Mattel launched the Barbie 'Inspiring Women' series honoring historical and contemporary female role models, beginning with Amelia Earhart, Frida Kahlo, and Katherine Johnson.
On March 8, 2018, coinciding with International Women's Day, Mattel publicly announced the launch of the Barbie 'Inspiring Women' series, a new doll line honoring seventeen female historical and contemporary role models from around the world. The first three dolls released in the series were modeled on aviator Amelia Earhart, artist Frida Kahlo, and NASA mathematician Katherine Johnson.
The series represented a significant departure from Barbie's traditional aspirational-but-fictional career dolls, instead directly commemorating real historical women who had overcome substantial barriers in their respective fields. Amelia Earhart broke barriers in aviation as the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean; Frida Kahlo became one of the most celebrated painters of the twentieth century despite chronic illness and disability; and Katherine Johnson's calculations were critical to early NASA space missions, work that had gone largely unrecognized by the public until the release of the film 'Hidden Figures' in 2016.
The 'Inspiring Women' series was part of Mattel's broader 'Dream Gap Project,' an initiative aimed at addressing the point in childhood, research suggested around age five, when girls' self-confidence begins to diverge from that of boys. The series continued to expand in subsequent years, eventually including figures such as Rosa Parks and other trailblazing women, aiming to use Barbie's cultural reach to promote female role models directly to children.
The launch received widespread media coverage and was seen as a significant evolution in Barbie's cultural mission, from selling an idealized fashion image to actively promoting historical women's achievements.