Doctor Barbie introduced

In 1973, Mattel released Doctor Barbie, outfitting the doll in a white lab coat and stethoscope to represent the medical profession. This release occurred at a time when women remained a small minority within American medical schools and the physician workforce, facing significant institutional and social barriers to entering and advancing within the medical field.

The introduction of Doctor Barbie provided an aspirational image for young girls, presenting the medical profession as an accessible and legitimate career path for women well before gender parity was achieved in medical education. In the early 1970s, women constituted less than ten percent of practicing physicians in the United States, and many medical schools maintained explicit or de facto quotas limiting female enrollment.

Doctor Barbie's release aligned with the broader feminist movement of the era, which was actively challenging occupational segregation and advocating for women's expanded access to professional careers, including medicine, law, and academia. The doll became one of many career-themed Barbies that Mattel would release over subsequent decades, part of a deliberate strategy to associate the Barbie brand with expanding possibilities for women's professional lives.

Doctor Barbie has been revisited and rereleased in various forms throughout Barbie's history, reflecting ongoing efforts by Mattel to keep the doll's career representations current with women's actual and aspirational professional achievements in medicine.