Dr. Barbie Will See You Now, but Only If You’re a Pediatric Patient

Barbie can be a doctor, but she rarely specializes or works with adults, and she almost never meets clinical safety standards for clothing or personal protective equipment (PPE), a quantitative study found.

Of 80 Barbie medical professional dolls, 53 (66%) worked with children as a pediatrician, pediatric dentist, or even a pediatric ophthalmologist, Katherine Klamer, of Indiana University in Indianapolis, reported in the BMJ’s traditional Christmas edition.

Even then, Barbie fell somewhat short: Mattel has a doll named Ella, who is a cancer survivor, but there is no pediatric oncologist Barbie. “Ella … has to go to the doctor. So why can’t Dr. Barbie do anything to help her?” Klamer told MedPage Today.

While Mattel has been more inclusive with dolls with disabilities — such as Becky, who uses a wheelchair — none of the medical-career Barbies were shown with a disability, Klamer emphasized.

Only three medical professional Barbies — including a Civil War-era nurse — were depicted as working with adult patients. “Besides that, all the other medical professional Barbie dolls were either depicted working with children (for example, if a child doll was included with Barbie) or were not depicted working with anyone,” Klamer said.

Among 12 scientist Barbie dolls, none met PPE requirements related to hair and clothing, she reported in the BMJ, noting that most Barbie doctors had their legs exposed, wore heels, and had loose hair, all of which pose a workplace hazard, and undoubtedly, a degree of discomfort.

Though almost all had stethoscopes, almost none wore masks. Barbie lab scientists barely wore wrist-length lab coats or slip-resistant shoes, and none had gloves. Many also sported loose hair and jewelry. Comparator female doctors and nurse dolls from Lego, Playmobil, and Beverly Hills Doll Collection were “much more clinically accurate,” Klamer wrote.

She wrote that “[a] large focus by children’s toy companies on treating children is understandable. Few children long to become geriatricians. Yet, Mattel has marketed Barbie as a trailblazer for decades.”

Klamer added that if “Barbie wishes to be an accurate mirror for young girls to reflect their medical and scientific career aspirations on, then she needs to practice many kinds of medicine and science and meet standard hospital and laboratory safety requirements.”

With women underrepresented in surgical specialties and a number of unseen forces further discouraging them, maybe “a childhood of playing with neurosurgeon Barbie or trauma surgeon Barbie could inoculate girls against sexist career assumptions and advice,” pointed out Sareh Parangi, MD, of Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, and co-authors.

“Instead, the current cadre of generalist Barbies that treat primarily children simply reinforces outdated concepts of gendered medical specialties,” they wrote in an accompanying editorial.

Klamer conducted a Google search for a “visual observation and analysis of Barbie brand and comparison dolls,” with data collected and analyzed from July to November 2023, which included the time period that the blockbuster “Barbie” movie hit $1 billion at the global box office. Klamer noted that dolls were ineligible for the study if they were modeled on a real person, like Florence Nightingale, or if they depicted a science job that didn’t involve humans (marine biologist, paleontologist).

Dolls, doll clothing and accessories, and any related packaging were used to determine the doll’s career; whether clothing and accessories met clinical and laboratory safety standards; and what patients the dolls were designed to work with. A comparator group of 65 non-Barbie medical professional and laboratory scientist dolls and doll-like toys also was analyzed.

Of 92 Barbie brand dolls, including Ken, 93% were female. Compared with 59% of the non-Barbie group, 26% of the comparator group were depicted as white, though over a quarter were non-human (“Dr. Paddington Bear“).

Study limitations included the potential for having missed some medical professional and laboratory scientist dolls, and the heterogeneity of the comparison doll group, which had to be expanded beyond 11-inch fashion dolls to get a similar participant sample size. Exact comparisons could not be made between groups, Klamer said.

This is not the first time Mattel has faced criticism for its use of Barbie in healthcare: A 2023 news analysis in the BMJ took the company to task for its “Barbie School of Friendship” program in which Barbie and Ken dolls were given to British schoolchildren for free as teaching tools on empathy. Mental health professionals told the BMJ that the program seemed “exploitative” and amounted to “stealth marketing.”

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