In 2022, Mattel sent two Barbie dolls to the ISS for Mission DreamStar, and their filmed trip became part of a STEM video series

Barbie has been an astronaut since 1965, decades before anyone actually let her near a rocket. That changed in 2022 when Mattel sent two real Barbie dolls to the International Space Station. The dolls spent several months orbiting the Earth as part of Mission DreamStar, a project built with the International Space Station National Laboratory, according to Mattel's official announcement. Mattel has said the goal of the project was to show girls that a career in space isn't just something that happens in the movies.

How two dolls ended up in orbit

The Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum, which later added the dolls to its collection, said that the Barbie dolls were flown in an Antares rocket in February 2022 and spent several months on the ISS. Per Mattel's announcement, the mission was a part of their Space Discovery dolls series and its Mission DreamStar outreach effort run jointly with the ISS National Laboratory. According to Space.com's coverage, Mattel officially announced its mission on April 14, 2022, in line with the launch of its Space Discovery toy range. Per the Smithsonian's own description of the dolls, their spacesuits were designed with pink and blue detailing evoking real ISS gear.

A guided tour with real astronauts

The dolls appeared alongside NASA astronauts Kayla Barron and Raja Chari in a special episode of Mattel's "You Can Be Anything" YouTube series, titled "Mission DreamStar-Let's Go To SPACE!," the same footage Space.com covered in its own reporting on the mission. In the video, Barron is shown at the Cupola, the module with seven windows that has a wraparound view of Earth, discussing ongoing research such as plant growth experiments in the Veggie facility and Astrobee, a free-flying robot that assists astronauts with routine tasks. Chari also appears in the episode, sharing what he enjoys most about living and working aboard the station.

Why a toy company cares about girls and science

This was more than just a marketing stunt. It addressed a problem that begins to appear during early childhood. A 2017 study, 'Gender Stereotypes About Intellectual Ability Emerge Early and Influence Children's Interests,' by Lin Bian, Sarah-Jane Leslie, and Andrei Cimpian, published in the journal Science, found that girls as young as six years of age begin associating a high level of intelligence with boys and not girls. The study found the belief was associated with girls showing less interest in activities described as being for super smart kids, although 5-year-old girls showed no such bias. And these ideas take hold early, well before most kids start to think about careers, the researchers noted.

The gap Barbie's campaign is trying to bridge

Media representation also plays a part here. As reported by the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media's Portray Her report, which has analyzed more than 1,000 STEM characters in a decade-long study of the best TV and films, 62.9% of all STEM professionals portrayed in the media are male, outnumbering women STEM characters nearly two-to-one, per the institute's own analysis. The report also found that seeing women in STEM jobs in films had a connection with increased chances of girls choosing STEM careers themselves. Mattel's own motto for the campaign, echoing the Institute's language, was that if she can see it, she can be it.

Where women in STEM stand today

The numbers show progress, but also how far there is to go. Data from the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics shows that females comprised about 35 percent of the U.S. STEM labor force in 2021, up from earlier in the decade. The same report also says that women earned half of all science and engineering bachelor's degrees that year. But they were unevenly represented across fields, making up a majority in social science jobs but a much smaller share among engineers, and their wages still trailed men's on average.

From orbit to a museum shelf

The Barbie dolls returned to Earth later in 2022 and were donated to the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, which lists the dolls on its own collection page. The dolls now sit on display at the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Virginia, alongside decades of earlier astronaut Barbie dolls dating back to 1965. It’s a small, almost playful detail in a much bigger conversation about who gets to imagine themselves doing science. A doll floating by a window on a space station probably won't close the STEM gender gap on its own. But it can help inspire another young girl to imagine doing the same thing, for real, one day.