Millennial Career Barbie

Is the Barbie movie a metaphor for middle-class millennial women entering the professional world?

Barbie became the blockbuster movie of the summer earning beyond even the wildest expectations. It struck a strong chord with women and triggered some men so much that even male comedians became hysterical and defensive at the satire.? Why did this movie strike such a chord??

Children learn through play and toys aim to prepare children for adulthood. Older millennials like myself and Barbie Screenwriter and Director Greta Gerwig, born in the 1980s, saw a more gender-neutral toy environment during our formative play years than children born later. Barbie—the toy— was launched in the mid-century heyday of gendered toys. Barbies assumed more gender-neutral careers as she adapted to the increasingly gender-neutral toy environment of the 1970s and 1980s.?

Barbie went from being a nurse and flight attendant to an astronaut, a veterinarian, a naval and police officer.? This evolution echoed the millennial message that girls could do anything and everything in a particularly plastic, Reagan-era-appropriate manner. The Reagan ethos that greed is good and government is problematic messaged to millennial women that amassing wealth and status was the key to equality -not the political organizing of our mothers’ second wave feminism. This was combined with a concerted effort towards gender equality in public and private school systems reinforced this message. Girls excelled alongside and began surpassing male peers in grades, standardized testing, college, and graduate school admissions.?

With this, many millennial women, whether or not we played with Barbies, grew up in some form of Barbieland. Entering the professional world was when we left BarbieLand.

Like Barbie herself, Barbie, the movie is many things—one of which is a metaphorical coming-of professional age tale for millennial women. Greta Gerwig’s own middle-class millennial backstory inspired her directorial debut in the film Lady Bird. ?Commercially and critically successful, Lady Bird was a highly relatable coming-of-age story for millennials with middle-class backgrounds and ambitions.?

Understanding this middle-class millennial female perspective, and viewing Lady Bird as a Barbie prequel, explains why Barbie resonated so much. Millennial women who emerged from girl power childhoods into a professional world where gender equality is not as advertised, can identify with Stereotypical Barbie’s slow-moving horror as she fully absorbs the real world.?

BarbieLand Found

The opening of the Barbie movie shows an Instagram-worthy caricature of what female middle-class millennials thought the future could hold if they just worked hard enough. Barbieland is a women-centered Eden where women hold all leadership positions. It runs as many imagine the world would if this was so. The first 5 minutes of the movie show different Barbies executing and winning a variety of career flexes such as lawyer Barbie triumphantly arguing the opposite holding of Citizens United. In Barbieland corporations are not people and can’t engage in unlimited political spending as a 1st amendment right. The Barbies have extreme confidence, no body image issues, and every day is the best day ever.?

Barbie screenwriter and director Greta Gerwig’s semi-autobiographical Lady Bird models how this was an expected conclusion of how the world would run for women who experienced a middle-class millennial childhood.?

Gerwig was born in 1980s Sacramento to a nurse mother and loan officer father just like her Lady Bird alter ego, Christina. Both attended an all-girls Catholic high school. Christina renames herself “Lady Bird” and sees college in New York City as her ticket out of Sacramento and into a more exciting future. Lady Bird is rife with references to how academic performance and artistic merit are keys to success and escaping Sacramento. Money, for affording college and status, is the other key.? At home, Christina’s mother is the practical breadwinner encouraging her to go to an affordable local state school. Her unemployed, depressed father secretly supports Christina’s dreams and her FAFSA application to an expensive college in New York.?

Despite frequent references to Christina’s less-than-stellar academic credentials, she ultimately makes it off the waitlist and into her unnamed dream school. Gerwig, who was granted admission to and attended the highly selective and prestigious women’s liberal arts college Barnard also in New York City, likely had stronger academic credentials than her Lady Bird alter ego. And Gerwig’s experience at Barnard likely furthered her expectations of women being main characters in the greater world. One fellow Barnard alumnus describes that at Barnard “every night is girls’ night”. Gerwig herself said that her female peers at Barnard “all seemed like superheroes” and speaks fondly of her all-girls Catholic School education.?

My own background —?and that of many other millennial women from middle-class backgrounds I have met at college, law school, and generally in my adult life— echoes some elements of Gerwig’s story.

While I and many others, may not have the academic and confidence boost that studies show an all-girls education provides that potentially allowed Gerwig to see her Kindergarten through college world as female-centered, many of us saw the world in our formative years as one that was roughly gender equal. Our young, na?ve brains saw enough evidence in our own lives to validate the larger messages of equality we were told.?

My own childhood was fairly unremarkable for a child of the 1980s-90s of similar socioeconomic status. Like Christina in Lady Bird, I also saw college and my future career as a way out of my own mid-market city of Pittsburgh. The cost of college was also a concern in my household. My primary goal starting in middle school was the academic and extracurricular performance that would warrant a scholarship to a prestigious school far away from Pittsburgh. I gained admission to my dream school, but no scholarships so I settled for where I did earn an academic scholarship. At the University of Southern California, I met other scholarship kids with similar childhoods and childhood experiences of gender constructs.?

In my formative years, my playmates were determined by their distance from my house which left me with one male and one female friend whose homes I was allowed to walk to. My sister and I attended daycare from infancy where our playmates were similarly gender balanced.

In my K-12 public school education, merit was determined by fairly objective grading and standardized testing where gender didn’t matter; our valedictorian was a woman. My high school sports of cross-country and diving had girls and boys practicing together and on the same teams. My parents (who met at work like the parents of many other millennials) had the same exact salary and job as Pittsburgh Public School teachers—a profession historically female with little room for advancement and therefore little reason for competition and hierarchy amongst colleagues. From my limited experience going to work with my parents and their frequent socialization outside of work with their colleagues, I saw a collaborative environment where men and women worked together to do the best they could for their students amidst extreme challenges. I witnessed what I now realize is a very rare division of domestic duties between my parents that I thought was the standard.?

While childhoods vary, many millennial women and men can quote some version of childhood details like my own that affirmed a sense of equality. Millennial women excelled in school and began filling up colleges, law, and medical school classes first in equal and then majority numbers. We seemed to be realizing the reality we believed and had been told: We could be anything that we wanted to be and we too could run the world.? And then, like Barbie, we went to “the real world.”

I am now amused and disturbed by my na?vete prior to entering the workforce that prior waves of feminism had mostly solved the gender equality problem.

BarbieLand Lost

Barbie’s heroine’s journey involves traveling to the real world, specifically Los Angeles. Here she finds a world where she is looked at instead of listened to, sexually harrassed, and men run everything. Essentially, the world many of us millennials found ourselves in when entering the professional world after graduating with expectations of equality.?

At first, Barbie is confused by what she sees in a male-dominated world and believes she is encountering isolated incidents or is doing something wrong. She’s assertive and logical to no avail with construction workers jeering at her. She seeks out friendlier territory and female-dominated spaces only to find there are none. Finally, she asks to speak with what she assumes to be the female management of Mattel only to discover they are all male and want to put her back in a box with plastic handcuffs.???

Like Barbie, when many millennial women like myself entered the professional world with expectations of equality, we initially thought it was a coincidence or our imagination when cases, projects, or other opportunities that correlate to recognition or political capital seemed to be handed to our male peers. We initially wrote off inappropriate comments, advances, and looks as isolated events or generational divides.

Then over time in the professional world, we saw the contributions of mediocre men overvalued and those of intelligent and hard-working women dismissed or diminished. This became a gateway to realizing and picking up the subtleties of how women are diminished everywhere from the healthcare system, to society, and popular culture. Like Barbie observing how things work on the streets of Century City and in the C-suite of Mattel, we realize that the structures of our world are built by and for men.?

Also, like Barbie returning to BarbieLand where Ken has imported the patriarchy to Barbieland after he accompanies her to the real world, we realize that women too can internalize and uphold the patriarchy. Some men of our generation who had to compete on equal footing growing up, are now enjoying— and don’t want to give up—?the privileges they’ve found outside of the walls of public schools where they don’t have to compete with women on objective criteria. Further many older men in power think that feminism has gone too far. While they support small strides, they think women have gotten too uppity and are too ungrateful for what they’ve been “given” and that this whole feminism business needs to be put back in the box.? At the same time, there are male allies, which Barbie symbolizes via Ken’s discontinued friend “Alan” who helps the Barbies to take back Barbieland from the Kens.?

The real world is not clean and well-packaged like Barbieland.

Messy Questions, Sold Separately

Barbie leaves us with more questions than answers, showing multiple paths and hinting at the problems associated with all of them.

Should women just continue to slug it out in an unjust world as a way to make progress as symbolized by Barbie’s decision to leave Barbieland for the real world? Does leaving Barbieland mostly intact for girls where they see no limits help them go further and dream bigger? Or should we inoculate girls by giving them more exposure and understanding of the stronger barriers they will face in the future??

And what happens if the inoculation and deprogramming of those who have internalized the patriarchy is successful? Will there just be a bunch of Kens to support who contribute little and don’t have their own storylines?

Boys and men are beginning to fall behind girls and women as childhoods become more gender equal despite still holding the majority of systemic power. Women still earn 8% less than men for the same work —controlling for factors like the need for increased flexibility and taking on less demanding jobs to account for contributing a disproportionate burden of caregiving. Still, millennial women have begun to out-earn men. Can men who have been bred for millennia to believe they are (K)enough with much less effort compete against women who have had to work much harder and be much better to get to the same place if more barriers are removed?

Only time will tell as we wait for the Gen Z and Alpha sequels.