Paging Doctor Barbie

Greta Gerwig’s Film Sparks Dialogue on the Path to Gender Equality in Healthcare this Women’s History Month 

Authors: Anushree Vashist, Shikha Jain, MD; Vineet Arora, MD

We may not live in a Barbie world, but that doesn’t mean we can’t learn from it. 

On its surface, a movie about the iconic yet controversial Mattel doll might seem superficial and of little substance or relevance—particularly to medicine. But Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, which  kicked off the awards season with the 2024 Golden Globe in Cinematic and Box Office Achievement, is much more than just a Pepto-Bismol–colored craze about a children’s toy: The film offers a powerful commentary on societal gender dynamics. As we celebrate Women’s History Month in March, Barbie becomes a topical and poignant reflection of the journeys of women in medicine—and a call to address the persistent gender disparities facing women in healthcare today.

As Charlotte Clymer writes, Barbie is “an ever-changing projection of social views that have amalgamated during her tenure at the top of the toy world.” Across its various iterations, Barbie mirrors the shifts in our attitudes toward women, providing a barometer for the progress women, both in medicine and in other professions, have made over the past six decades. 

Gerwig’s latest live-action film follows Stereotypical Barbie’s journey with Ken from Barbie Land to the real world, where she discovers patriarchy and all its constraints on women’s dreams and aspirations. During this “sage of self-realization,” as Rolling Stone’s David Fear puts it, Barbie toys with a complex history of perpetuating stereotypical, traditional femininity and subverts conventional gender norms—showing us that the world is often antagonistic towards women, but that doesn’t stop them from being whoever they want to be. 

Alongside Stereotypical Barbie’s journey, we witness the stories of President Barbie (Issa Rae), Weird Barbie (Kate McKinnon), and Doctor Barbie (Hari Nef) in Barbie Land, the latter of which is played by the first openly transgender woman to appear on the cover of a major British magazine. It’s not just acceptable but gratifying for women, of all backgrounds, to be ambitious, but they can also be their authentic—and sometimes weird—selves. 

Barbie itself shows us the importance of this visibility when Ken, who is merely an accessory to Barbie in Barbie Land, feels empowered after seeing men be leaders in the real world. This mirrors the plight of women in medicine, who are also often hidden in the rungs of the leadership ladder. Although women in medicine now make up over half of applicants and matriculants to medical school, they still face gross underrepresentation as professors, in academic and private sector leadership positions, as well as in awards conferred by their professional societies. This is despite the fact that women physicians are associated with better or equivalent outcomes than their male counterparts. And these disparities are even more prevalent for women with intersectional identities, like women of color and those in the LGBTQ+ communities. We still have great lengths to go to break down systemic barriers and truly promote equity and inclusivity within the medical profession.

And just as Barbie’s autonomy is threatened when the all-male board of directors orders her to be captured and brought back to Mattel headquarters, or the institution of patriarchy that overrun in Barbie Land, women in medicine still face countless limitations. 

Sexual harassment remains a threat to the safety and health of women physicians. A 2018 report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine found that sexual harassment is common in academic science and medicine—and at every level, from undergraduate students to faculty and staff. Furthermore, women students in medicine face sexual harassment perpetrated by faculty and staff more often than women in science and engineering. 

Women in medicine—like their peers in countless other professions—also face a gender pay gap. A 2013 study published in JAMA Internal Medicine found the annual disparity between men and women physicians at U.S. public medical schools to be $19,878—even after adjusting for potentially confounding variables like specialty, years in rank, and age. This income inequality translates into women physicians earning $2 million less than their male counterparts over the course of their careers, according to a 2021 analysis published in Health Affairs.

And, despite long-standing gender parity among medical students, there is a significant divergence in the gender composition of medical specialties. While some specialties have experienced a growing dominance of female doctors, others have remained predominantly male. 

Meanwhile, the widespread implicit gender bias in healthcare and paucity of women in medical leadership make practicing medicine on the daily exhausting for women doctors. As America Ferrera put it so eloquently, “ It is literally impossible to be a woman.”

So now that Barbie has offered us a reminder of the breakthroughs of women in medicine—and the gender disparities that still linger—where do we go? In the real world, we’re lucky to actually experience the sort of celebration of women, their progress, and their ambition that Barbie offers at the annual Women in Medicine Summit™, a conference focused on empowering attendees of all genders to work together towards fixing a system built on hierarchical and sexist foundations. 

And while Barbie or the Women in Medicine Summit alone cannot remedy an extensive history of subjecting women to stereotypical roles, they offer a much-needed starting point. In The Atlantic, David Sims writes, “Remove Stereotypical Barbie from Barbie Land and plonk her into Los Angeles, and she’s just another woman struggling to find meaning in a world that’s inherently hostile to her very presence.” Barbie and the Summit both, in their own ways, help us make sense of the impossibility of existing and thriving in a world intrinsically antagonistic to women. They show us that there is no one way to be a woman, in a professional space, or otherwise. They encourage us to approach the problem of gender equity from different angles, giving us concrete language as we, one step at a time, try to grapple with a concept so much bigger than any one of us. They remind us of the histories of women who come before us and that progress, while not always linear, is possible if we’re bold enough to pursue it.

About the author: Anushree Vashist is an undergraduate at the University of Chicago studying biology and history. You can follow her on Twitter/X @AnushreeVashist.