I remember when similar techniques were employed by the Soviets (posters of woman in the army, posters of woman making weapons, etc.) We now consider that to be propaganda.
I am a profesional in the science industry and the profession is so debased I would not recommend my children to get into the field. We all talk about burnout and loss of meaning. We see other eras (eg. the 50s-60s in IBM, Bell Labs, etc.) as a past golden age. This seems to be something generalized and across technical fields.
Instead of focusing on figuring out what happened we have all the HR people working nonstop to try to pump more people into the field and painting it as a rosy.
There have been Barbie doctor dolls and astronaut dolls since at least the 80s.
That is besides the point. The point is the constant drilling of this topic in every form, painting the woman as oppressed superheroes and males as privileged oppressors. This with the goal of getting more people into a debased field while salaries and family-work balance keep getting worse.
> painting the woman as oppressed superheroes and males as privileged oppressors
Which part of article is painting women as oppressed and which one even mentions men?
And also, the amount of scientists is limited by open positions. There is literally no need for anyone to higher up supplies of those, you have dozens of PhDs for every post doc position.
"I am a profesional in the science industry and the profession is so debased I would not recommend my children to get into the field. We all talk about burnout and loss of meaning."
I'm curious to hear more about this. What's causing the debasement and loss of meaning in the field?
It is a long topic and the causes I don't understand well. We spend more time trying to obtain funding and satisfying some metrics rather than doing actual research we find meaningful or useful to society. The competition among peers in your same lab makes difficult to build healthy work relationships. We see how much of the people that become successful do it so in a way which is orthogonal to scientific values.
This might be something that has been going on since "the world is world" but talking with the old timers it seems it has been exacerbated in the last decades.
In addition to that all, in the universities and research labs, the HR and management departments have exploded (Have you seen the graph at [1]?) And they all seem to focus in stuff like in the article rather than taking care of the existing talent.
This article might lay the issues better than I did [2]
We always considered it propaganda. Just like modern day advertising and marketing. Its all propaganda. They are trying to convince you to believe something (that is likely not true. ie: we have the best product)
What properties the doll or figurine have to satisfy to not be propaganda?
There are hundreds of barbie occupations: yoga teachers barbies, ballerina barbies, hairdresser barbies, chef barbie, meme maker (? lol) barbie ... do they all count as propaganda too?
This gives Mattel way more credit than they deserve.
They're making these dolls because society has figured out that we need to value women's contributions, and everyone agrees. Mattel is lagging, not leading on this issue.
Go back a bit in time and when society had different values, Barbie had different professions.
Fair, but they still have a large cultural impact and this is still a net positive impact. When kids run into the toy section at Walmart, they still see a lot of Barbie. So having this happen is still an overall good thing, even if it's late.
From one perspective, they won't know or care either way, so that's why it's important to showcase diverse careers and individuals, so that it can just become "normal".
I have seen this story make the rounds in my local (non-English) reporting as well. Did Mattel really pay each any every one of these media? The much easier theory is that news outlets crave feel-good stories that no one will object to, like this one, to balance out all the grim world events.
It's not that they get paid explicitly. Their PR knows journalists and just casually suggest that if they have some space, how about this {article}? We'll even do most of the writing for you. That frees up your time to investigate real things.
Is it wrong for Mattel to do this? Wouldn’t most companies do a press push when they release a new product? I don’t see how this is any different than an article about the latest Apple product.
This is typical company not wanting to be on the wrong side and pandering.
Only thing they care about is the bottom line.
Nevertheless, it would be good to see different types of Barbies if not only for the fact that if they get discontinued they'll make good collectibles.
These are not generic occupation Barbies, but modeled on some real world women:
> Kirby White is an Australian doctor based in Victoria who pioneered Gowns for Doctors, an initiative behind surgical gowns that can be washed and reused by frontline workers during the pandemic. Dr White was inspired to create the gowns after her clinic experienced a shortage just three weeks into the COVID-19 pandemic last year.
I don't see how it changes much of anything. The novelty is not to propagate being doctor to girls (quite normal occupation for women these days), but that this particular woman was made into barbie.
Point is you can support any thesis by selecting supportive evidence. I could as well say they are a backward firm for not showing Barbie doing the things on my list until way too late.
Are they also a backward firm for not making a hairdresser Barbie until 2008, and a make-up artist Barbie until 2007?
I had typical boy's toys - lego and some action figures. None of them were news anchors, presidents, basketball players, dentists, or famed male scientists. Nor were any surgeons or business executives. Only a few astronauts. Is that also evidence of... something?
Research is done by researchers, and they hardly carry a phonendoscope.
For the record:
Duties of a doctor
Monitoring and caring for patients in hospitals and clinics
Investigating, diagnosing and treating the health conditions of patients
Prescribing and reviewing patients’ medication
Taking accurate notes, as a legal record and for other healthcare professionals to use
Working with other doctors, healthcare professionals and management staff
Educating people about their health
Teaching and supervising trainee doctors.
More senior doctors may also:
Manage a team or department and organise workloads
Research and review processes.
Well, first, two of the people these are based on aren't doctors at all; they're biomedical researchers with no background as practicing doctors.
However, the random careers website you cite may be giving you a slightly confused idea about actual doctors, too. Many doctors do research, and a lot of medical research gets done by practicing doctors. That website isn't intended as an exhaustive guide to everything that doctors do.
I don’t understand what you are criticizing. These dolls are modeled after real people, some of whom are scientists. Are you saying these people don’t deserve to be called scientists?
Quoting article: British woman Sarah Gilbert, a 59-year-old professor at Oxford University who co-developed the AstraZeneca vaccine, is another scientist to be honoured with a doll.
This is one of dolls. Quite odd choice of person to gatekeep as a scientist.
> Computer Engineer Barbie is the 126th career version of Mattel's Barbie doll. In response to poll results indicating strong support for computer engineers, the doll set was created and introduced in 2010.
She realized her female hormones and intellect meant that nature never intended women to be software engineers anyway, and that she was only coaxed into considering such a career path by the sexist agenda of Marxist feminist radicals to begin with. So she stayed at home and became a tradwife.
I didn't find a first "doctor" but ive delved deeper into Barbie history already this morning than anticipated. There's much more information to be had.
It's not Lisa Lionheart, it's the copy cat doll that the big corp released at the end of the episode, when they realized that there was a market for something like Lisa Lionheart.
> I'm taking bets on how much time elapses between now and when Mattel comes out with a transgender line.
Er, how would that differ? Its not like Barbie’s sex-assigned-at-birth is included on a certificate with the doll in the first place, or like the doll is so anatomically correct that one could determine what that likely was from the kind of genitalia and whether or not they had the telltale signs of surgical modification.
Sex is observed, not assigned, this is true even in the case of intersex individuals. The modern construct of gender is largely a function of environmental and media exposure. Unlike sex, no falsifiable tests exist for it. Don't confuse the two.
Various indicia are observed, sex (more accurately, “socially ascribed gender”, but the established terminology is “sex”) is assigned based on some subset of sex-related indicia.
> The modern construct of gender
The modern understanding of the distinction between sex, ascribed gender, and gender identity may be new, but the things themselves aren’t modern constructs. Biological sex (or at least the individual traits that make it up), socially ascribed gender, and gender identity have always existed.
> Various indicia are observed, sex (more accurately, “socially ascribed gender”, but the established terminology is “sex”) is assigned based on some subset of sex-related indicia.
This is an intentional and politically motivated conflation, that I notice you have attempted in several different threads, and it's why I replied here at all. Sex is a hard attribute that can be measured empirically at the chromosomal level, stop attempting to redefine it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex
Eh, I'll take that bet. They're still a company, and by the numbers, I would think it represents a very small minority. The sales probably wouldn't make it worth it. It might be worth it as a marketing tactic though, who knows.
Trans advocacy is a policy game at every level, not a numbers game. At the national level for example, the UN universal periodic review began recently including trans rights in its methodology. It is far more likely Mattel would respond to this kind of pressure from some kind of industry group than any expectation of high sales (although given a decade of this kind of influence organic sales will be a natural consequence, which is why advocacy efforts are so important to watch to understand the future of society)
Agreed, and great point, LOL! This doesn't solve the actual problem at hand. It's more like a token like "hey you can do it too". It does not give you the skills you need, like spatial skills, for example, which you learn from playing with Lego, etc., which is crucial for success in engineering. If you don't have these skills, you will be in for a ride in formal engineering school. Yeah, you can learn it during your weed-out courses, but have fun!
I am female and I have a twin brother. Fortunately my parents were awesome and I didn't have to deal with as much gender bias as other people. I got to play with all of my brother's toys and I had no interest in dolls. I also got to play with computers, which was the best, LOL!
In order to actually help solve this issue, unlike Mattel, here are some useful tools (toys):
Here, if you have a child who is a girl, get her GoldieBlox in order for her to intuitively develop spatial skills. GoldieBlox is designed by a Stanford Engineer and has free virtual STEM Camps: https://goldieblox.com/
I am a profesional in the science industry and the profession is so debased I would not recommend my children to get into the field. We all talk about burnout and loss of meaning. We see other eras (eg. the 50s-60s in IBM, Bell Labs, etc.) as a past golden age. This seems to be something generalized and across technical fields.
Instead of focusing on figuring out what happened we have all the HR people working nonstop to try to pump more people into the field and painting it as a rosy.