No Barbie hasn’t gone all Al Qaeda on us, she’s just been hijacked by a group of technology enthusiasts who’ve commandeered the Mattel vote for Barbie’s next career.
After being a doctor, a tennis player, a pilot AND a flight attendant, Barbie has got a whizz bang 21st century career, this time as a Computer Engineer. The tragedy of it is that all the little girls out there who voted wanted Barbie to be an anchor woman, and I do too.
Anchor women are cool. We call them newsreaders here in Australia. They go to all the best events, get loads of free stuff, interview celebrities, wear really, really nice clothes, have perfect teeth/tans/hair–they are Barbie pinups. What a brilliant career for any little girl to aspire to via their Barbie doll. No longevity in it of course, but hey they can always become spruikers on the shopping channel.
But no the computer geeks beat the kids at their own game and now Barbie is a Computer Engineer replete with black sparkly leggings, pony tail and loads of Barbie pink accessories like geek glasses and bluetooth headsets. Serves the computer girl voters right, pink bluetooth indeed, bet they wish they’d let her be a newreader now.
But what is really interesting is that computer geeks (and I’m not being mean as the mass voting was masterminded by GeekGirlCamp and someone from the US Dept of Defense) aspire to have Barbie as their role model. Perhaps Barbie is not feminist poison at all.
Think about it. Computer geek girls have made it in a male dominated industry. They are looking for recognition and want other females to think about technology as a career choice. Enter Barbie, their new best friend and inspiration to young girls the world over. Barbie is everything that stereotypical tech heads are not. She’s has enormous assets and great hair. Her only flaw is that she walks around on tip toe like Victoria Beckham. So keen are the tech heads to enhance their image via Barbie that they even offered input into how Computer Geek Engineer Barbie should be dressed.
They wanted her to look cool and hip. She wasn’t to be dressed in a lab coat. The techs didn’t want her “to make us look like nerds”. Fat chance of that happening. When has Barbie ever looked like a nerd?
Anyway statistics suggest that the Computer Geek Engineer Barbie might be the saviour of an industry that is struggling to attract new talent with university graduates in the field of technology dropping significantly in the last 20 years. Personally I would be happy to be labelled a geek if I were smart enough to invent say Google or Facebook or anything else that could generate billions of dollars for me.
But not all is lost. Mattel felt sorry for the little girls around the United States and are releasing Anchorwoman Barbie alongside Computer Engineer Barbie later this year. I know which one I’d like. Yep, that’s right the one with the pink microphone. Image
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