Hockey Barbie: she’s everything

Barbie should promote diverse expressions of femininity to young girls, including athleticism.

On Feb. 29, the Professional Women’s Hockey League (PWHL) and Mattel Canada announced Barbie as an official partner to the league for its inaugural season.

In general, women’s sports deserve more respect and attention from advertisers and audiences. The publicity this partnership offers will benefit the PWHL by allowing its up-and-coming athletes some of the much-deserved support and engagement they could expect playing in men’s leagues.

Male athletes receive much higher wages than their female counterparts, in large part because advertisers don’t invest in women’s sports. Companies don’t believe female athletes can attract comparable fanfare. Mattel’s partnership signals its confidence in the profitability of the PWHL, hopefully setting an example for other brands to follow in the future.

One centrally important demographic this partnership must appeal to is young female viewers. The partnership will include a video series for children featuring Barbie alongside PWHL players, themed in-arena rink boards, and in-game interactions. Ideally, the promise of seeing Barbie at a hockey game will encourage more girls to watch and, perhaps eventually, play the sport.

Barbie must seize this opportunity to pivot away from the Eurocentric and impossible standards of beauty and femininity it has historically promoted, opening expressions of femininity to strength and athleticism instead. Girls deserve to learn femininity doesn’t only look one way and developing their athleticism doesn’t have to be at the cost of their femininity—a strong, fast body can be just as pretty and feminine as one in high heels and a tight skirt.

And as much as wanting to look pretty can coexist with playing sports, hyper femininity isn’t the only acceptable expression of womanhood.

The Barbie partnership can yield fun opportunities to model supportive male viewership. Hopefully we’ll catch glimpses of Ken the Zamboni driver gliding across the ice or waiting adoringly in the stands, holding Barbie’s Gatorade.

Even in encouraging more girls to follow their passion for sports, it will take time and effort for this campaign to meaningfully change the landscape of women’s hockey or sports. Not only will its young viewers first have to grow up before we can see if they’ve been encouraged towards sports, but other social barriers to playing will have to be addressed.

Hockey is an expensive sport to play, inaccessible to many whose households or communities don’t have sufficient resources to support access to organized sports. The cost of playing hockey explains at least in part why it’s a predominantly white sport.

To maximize its impact, Mattel must offer financial backing to make hockey accessible for more members of marginalized communities.

It’s worth noting that, of all the women’s sports leagues, Mattel is partnering with the one belonging to one of the whitest sports. To really support women’s sports, women of colour in sports must be provided at least the same support as white athletes.

The intersection of strength and femininity warrants promotion.

—Journal Editorial Board

Tags

barbie, PWHL, women's sports

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