#barbies in stem

[barbielore]

Over the years Mattel has really tried to push that Barbie "Can Be Anything" -- there's multiple doll lines with that very branding. But there's been a few missteps over the years when it comes to STEM - "math class is tough", the computer engineer Barbie who needed help from her male colleagues, and so on.

So I thought I'd go back and look at some of the early Barbie STEM careers, to see how she has evolved over the years.

Depending on how you define STEM, the first STEM Barbie may have been Nurse Barbie in 1961. This is a tricky one because I cannot think of a reason why nursing would not be considered a STEM field, except for the fact that it has historically been a female-dominated field since before there was a bigger push for women in STEM. Sexism in action, really. Anyway, here's Nurse Barbie (1961).

The collectors edition rerelease in 2009 shows the same outfit on an actual Barbie.

The earliest STEM career that seems completely unambiguous as a STEM Barbie was astronaut, back in 1965 - making Barbie technically the first American to walk on the moon, but who's counting?

Naturally this was also historic enough to see a rerelease in the My Favorite Career series in 2009.

Barbie explored other fields of medicine in 1973 as Doctor Barbie - who appears to be wearing a surgical gown.

(Note this is also a rerelease, as I can't find a picture of the original 1973 Barbie.)

There were a few more over the years after this but it wasn't really until the 2000s that she started regularly seeing STEM careers in her history. (There are several from the 90s - but the 2000s is really when it began to pick up steam.)

One of my favourites among the more recent is Astrophysicist Barbie, released as a tie-in with National Geographic.

[barbielore]

Hey this is really random but did you know that today (the day this post will be coming out of my queue, in Australia time - January 14) is World Logic Day?

According to the director-general of UNESCO, Audrey Azoulay:

In the twenty-first century—indeed, now more than ever—the discipline of logic is a particularly timely one, utterly vital to our societies and economies. Computer science and information and communications technology, for example, are rooted in logical and algorithmic reasoning.

So I thought this might be a fun day to talk about a few STEM Barbies - or specifically, STEM Barbies that would link in thematically with World Logic Day.

For example, Mattel released a Barbie Role Models doll for Katya Echazarreta, an electrical engineer who at age 27 was the first Mexican-born woman to go into space.

She is now 28 and was also the co-host of the Netflix YouTube series "Netflix IRL".

As a part of the line-up for the 2018 Career of the Year, Barbie was also a Robotics Engineer.

Barbie has also been a Computer Engineer, though given the way Mattel bungled the storyline that went along with this, perhaps the less said the better.