Good News Day

Game Developer Barbie Can Actually Code!

''You may remember that, according to Mattel’s book Barbie: I Can Be a Computer Engineer, Barbie was actually very, very bad at being a computer engineer. If you didn’t hear about this at the time, you might be thinking, “It couldn’t have been as bad as all that.” Trust me: It was as bad as all that. According to this book, being a computer engineer means: 1) coming up with “design ideas” for a game but then requiring the help of boys to make it “real”; 2) infecting both your computer and your sister’s computer with a virus through sheer incompetence; and 3) getting boys to help you fix that, too.

As I wrote here in 2014, the overwhelming reaction to that book by many people—especially women in technology fields—was outraged disappointment. Such squandered opportunity! Sure, it might have been a little silly that the actual Computer Engineer Barbie (first sold in 2010) has a pink laptop that perfectly matches her glasses and writes code in binary—but the fact that she existed was pretty awesome. Given how underrepresented women are in computing careers, young girls may not have any computer engineers (or programmers, or game developers, or interaction designers) around them as role models. Barbie, with her fashionable pink laptop and her plushy Linux penguin, signaled that computers aren’t just for playing games. There’s even a black version of the doll, also important since women of color are even more underrepresented in computing. Unfortunately, Computer Engineer Barbie was discontinued some time ago, so if you want to snag one now it will cost you upward of $100 on eBay...''

by Casey Fiesler