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Barbie's Most Common Careers (1959 to 2023)

Hello, this project is looking into all the many dope careers Barbie's had between 1959 and today. She really is a very busy lady. The intention here is to show what her most frequent careers were (so, for example, how many years was Barbie a professional cheerleader!? The answer is 10, from 1963 to 1964 and, after a nearly 30-year hiatus, again in 1992, 2000, 2006, 2007, 2010, 2011, 2013, 2014… I’m confident her basket toss was flawless that entire time). I also looked into the average median salary for some of her most frequent careers. "Astronaut" was her top earning job of her frequent careers, with an average base salary of $239,986 U.S. dollars in 2023. If you’re looking for a fun fact to repeat as you walk into the Barbie movie next month, you can tell your friends that Barbie actually went to the moon in 1965, four years before Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong got there in 1969. Honestly this is a huge historical oversight.

In my research, I found that some of Barbie's most common careers played into traditional gender roles (the idea that women are more likely to be elementary school teachers, etc.). I was curious what this meant to all the young people who grew up playing with Barbies. And how our dolls factored into our cultural ideas about who can do which jobs today (and who makes the most money).

I asked Tanya Lee Stone, author of The Good, the Bad, and the Barbie: A Doll's History and Her Impact on Us, to weigh in. She said there was an interesting "both and" answer to my question.

“It is both not at all surprising when the doll debuted in 1959 that many of Barbie's original careers were more traditionally gendered — and simultaneously quite progressive that Barbie was a ‘business executive’ that year instead of a secretary.”

Over the years there were plenty of traditionally gendered roles that this doll fulfilled, “Barbie was president eight years before Hilary Clinton ran for that office, and was an astronaut eighteen years before Sally Ride became the first woman to go into space.”

That said, Stone doesn’t think the doll actually influenced our cultural ideas about jobs and who does them — at least not much. “I don't believe a toy can be credited (or discredited) with moving that needle much,” she says. “As I concluded in my book after collecting more than 500 anecdotes from a wide variety of people who played with Barbie over the decades, the toy offers opportunities to experiment and imagine many different pathways and, ultimately, kids impose their will upon Barbie—not the other way around.”

Other notable careers Barbie has had in her long, shiny, and storied life: panda rescuer, food truck operator, saxophonist, and SeaWorld trainer (she worked this last gig in 2013, the same year Blackfish came out... To be fair, she was also working as astronaut, babysitter, and Canadian Mountie during that same year, which is frankly a lot of emotional labor when you add it all up. So, perhaps she didn't have time to keep tabs on or report any alleged abuses occuring right under her nose in the whale tank.)