You may be wondering what this topic has to do with astrophysics and with me and now I'll explain it to you.
Between October and December 2022, I participated in the IVLP program “International Visitor Leadership Program” of the US State Department on the topic of empowering women in STEM subjects, an acronym which stands for Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics. Thanks to this program I spent three weeks in the United States and was able to meet and interact with various American realities that deal with or, in some way, have to do with the gender gap, particularly in STEM subjects.
In Los Angeles I participated in a round table in which the vice president of Global Brand Marketing for Barbie was present (almost the only man I met in 21 days 🙂 with whom we discussed the topic of representation and models. Mattel, over time, it went from producing only Barbie princesses, ballroom, cook, nurse, etc. to astrophysicist, astronaut, geologist, mathematician Barbies, etc. finally giving a representation of the woman far from the stereotypes in which she had been enclosed even by the dolls
In reality, you will have noticed, other companies have also done something similar, such as Disney which moved from the fairy tales of Snow White and Cinderella, where a little girl could not help but recognize herself in the princess who had to be saved by the blond prince on duty, to heroines who save themselves, such as Mulan, Pocahontas or Vajana. And in fact, Disney was also among the interlocutors of my journey to discover techniques for raising awareness of the female role in STEM, approaching "storytelling".
So, while Mattel acts by showing girls that in in life they can be what they want by recognizing themselves in the Barbies they play with, Disney instead tells stories centered on women, to the same end. My program, entitled "Hidden No More" takes its name from the Disney film "Hidden Figures", in Italian "The right to count", which tells the story, hidden for several years, of three African-American super women who changed the history of America, allowing the American people to arrive, and also first, on the Moon. The idea is to reveal our stories of women in STEM, which are all too silenced, to show girls that there is more than the roles that society wants to impose on them and that if they believe in something, they can achieve it, just as we did, so that women's stories are no longer hidden. Obviously this speech can also be addressed to a boy who is not comfortable wearing the shoes that society would like to saddle him with and is aimed at encouraging everyone to follow their own exclusive and gender-free inclinations.
I'll tell you: in addition to proposing myself to be the new Disney heroine (I swear I really did it!), I thanked the Barbie delegate for having created the Samantha Cristoforetti Barbie and not just the "ironing" Barbie, so finally ( since there isn't a Ken who irons!) the girls will be able to think "so can I too?".
And now we come to the title of this post: Barbie with Down syndrome. Operations of this kind, for me who believe in representation as a means of identification and primary emulation, especially in children, are very important. In reality, there is nothing new in the method because similar operations had already been carried out with the colored Barbie, the curvy Barbie or the disabled Barbie but I believe that the real goal is not that this latest Barbie reaches only girls with Down syndrome but which, as it will be with the Disney colored Little Mermaid that we will see worldwide, reaches all little girls or anyone who wants to play with Barbies. In this way, all of humanity - as far as possible - will be able to pass through their rooms and it will be normal for them to see a different face or colour.
Now I don't want to judge the reasons that push a company to take these steps, given that it is probably, indeed almost certainly, marketing. The thing that interests me is that they do it, because this type of marketing, which reaches millions of people, can really influence them and these companies have an ethical responsibility to chart the right path.
If you want to delve deeper into the topic of Barbie and STEM, I recommend you watch this video on the "Dream Gap" which is also the name of Mattel's project, designed to help fill what they called the "dream gap", a consequence and contemporaneity of the gender gap: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZ8Sgkq74XA
