Life In Plastic Ain't So Fantastic

The girlypop economics of Barbie

come on barbie let’s go examine the economics of the patriarchy

The Barbie movie came out today, and it’s THE film event of the year for many¹. To say people are hyped would be an understatement. To say I’m hyped woud be an understatement. Barbie is a major cultural figure - so what are the economics there?

Note: this isn’t necessarily about the doll industry or brands. Most of that is similar to my last post, about Disney princesses.

Gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss

My whole philosophy of Barbie was that through the doll, the little girl could be anything she wanted to be. Barbie always represented the fact that a woman has choices.

Ruth Handler, creator of Barbie, in her 1994 autobiography.

Is Barbie a feminist? Kinda. On the other hand, the doll has long come under fire for being a bad role model for girls, especially regarding body image and physique, but also tidbits such as race (the first Black Barbie was called the Oreo Barbie, unaware that “Oreo” is also an anti-Black racial slur) or disability (the original wheelchair Barbie couldn’t fit inside Barbie’s house). Much like Disney princesses, the doll was kinda conservative for a while, but later reinvented as a more positive figure due to backlash (and sagging sales) in the 2000s and 2010s. But Barbie was also somewhat feminist: when it came out in 1959, Barbie was pretty much the only doll to not be about motherhood and homemaking - she’s always been about being a young professional, living on her own, and hanging out with her friends and boyfriend (not husband) Ken.

Barbie’s complicated relationship with girlbossery definitely intersects with the actual history of women’s participation in the labor market. Contrary to basically every reactionary meme made from 1950s advertisement you’ve seen, women were mainly homemakers for, at best, a few decades of the 20th century.

Back in the very olden days, basically everyone worked, because the alternative was starvation - which meant that female labor participation was basically on par with men’s. Later on, as wages rose due to industrialization, it made sense to specialize: someone had to do domestic labor, while someone else had to do labor outside the house. The family is like a company, which produces goods and services at home for the family, or in market jobs to earn money, and spends that money outside the house; the relative wages of each partner and the cost of, say, appliances or takeout or childcare detemrine who does what and how much. Since society disadvantaged women relative to men (still does), women’s wages were lower, plus the whole cultural aspect, and therefore women stayed home. The same is true comparing countries across incomes: rich countries and poor countries having very high participation, and countries in the middle having very few women working

In the US specifically, female labor force participation was only higher than in the present during the Revolutionary Era, which was the most agrarian time in US history - even for urban women, who worked at even higher rates. Participation leveled off during the 1900s, behaved weirdly during the Depression, spiked in WW2 and went back down, and then steadily increased from the 60s and 70s onwards. The role of marriage is pretty relevant: until my parents’ lifetime, women left the workforce after marriage because it actually was illegal, until the 1950s, to hire married women in most industries, since it was expected that they become unpaid domestic laborers for the rest of their lives. Some professions, like teaching and nursing, were allowed to continue, however

But this was a progressive development, which meant that it wasn’t an instant change - as well as the fact that, say, the Great Depression or the two World Wars boosted female employment rates since the alternative was “not eating”. In fact, at the start of this period there were many highly educated women who simply did not start families at all, and instead worked. Additionally, it was relatively common for women to work before marriage - both as in proper careers, or by taking smaller positions and then bowing out. It was also common for women to develop careers after having children, especially in the 1960s, which became less common with the widespread accessibility of the birth control pill, abortion, or divorce.

This also relates to a (fake, stupid, wrong) idea called the Two Income Trap, which is a source of constant conservative confusion: women aren’t in the workforce because wages are low. In fact, women are in the workforce because wages are high - the cost of working outside versus inside the home is just too high, especially since domestic work has had ample productivity increases with the invention of domestic appliances, as well as social changes and legislation, plus the shifts in biopolitics (?) already mentioned.

Mother is mothering

I’m not a poet, I’m just a woman. And as a woman, I have no way to make money, not enough to earn a living and support my family. Even if I had my own money, which I don’t, it would belong to my husband the minute we were married. If we had children they would belong to him, not me. They would be his property. So don’t sit there and tell me that marriage isn’t an economic proposition, because it is. It may not be for you but it most certainly is for me.

Amy March, “Little Women” (2019)

It’s pretty interesting that Barbie has never been a mother. No Barbies with children of any ages have been released, only “younger sisters” or pregnant related dolls (the infamous Midge, who was, as they say now, cancelled by conservative freaks for not having a wedding ring - was her movie poster “this Barbie had a child out of wedlock”?), but never a pregnant Barbie or a mom Barbie.

This is different than the real world, of course, where most women do have a kid or two. Unfortunately, the economic impact is pretty grim: there is a lifelong earnings penalty for women after they have children (chart time!), both with other women and with men. In academia, for instance, women’s productivity decreases after having children compared to male academics. A recent paper has found that women and men are equally likely to get tenure controlling for all factors, including parental status, but ommitted from all the celebratory statements is the finding that only 27% of mothers get tenure, compared with 48% of fathers and 46% of childless women. Economics, after all, is pretty sexist.

Even if men aren’t sole breadwinners anymore, women are still tasked with most of the housework. Women do a disproportionate share of the housework, and there is a strong, negative correlation between domestic work and wages for women. There’s not a lot of research on the importance of domestic labor to the economy, but where there is, it’s staggering - if housework was a sector of the economy, it would be bigger than any other in Argentina, accounting for 13% of GDP - and it would accrue, at least 80% of it, to women.

There is basically no wage gap between women with no children and men, with or without children, and this occurs even in societies as progressive as Denmark. The decision to work less at the office and more at home in the labor market happens at both the yes/no margin and the number of hours worked - as seen in both the Danish and Chilean labor markets. In Mexico, women whose mothers die drop out of the labor force both in number of hours and in rate of employment, unless they have a public or affordable childcare option. For American MBAs, so the top of the top of the education and income scale, there is a massive pay divergence between women and men that is mainly accounted for by number of hours worked and career interruptions. And this is heavily influenced by culture - Germanic nations, which heavily sanction women who work instead of raising their children (the much dreased Rabenmütter status, the raven-mother) have larger pay gaps.

Motherhood and its implications account for most of the gender wage gap - career and occupation only make up a fraction (a third, at best) of the total. As a matter of fact, the legalization and popularization of the birth control pill can account for a large fraction of the reduction in gender pay disparities over the 1980s and 1990s. Plus, it also became illegal to pay women less than men. Most of the more obvious ways the gender wage gap manifested have vanished, but subtler, more insidious ones remain - culture, values, etc. For instance, after giving birth, women have different career tracks in firms, meaning that their lifelong eranings get derailed by child-rearing.

The role of choice is interesting. Of course, career choice accounts for roughly a third of the gender pay gap - but why do women choose certain careers and not others? Expected discrimination might be a big barrier for self selection - finance, for instance, is very male-centric, and STEM workplaces are constantly losing women workers, which is fairly common for male-dominated industries in general, in fact. This is so egregious, in fact, that gender non-conforming women tend to be better ranked by their coworkers, at least in the tech sector. Exactly why certain occupations tend to be segregated between men and women is a bit of an open question, and there is very much a cultural component to it - to some extent, beliefs and ideologies where women have to perform certain tasks becoming crystalized play a role.

And, back in the 1950s and 60s (the nadir of women’s labor force involvement), women also did indeed show much less interest in a career than they do presently - surveys, for instance, show that the main reason why women attended college was to find a (successful) husband, rather than a career of their own. But, at the same time, the returns to getting a husband through an education were higher than the results of getting a job through an education - so we’re in a case of chicken and egg: either the culture led to reduced opportunities for women, or the reduced opportunities for women shaped the culture. And of course, preferences for socially influenced affairs can’t be separated from the culture, and the culture can’t be separated from government policy itself (for instance, explicit bars on married women working or the legalization of contraceptives). And men whose mothers worked (largely due to the economic conditions of World War Two) supported their wives working, which shapes the culture overall.

Marriage is an economic institution, and that economic institution mostly serves the interest of men - Swedish lottery winners who are women run off to get divorced, while men stay in their marriage; the effect for women, however, only occurs if the marriage was unhappy or there were financial disparities between partners.

He’s everything. She’s just Barbie

“How did I — the daughter of a feminist and working woman, myself a future feminist and a generally liberal, Prius-driving recycling lady — play with my Barbie?” mused Sarah Haskins in the Washington Post the same year.

There is, of course, an obvious issue where unapologetically feminine matters are deemed superficial and shallow - which complicates the matter. Children, in fact, are way more violent towards Barbie than they are towards any other toy, a seemingly semiotically driven phenomenon: society, patriarchal society, is uniquely violent towards women.

Women, overall, have lower standing than men in society. That’s what the patriarchy is, in summary. And this is not about legal status or whatever - it is an outcome of how society, politics, and the economy are structured. Measuring discrimination directly is hard, but it clearly exists. In the movie Tár (you should probably know what to expect from me at this point), the orchestra needs a new cellist, so they conduct an audition behind a screen to choose one - which actually reflects a real world experiment, where orchestra auditions with screens (“blind auditions”) increased the number of women musicians chosen. All else being equal, recruiters are more likely to call back for interviews men to women, especially if the women have children. Finally, people rate the job performance of women as worse than that of men, and mothers as even worse - despite women being as productive as men and women with children being more productive, not less. In fact, while male managers tend to underestimate the talent of their female employees, female managers treat the men as well as the women. “Schmoozing”, the social relationships between coworkers and colleagues, largely happens without women, with a large impact on promotions and wages.

There’s a philosophy paper I really like called “White Psychodrama” (you can also find a more accesible writeup at Salon), which is mostly about how different groups of Americans deal with racism (feeling guilty, feeling guilty about being made to feel guilty, or - if they’re not white - by cashing in). But the crux of the question is that a big part of the issue is that there are significant economic disparities between the races, and a lot of issues that minorities face stem from there - for Black people, there’s some issues they face for being Black, and some because Black people are (on average) poorer. I’ve written about this, and there’s also a non-economic component, but that’s neither here nor there.

This applies to many groups - to a large extent most “discourse” is about semantics and labels, and not really about whatever the actual issues are. While the debate about economic disparities is largely about “discrimination versus choice”, the real issue isn’t really that evil bosses are paying women less, it’s that there’s a different choice set for women because they are women and that has economic consequences. If you said “West Virginians making less than San Franciscans proves discrimination”, you’d be wrong, but it would be dumb as hell to say that West Virginians are simply choosing to work in lower paying occupations. They’re faced with a labor market that has different options, and those options impact their earnings. Whilst the economic aspects dominate, but you cannot understand the economics of gender inbalances without understanding the cultural aspects - to quote a certain George Costanza, we are living in a society - one that people aren’t very good at understanding.

Conclusion

Well, is Barbie a feminist? No, she’s a doll. Idk what to tell you. But she does have some interesting economics there.

There isn’t much new here, not that wasn’t in previous posts about the gender pay gap, the two income trap, gender and race disparities, or culture in economics.

Now, to cite Catherine McKinnon:

Those of us who do not take our politics from the dictionary want to know: Why are women unequal to men? What keeps women second-class citizens? How are women distinctively subordinated? The important question for a political movement for the liberation of women is thus not what a woman is, I think, but what accounts for the oppression of women: who is oppressed as a woman, in the way women are distinctively oppressed?

Women are not, in fact, subordinated or oppressed by our bodies. We do not need to be liberated from our chromosomes or our ovaries. It is core male-dominant ideology that attributes the source of women’s inequality to our nature, our biological sex, which for male dominance makes it inevitable, immutable, unchangeable, on us. As if our bodies, rather than male dominant social systems, do it to us. It is as if Black people’s melanin content is the cause of police violence against them, rather than the meaning police attribute to their appearance (racial markers in this instance) and the law and culture of impunity for their actions.

1. September (Challengers - aka bisexual Zendaya movie -, Yorgos Lanthimos doing feminist Frankenstein, lesbian Coen Brothers movie) is my Barbie/Oppenheimer though.