Results: Way To Represent, Barbie!

In recent years, Mattel's Barbie doll has been making wonderful and much-needed strides towards greater inclusivity and representation. Following in that trend, the brand has just unveiled a new doll with Down's Syndrome, and recruited British model Ellie Goldstein to help promote it. "I am so thrilled there are now Barbie dolls with Down's syndrome," Goldstein wrote on Instagram alongside a video of her seeing the doll for the first time. "When I saw the doll I felt so emotional, and proud. It means a lot to me that children will be able to play with the doll and learn that everyone is different." Do you applaud Mattel and Barbie for this move?

Recently, the brand also released a doll with a hearing aid, as well as one with a wheelchair and one with a prosthetic leg as part of a collection of dolls with disabilities. In the past, the brand also introduced dolls with vitiligo and one without hair. Do you think Barbie has come a long way from its earlier days?

Nowadays, Barbie looks a lot different than she did during your childhood. She's available in twenty different skin tones with many dolls now being based on real-world scientists and artists of color. The first black doll named "Barbie" didn't debut until 1980, 21 years after the original white fashion Barbie made her first appearance in New York and decades after the start of the Civil Rights Movement. And in 2022, actress and LGBTQ activist Laverne Cox, the first transgender actor to be nominated for a Primetime acting Emmy Award, became the face of a Tribute Collection Barbie. Do you appreciate the importance of diversity in an iconic doll like Barbie?

"The Doll Study" conducted in the 1940s by psychologists Kenny and Mamie Clark shone a light on an issue that went beyond the type of dolls children had access to. "You didn't have that choice of a black doll or a white. They were all white dolls. But what it did was it gave me a belief and a feeling as a child that, that doll was prettier" Mamie said. The findings in the study proved she wasn't the only child who felt this way. In the experiment, sample groups of children were asked to compare a white doll and a black doll, not just by color, but by character as well. "Even the black children said the black doll was the ugly doll," Mamie said. "The black doll was the bad doll, so all of these negative influences come in when children have images that don't look like them." Does this study explain why diversity does matter, even in something like the toy industry?