2021


It’s a shame but not terribly surprising to see a lack of hair texture diversity to go along with the skin tone changes. I’m sure straight hair is easier than curly to keep looking how the manufacturer wants it, but it also seems in line with the “feminist but not TOO feminist” vibe.

Anyway, the article is very interesting and a good read! The straight-up RBG Barbies are pretty cool.
posted by obfuscation at 4:18 AM on August 29, 2021 [4 favorites]


2022 Barbie, full time employee
2023 Barbie, employee
2024 Barbie, climate refugee
2025 Barbie, legal resident
2026 Barbie, wife
2027 Barbie, she was your mother's.
posted by Joe in Australia at 4:35 AM on August 29, 2021 [6 favorites]


I wish I had gotten Architect Barbie that one time I saw it in TK Maxx. She would've fit in nicely with the other ladies.

She'd probably be living with Bee and on-again-off-again dating Bibi, hanging out at Babs' and Barbie's place whenever Bee would bring home a "really interesting" specimen and getting rock all over the dining room table again oh my god, do you have any idea how special that table is, Bee, it's a Florence Knoll for god's sake!

(Since I made that Twitter thread, I've picked up Robotics Engineer Barbie, who I've decided likes to be called Barb, spends most of her time welding, and dates Bee, because Bee doesn't mind the oil stains and Barb doesn't mind the dust.

Music Producer Barbie would be Babs' little sister B2 (sometimes B-Squared if she's in the mood) and produce weird-ass electronic shit that is called B-Core or maybe B-Gaze, Babs cannot figure out what the hell she's talking about, but she's happy. Barbie got her a good contract to do the music for one of their games, and it seems to be a hit with their audience. At least B2 doesn't keep on asking Babs to fix her computer...)
posted by Katemonkey at 5:31 AM on August 29, 2021 [12 favorites]


Nancy Lebovitz: ""And apparently, if you are slightly less thin, you are also shorter. I wonder what that is all about."

Possibly less bulk than if she were taller.
"

Consistent amount of plastic used in manufacture? [This is not a good reason.]
posted by chavenet at 5:44 AM on August 29, 2021 [4 favorites]


Sabattical? Fed up with being a wage slave? Maternity leave? That glorious year in Thailand with Teresa? Studying for her MBA?

“can you explain this gap in your resume?” yeah, that was when i felt joy for the only time in my adult life
posted by clawsoon at 5:52 AM on August 29, 2021 [18 favorites]


"Nancy Lebovitz: ""And apparently, if you are slightly less thin, you are also shorter. I wonder what that is all about."

Possibly less bulk than if she were taller."

Consistent amount of plastic used in manufacture? [This is not a good reason.]"

No, my idea is that someone who's short and fat is less bulky and takes up less space than someone who's taller and equally fat.

I've gotten less shit than a lot of what gets reported in fat acceptance venues. It could be that I'm not as fat as many, which is certainly true, It could be luck. It could be that there's something which makes hassling me less tempting.

And when I bring this up, I basically get told it isn't something I should be thinking about.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 6:00 AM on August 29, 2021


The weird thing for me is that Barbie was supposed to be a teenager. My very early Barbie had an outfit for babysitting. At some point, nurse and airline stewardess were added. I don't think the careers really took off until later.

The body for Barbie was based on a German doll called Lilli, which was sold in a tobacco shops as a novelty doll for grown men. So little girls everywhere ended up aspiring to this porny body type

Still, I can't manage to hate Barbie. She was such a major part of my childhood.
posted by FencingGal at 6:03 AM on August 29, 2021 [5 favorites]


Mattel at least knows they have a lot to atone for.
posted by tiny frying pan at 6:13 AM on August 29, 2021 [1 favorite]


This was an interesting article about something I knew nothing about.
posted by Dip Flash at 6:49 AM on August 29, 2021 [3 favorites]


This random Ebay listing seems to think that in 2017 she was a pilot.

(This was .5 seconds of googling so I am happy to be corrected.)
posted by janepanic at 7:56 AM on August 29, 2021 [1 favorite]


It’s hard to make fabric 1/6 of the thickness of the fabric human clothes are made from, which is part of the reason for the body shape.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 8:11 AM on August 29, 2021 [5 favorites]


Janepanic: My understanding is that there are lots of career dolls each year, but only one “Career of the Year” doll. The pilot appears to be a career doll from 2017, but not the “Career of the Year” doll.
posted by brook horse at 9:01 AM on August 29, 2021 [3 favorites]


Raising an eyebrow at the pink-and-white astronaut suits, although Mass Effect made it work.

Also, 2017 CotY Barbie was an archaeologist, but after an expedition to the Antarctic from which she was the only member to return, prone to improbable stories and recurrent nightmares, that one was classified.
posted by Halloween Jack at 9:02 AM on August 29, 2021 [14 favorites]


Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Ken Dream House wgah'nagl fhtagn
posted by Halloween Jack at 9:03 AM on August 29, 2021 [8 favorites]


I liked this observation, about the vague “entrepreneur” career:
The fact that there’s no comprehensible clear thing an entrepreneur Barbie would do or make, other than have money and move money around to make more money, is an example of how hard it is to communicate to kids how power and money really work (and how nonsensical it often is).
posted by migurski at 9:37 AM on August 29, 2021 [15 favorites]


I think they try to design the clothes to still be interchangeable between dolls, which constrains the extent of body diversity.
posted by Comet Bug at 10:42 AM on August 29, 2021 [3 favorites]


It’s hard to make fabric 1/6 of the thickness of the fabric human clothes are made from, which is part of the reason for the body shape.

I remember reading about this in a book, that one reason for the tiny waist is that when you fold the fabric over to sew it, it's going to add thickness that will look weird if the waist is larger. I've been trying to verify it online, but I'm mostly finding tiny snippets of info with lots of snark.

There was a doll in the early 90s called Happy to Be Me that was supposed to be a more realistic body shape, but it never really caught on. However, it does make it seem that Barbie's proportions don't have to be quite what they are, unlike drawings purporting to show a more realistic fashion doll. I also owned the Barbie Twiggy doll, which had a smaller bust, so the waist would have seemed comparatively larger (still super skinny overall - it was based on Twiggy, after all).

In this interview, a Barbie designer talks about the doll's shape remaining the same as a matter of heritage. She also seems to think it won't have a negative effect on little girls, which is obviously bullshit. I remember reading an article about a grown woman who said that even as an adult, the weight stuck in her head as ideal for her was 110 pounds because that was the weight on the Barbie scale. My Barbie also had a diet book, which had two words on the back: Don't eat.

I was very excited to see the Barbie doll of Olympic fencer Ibtihaj Muhammad. She actually seems to have strong, muscular legs. I think this is more a collectible doll than a doll to play with though. I doubt she'd fit in the other Barbie clothes.
posted by FencingGal at 10:47 AM on August 29, 2021 [6 favorites]


Perhaps Career of the Year 2017 was prematurely planned to be "First Female President", and now there's a landfill somewhere full of tiny pant-suits?
posted by bakerybob at 11:39 AM on August 29, 2021 [20 favorites]


I really enjoyed the article. Thank you for posting brainwane. It reminded me of the politics surrounding Barbie that I'd never understood as a young girl in the 1970s. I envied girls who owned real Barbies but we never did.

Otoh, dad did bring us back Mary Quant's Daisy to make up for refusing to buy Barbies. I still have her somewhere with all her accessories. Vintage fashion!

Pink laptop computer engineer Barbie was my ironic avatar on tumblr ;p
posted by infini at 12:15 PM on August 29, 2021 [1 favorite]


This is really, really interesting. I had no idea there was a Career of the Year Barbie, and I had never heard of the Creatable World series.

There are so many interesting things in this article - Mars Barbie, wheelchair Barbie, 6 president-related Barbies (some presidents, some just candidates, as noted above). Heck, I don't remember even ever seeing a Barbie with dark hair before, so I learned a ton from this article.

(I was never a huge Barbie person, but I enjoyed having a Barbie Townhouse that I could let my hamsters run around in. I wonder if they enjoyed the elevator as much as I enjoyed transporting them in the elevator.)

I am really glad to have had the chance to read this, brainwane. Thank you for sharing it with us!
posted by kristi at 12:26 PM on August 29, 2021 [7 favorites]


Tell you what, when I woke up this morning I did not expect the most interesting article I'd read today to be about Barbie careers. Good post.

I think this is so fascinating to me because of the contradictory impulses working for the Mattel marketers; on the one hand there's the urge to present their character as modern and meritocratic, Barbie as careerist and defined by her abilities and achievements, and on the other hand there's the problem that you it's very hard to see, much less sell those things, and that in the end, just like she's been for decades, she's a doll that wears clothes. It's very hard to get away from that problem, so she's stuck, as in the observation migurski posted, in that however careerist she's marketed, the character remains basically a celebrity, famous for the quality of being famous, and, with new clothes, interchangeable. 'You can be anything' is an incredibly ambiguous slogan (you can be anything you want, as long as it's Barbie!), and it's not just Barbie's bitter ambiguity there, it's our meritocracy; it's that 'success' defines itself by the self-image of the successful.
I remember thinking about the fact that (at the time) when you looked at lists of college majors by expected salary, architect was usually listed as the highest-paid major for women
When I retrained (in urban planning) some years ago, the majority of the other students in the Masters course were women architects, who didn't mind the pay but were absolutely fed up with the >70 hour weeks, bloke office culture, and the generally tedious and repetitive job. I look forward to Town Planner Barbie with her draft LEP amendments, development contributions scheme, framework regional consultation plan, and most of all—her union membership, nine-day fortnight, and healthy work/life balance working for a local council.
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 5:51 PM on August 29, 2021 [5 favorites]


One of my favourite discoveries in the lockdown was Barbie's Instagram (target:twentysomething to thirtysomething career woman, no children some pets) The team behind it are marketing geniuses.
They have to sell clothes, and styles and the latest plastic, and they do, but their happy on brand stay at home order Barbie was very close to having a breakdown and it showed between the lines.
If you can empathize with a plastic doll trying to keep it together in the current times, your social media squad is doing their job
posted by thegirlwiththehat at 10:24 AM on August 30, 2021 [3 favorites]


Totally missed opportunity - 2021 Barbie should be working form home in sweatpants from the bottom down and a put together ensemble from the waist up, on Zoom with kids in the background.
posted by brookeb at 9:57 PM on August 30, 2021


Also 2022 Barbie will, sadly/gladly, be an influencer and everything will have come full circle.
posted by brookeb at 9:58 PM on August 30, 2021


It’s hard to make fabric 1/6 of the thickness of the fabric human clothes are made from, which is part of the reason for the body shape.

I remember reading about this in a book, that one reason for the tiny waist is that when you fold the fabric over to sew it, it's going to add thickness that will look weird if the waist is larger. I've been trying to verify it online, but I'm mostly finding tiny snippets of info with lots of snark.


I have no verification if this was ever officially a concern of Mattel’s, but it fits with my experiences of sewing for the little lady.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 10:16 PM on August 30, 2021 [1 favorite]


As a feminist woman in STEM, I was wary of buying Barbies for my daughters. But Mattel got my business anyway. These days Barbie is not the stiff, blonde, big busted and wasp wasted fashion model I grew up with. Most of the dolls my daughter has picked out are "Made to Move," which means they have articulated elbows, knees, ankles, wrists, and even waists. (Normal Barbies only have hip, shoulder, and neck joints.)

The Made to Move dolls are still quite thin, but they also have smaller boobs and generally more realistic proportions. When I buy Barbies as gifts for the kids, I usually buy the "curvy" ones (which do have their own clothing -- the outfits are not interchangable between "curvy" "petite" "tall" and "standard" body types). I get them a variety of races, and got one doll with vitiligo just because I thought it was beautiful. And I like that Mattel is highlighting how many different ways there are to be beautiful.

My daughters and I agree that the best Barbie we've bought is this Barbie Extra. She might be Latina? But she has fluffy curly hair texture which means she might have some African descent too? But the hair is blue. And she has freckles. She's got the curvy body type, but she's also fully articulated, with a skateboard! And headphones. And two kittens wearing crowns? Extra! She and her friends even have a music video...

So what I am saying is... Good job, Mattel. You have correctly marketed to moms like me, and to our kids. I bought them Barbies after all.
posted by OnceUponATime at 3:37 AM on August 31, 2021 [4 favorites]


I also bought the 2016 "president and vice president" dolls... for myself. I mean I kept them in their package as a sort of memento of 2016 and Hillary Clinton's popular vote victory and the Women's march and the Me Too movement and the bitter irony of celebrating women's achievements even as Trump took power. But anyway. The Black doll in that set does have a more natural hair texture.
posted by OnceUponATime at 3:43 AM on August 31, 2021 [4 favorites]


For the teachers in the room, or the economics nerds, the St. Louis Fed created a lesson plan based on Barbie careers and the Bureau of Labor Statistics Women's Bureau reports. It's pretty awesome and very fun to sit with teens and get them to think through why there was an astronaut Barbie in the sixties and in the eighties. Most classes I worked with came to the conclusion that Barbie careers walked the fine line between aspirational goals and realistic career paths. Sure, Gen X had Astronaut Barbie but Veterinarian Barbie was a more likely career path.
posted by teleri025 at 8:59 AM on August 31, 2021 [4 favorites]


in the end, just like she's been for decades, she's a doll that wears clothes

Except for people who play with dolls, for whom a doll is a complicated mixture of freedom and preëmption in storytelling.
posted by clew at 9:29 AM on August 31, 2021 [7 favorites]


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