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"Barbie: I Can Be a Computer Engineer" Pulled From Amazon
New submitter clcto writes Back in 2010, Computer Engineer Barbie was released. Now, with the attention brought to the Frozen themed programming game from Disney and Code.org, unwanted attention has been given to the surprisingly real book "Barbie: I Can Be a Computer Engineer". So much so, that Mattel has pulled the book from Amazon. The book shows Barbie attempting to write a computer game. However, instead of writing the code, she enlists two boys to write the code as she just does the design. She then proceeds to infect her computer and her sister's computer with a virus and must enlist the boys to fix that for her as well. In the end she takes all the credit, and proclaims "I guess I can be a computer engineer!" A blog post commenting on the book (as well as giving pictures of the book and its text) has been moved to Gizmodo due to high demand.
It's unix!!!11
This book sounds just like real life.
Who does Mattel have in charge of Barbie these days?
Because whoever it is, has stepped in it so many times it's not even funny.
Are they being punked from inside? Or are people actually thinking this shit is a good idea?
Absolutely mind boggling.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
We have come so far since feminism began, but then stuff like this still happens... How could anyone, in 2014, have thought this was acceptable?
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
https://www.facebook.com/rs79....
Need Mercedes parts ?
In the final chapter, Barbie sleeps with several game reviewers to make sure her game gets good reviews and publicity on various gaming websites.
This Barbie actually does sound like some computer "engineers" I've known.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
http://www.themarysue.com/barb... is much better done. If only that had been the actual book!
Is that American Barbie outsourced the job to Indian Barbie (http://www.amazon.com/Barbie-P8228-INDIAN-BARBIE/dp/B002PEQKHG) at a quarter of the pay and pocketed the rest as profit.
That's the American way.
A boss?
I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it!
Is there an author attributed?
It is a completely accurate depiction of the real world. I have met exactly three women whose developer skills are good enough to garner respect. They just aren't out there.
Barbie's career track is as a scrum master or some other fluffy bullshit.
with Ken, Preventer of IT Services, then it would be pretty realistic and quite gender-unspecific.
Please remain calm, there is no reason to pani... wait, where are you all going?
No, he meant a CIO
no, he means a CEO :)
I see male software engineers infect their own laptops with viruses and malware and then have to enlist the support of the help desk department to clean it off for them. I don't see how this point is relevant to the ability to write code. Unless, I suppose, if your job is to write malware and viruses.
-- Thou hast strayed far from the path of the Avatar.
Despite that book being completely true to life, I'm not one to jump all over something and call it sexist but that sounds incredibly sexist. Most feminist feminazis make exaggerating their full time job but that book sounds almost purposely sexist.
Great fun for while you're waiting on the build server.
Misogyny is so much easier, we'll just go with that instead.
I always hated this particular hatred of "Math is hard"... Math is hard - I always tell my daughter that. Not telling girls that math is hard because we are afraid they won't like it isn't going to help them. They are going to struggle with it like all of the boys - not understand why it is hard for them and fear that it is because they are a girl. I always tell my daughter math is hard - she has to struggle with it like everyone else, but in the end that is what she will need to get the good jobs when she is older. And yes - she is actually very good in Math as an honor student in pre-calc as a sophomore.
Get off your high horse saying that is is Misogyny telling a girl that math is hard... If it isn't you aren't doing it right, take the next class up until it is.
I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them
Wait, but what about STARVING AFRICAN CHILDREN, why worry about privileged white women in first-world countries when CHILDREN ARE STARVING?!?! What kind of monster are you?! I expect you to dedicate all your attention to issues that I care about! NOW!
And the problem isn’t even that Barbie isn’t a “real” computer scientist because she isn’t coding. (I am one of those mostly-non-coding computer scientists myself, though now I’m tempted to make a game about robot puppies shooting lasers anyway.) The problem is the assumption that she is a designer, not a coder, and the coders are boys. (There are also problems with nonsense explanations for computer viruses, taking credit for other people’s work, and inexplicable pillow fights.) I happen to study remix, so one of my first thoughts upon seeing this was: someone is obviously going to remix this. I figured, why wait? I also have at my disposal my roommate Miranda Parker, a student of Mark Guzdial, who studies computing education and broadening participation in STEM. So with her input, I rewrote the book with a slightly different spin. (I also kept her as a “computer engineer” even though she’s really more of a computer scientist, software developer, etc.) I hope you like this new narrative better, too!
mfwright@batnet.com
What are you talking about, Half, if not more than half of CEs are programming. Sure, not game programming (as in the book) but still programming.
I'm a CE and I spend most of my time programming everything from Robots, PLCs, HMIs, Motors, FPGAs and Vision systems, to the communication that glues them all together. I still need to have a knowledge of electronics and electrical design, but still a good portion of my work is (usually low-level) programming.
Slow Down Cowboy! It's been 1 hour, 47 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment
Oh no! An anorexic harlot from nazi Germany has failed us as a role model. Again.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Advanced maths is hard, but most school level stuff really isn't. Arithmetic, basic algebra, basic statistics, a bit of trig... Almost all children should be able to master those, learning disabilities aside.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
STARVING?
Innocent animals are DYING every day! What kind of monster are you that you'd rather deal with what people eat?
So if your mother was having a heart attack and you were hungry you'd first call for a pizza and only then help her!?
You should die in a fire fueled by your own selfishness.
If timothy wanted to properly generate outrage on /., then Barbie would have said "I love systemd" when you pull her string, and article would be authored by Bennett.
Jean McKenzie has been Executive Vice President of Mattel since September 2012. She was named President of American Girl Jan. 1, 2013. Prior to re-joining Mattel in 2011 as Senior Vice President-Marketing, she was President and CEO of Gateway Learning Corporation and Senior Vice President for The Walt Disney Company. From 1989-1998, Ms. McKenzie served in various executive positions at Mattel working on the Barbie brand, most recently as Executive Vice President and GM of Worldwide Barbie for Mattel.
Not sure if this makes the screw-up better or worse...
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
I've seen a lot of posts already claiming that this is what happens in real life. Has anyone stopped to think that the reason for this is because girls are encouraged from day one to behave that way? It is true that women gravitate towards the project manager, training and business analyst jobs. But I have worked with many people of both genders, and the ability levels are pretty evenly split. There are plenty of helpless, clueless guys too, and they tend to bolt up the ladder quickly into management where they don't have to do the technical work anymore. I think women generally like PM or BA jobs for the simple reason that they get to interact with humans who actually care about something other than computers, video games and software development. (You couldn't pay me enough to be a project manager, going around begging people for work while not being able to control them and still being responsible for the project.) But, I also think that with the right encouragement early on, and without the hostile work environment that some IT outfits provide, there's nothing stopping women from doing great software work. The requirements are the same -- critical thinking, logic and an ability to deal with occasional intense levels of frustration. If girls aren't poisoned with things like this early on in their schooling, they have the same opportunity to develop these skills as boys do.
I'm just really surprised that this book made it through focus groups, internal meetings at Mattel, etc. and people still thought it was a good idea. That leads me to believe people are even more clueless than I thought.
I've got both a young son and a young daughter, and the age at which they start pushing the pink crap on the girls is astoundingly low. My daughter doesn't really play with dolls too much, and certainly doesn't own a Barbie. My wife grew up in a household where both parents were academics, and it shows. They didn't let her get sucked into this trap, and we're going to do our best to do the same. The thing I'm worried about is the peer pressure from dumbass female classmates once she gets to school. I'm amazed that in 2014 women are still being encouraged to take on traditional roles, and that sexism is somehow still OK. We've got a couple more years, so I think all we can do is just encourage them to like learning. It appears to be working for our son -- we limit TV and computer time, and actually take the time to explain things he has questions about in terms he can understand. I'll find out in 15 years or so if I did a good job or not....
"Acceptable"? Was the First Amendment declared null and void, while I was sleeping? What do you mean by "acceptable", mister thought-policeman?
If burning American flag, calling for killing of the sitting President, or publicly defecating on a police car is acceptable, having a book with a hare-brained bimbo as one of the characters certainly is too.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
I saw this yesterday and tried, so hard, to be the skeptic poking holes in a feminist's overreaction -- and failed. This thing is just awful. The best I could come up with was, "Well, there are valuable people on software development teams who do design. I value them immensely, because I can't do it."
Well, sure, and maybe they should also put out a book titled, "I can be a game designer." But that's not the title, and (I can tell you from personal experience) women make fine software engineers. Some great, some awful, most somewhere in between -- just like guys. If they want to make a book with a title about Barbie being a software engineer, they should just tell that story.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
In my house, computer engineer Barbie would have ended up just like all the other Barbies in the house... naked, legless, armless, and often headless in the bathtub. We affectionately called them all "Torso Barbie"
Brawndo: It's what plants crave!
I skimmed the blog post but nothing jumped out as being offensive. Girl and boy took turns having difficulties. BFD.
Math, at the age where Barbie hits her prime demographic, is no harder than reading, history, singing, or being physically fit. There are exceptions where certain things really are hard to some people with disabilities (both mental and physical), but for the vast majority its not hard - it just takes practice and study/work.
Saying "Math is hard" elevates it and offers an excuse as to why you aren't doing well at it. If you don't read, you'll never be a good reader. If you never do physical activity, you'll never be in good cardiovascular shape. If you don't study history, you shouldn't expect to be able to recall historical facts and make logical connections between events. Playing piano will not work out well for you if you never practice. In that sense, all those things are "hard" - but only "hard" as compared to, say, watching a movie or drinking a slurpee.
Misogyny is presenting a girl as an incompetent fool, incapable of doing the very things which the presentation aims to promote. Apparently, writing even the most basic story book an staying true to the subject is hard as well.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Be honest now - how many of the people commenting here are actually people who would've been boob-tranced into helping poor little Barbie finish her project? (I'm raising my hand!)
Depends on where you're from. Game designers aren't, generally "computer engineers"
When I was in school, there were different tracks for Computer Science (programming, IT management) and for Computer Engineering (a sub-discipline for Electrical engineering), involving the design of computer hardware at the chip and sub-chip level. Computer engineers were generally at/near the top of the intellectual heap, joining the aerospace engineers looking down at all the other engineering disciplines.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Almost all children should be able to master those
Mastering them would include having a full, deep understanding of why it all works. That means no nonsense like mindlessly memorizing formulas or proof, and it means more than just being able to use them to solve problems.
I'm not entirely sure almost all children are capable of that.
The suggestion in the book that it would be appropriate to plug a known-virus-infected USB thumbdrive into another computer in order to fix it seems totally crazy to me. Even if the second computer does have better security there's no guarantee the virus isn't a new one that hasn't made it into virus checker recognition databases yet...
the software industry is the way it is because of shit like this. companies and media is at the source of the problem.
this is one industry that you'd think would be an equal playing field (ie. physical strength nor testosterone needed) and we have to drive them out with these stereotypes. sad really.
I am a retired Computer Engineer, I was in the the field starting in May of 1980, Graduated from Clark College in 1981 with a Computer Science Degree, worked in the field for over 33 years. I was the girl that was good in Math, Science, English, sometimes being the top student in the class and the only female. Yes the filed was dominated by men back in the 1980's and early 1990's, but female are catching up, and will maybe someday be ahead of the males in the field. If you take any 5th grade class the males and females preform equally well in areas of Math and Science, it society that changes females to pursue other areas of expertise. I attended a Women in Science Seminar in 1979 at Clarke College, "why be the Nurse, be the Doctor", 'Why be the Dental Assistant be the Dentist", 'Why be the Vet assistant, be the Veterinarian", career after career. The time I started in the field, I was again in job like in school the only female, I performed my job and very well may I add, my husband was transferred and I applied for a position at a Bank in Des Moines, IA, and before they would interview me they gave me 2 tests, one for details, more like a postal test, and a Math Test. They scored both tests and told me they were not surprised by the results of the detail test but the Math test results, 100% surprised them, please I majored in Computer Science and Math, I started College to be a Math teacher. I didn’t want to work there I felt I would contently be tested on my abilities. My first job, the boss was male, dark hair, dark eyes, so was my co-worker, they hired another male, same dark hair, dark eyes, dark complexion, I was blonde, dark eyes and female. Our boss had a mustache, not until the new male employee started did the original coworker grow a mustache as did the new male coworker. I for year would hear, women this women that, and the fashion was three piece pants suits for women, man tailored, I would were those pant suits, and a tie, or a scarf pulled into a tie shape. Well the mustache did it, I tried to grow one, without success, so I bought one, and in order to get to the coffee pot, the boss had to pass my desk, I had my head down working on a program, he comment” I see you are wearing a tie", I looked up and had the mustache on my face, he said, "I think we need to talk", we did and I was told I didn’t had to dress like an male, dye my hair, and throw the mustache away. I told him time and time again the computer does not know if the Computer Engineer is a male or female. Barbie is such an influence on little girls, some good some, bad, I believe she is more for girls that want to be models, not average beauty and shaped females, I was a size "0", Blonde, pretty and bright, good at Math and Science. I would love to see a more natural shaped doll one that promotes talent and abilities not impossible body shape, hair, and beauty. I have 2 daughters, 3 step daughter, daughter-in-laws, 7 granddaughters, 7 step granddaughters, and a great granddaughter, my grandmother graduated at the age of 17 of Alleghany College, where she then taught, Math, English, French and German. Women can have a career in anything they choose to be and should be encouraged to do so, from the time they are little all through their lives. The same should be for men, careers should not be gender based.
Plus she's creating JOBS!
I like how you gloss over the role of men in the raising of their own children. Of course it's only women buying this stuff, we should beat them until they're bloody for raising our daughters so poorly. And then teach those daughters not to ever misstep, or they'll get beaten bloody too.
Misogyny? Sexism? Naaaaahhhhh.... not you.
http://www.amazon.de/gp/product/0449816192
I'm offended that boys are being stereotyped as too stupid to realize that Barbie is just using them! Wait, I bet I was supposed to be offended that Barbie using her natural talents and as a result achieving her objectives, was using the wrong talent. Cause she'd be smarter to do it all 100% by herself, so the book portrays her as stupid, right?
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
She has her own web site:
Susan Marenco
(presumably built by a boy after she contributed some design ideas).
Note that on the linked page she lists "Barbie ICB A Computer Engineer" _first_,
which suggests she still hasn't seen the memo about how bad it is.
Waay back in the day when my wife was a grad student at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution by an odd fluke the sysadmins and programmers of the Vax/VMS systems they used for scientific data processing were women. Possibly their inability to grow beards disqualified them from Unix jobs. Anyhow, the nickname for them was "data dollies".
Of course there was a long, long history of women in scientific computing. The mom of one of my high school friends graduated from Wellsley during WW2 and worked programming the Harvard Mark 1 -- which meant (although I didn't realize it at the time) she must have worked with Grace Hopper. And of course there were the female code breakers of Bletchley Park. There were a lot of opportunities for smart women to do innovative things in WW2 while many of their equally brainy male counterparts were being fed into the war effort like scraps into a meatgrinder.
Anyhow, I don't think "data dolly" was meant to be as patronizing it sounds to us today. It was a cultural anachronism, like the drinking and smoking on the TV show Mad Men, which appears to us gauche but strangely fascinating. The common assumption back then was that even an intelligent, highly trained woman would quit her job when she got married to raise some man's children. My generation was the first to view automatically assuming that as patronizing. This new attitude was in its day called "radical feminism" -- which was a not too subtle way of associating us with Communists. But of course insensitivity is a two way street. A lot of older women felt insulted by the implication that they'd thrown their lives away.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
"Barbie: I Can Be a Computer Engineer"
Well that's not too bad...I mean I want to get my daughter interested in this stuff too and...
instead of writing the code, she enlists two boys to write the code as she just does the design.
Huh, well, design is an important part of computer engineering, and...
She then proceeds to infect her computer and her sister's computer with a virus and must enlist the boys to fix that for her as well.
Ah, well..
In the end she takes all the credit, and proclaims "I guess I can be a computer engineer!"
sigh
As a computer engineer, I can assure you that all branches of engineering look down on all other branches.
Until a liberal arts major says something, then we all come together to tell him/her to just get us our fries and shut-up.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
No, math was hard. To this day I remember swearing up and down to my mother, despite her showing me on a calculator that 50 + 50 = 100, that it actually was 110. I also had great difficulty with subtraction.
Advanced maths is hard
You know, Barbie said the same thing!
Perception dominated the knee jerk reaction.
In my experience modern computers and operating systems
are beyond any one person knowing all the answers.
I recall working with an astoundingly clever and smart network type
that was tasked with tuning the lowest nasty bits of the network
stack. However he had no experience in setting a machine up
and installing a base system and adding initial users so he could
test what he was doing.
Same is true for a lady hardware designer. A true wizard at termination
of very high speed transmission lines and world class in coding VHDL
to eliminate random TTL logic on a board... Again the random decisions
made for setting up a user could not be deduced from raw logic....
The toy company should have had an ethnic and gender mixed help desk.
But that does not give the foolish critics a free ride.
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Mark Twain.
I almost wish that Amazon didn't pull the thing, just to give a poke at the damn complainers. It could only help sales. The thing is a pretty good reflection of the kind of society behind it. Oh, wait.. Now I get it. It had to be pulled because it reveals too much.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Does anyone find it a bit shady that the author of this hater blog post is a writer from Disney? The same company that brought us some wonderfully in-depth characters like Sofia the First and Hannah Montana!
All of this just sounds like a well constructed branding war, and the feminazis just fell right into the role of pawn.
Someone made a web thing so you can erase the old text and put in your own. I did one. I think it significantly improves on the original page.
https://computer-engineer-barb...
So, I looked up the author of this particular book, and it appears she lives in San Francisco, and used to work for Microsoft doing exactly the type of work (software product design) that Barbie was doing in the book. I suspect the author wrote a book called "Barbie: I can be a Software Designer" but that the editor, being clueless about job titles in the software industry, decided to change the name to something more marketable. After all, authors aren't the ones who name their books, the marketing team/editors do.
The Generation
I'd say something witty here, but I'm not that bright.
There are no liberal arts majors with ';similar achievement'. Stopped reading there.
I love how liberal arts majors want to claim scientists. Sorry, no. Hint: if you believe that all things are socially constructed you are not a scientist.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
There is this wondeful sentence in the "Barbie" apology at the end of Pamela Ribon's Blog:
> We believe girls should be empowered to understand that anything is possible and believe they live in a world without limits.
That sentence leaves me almost speechless. Welcome to faryland!
When are they going to pull the books from Amazon that have any subjects where a man is a pedophile, or a rapist?
Of course not. Those are approved stereotypes.
Sufficiently advanced maths is hard for anybody. It's a great leveller: Everybody eventually bumps into a maths problem that they find hard.
And the generations since then have been suffering from this idea that raising the young of the species is less important than filing TPS reports.
You know men can raise children too. And some of us chose to put our careers on hold to spend more time with our kids. I did. When my oldest got to high school I decided to put my career on hiatus to spend the remaining years I could with them. Before that I workng 50-60 hour weeks and spending about 1/3 of my time traveling, and though my flexible schedule allowed me to stay involved with my kids when they were younger, my window of opportunity to spend a *lot* of time with them was closing. Quantity time *is* quality time. It communicates your priorities like nothing else.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Don't you mean Gawker Media? Why are we giving these scum any attention whatsoever?
Have a Virgin Mobile USA smartphone? Give VMRoms.com a try!
Or devote some of their life to reading technical news on a technical news site. Glad we agree.
I read the book via the Gizmodo blog post. I understood the critiques that they leveled at each page. At the same time I felt that a lot of the plot twists were open to interpretation. The most basic example is that her collaborators were boys. Is she supposed to only work with women? Of course not.
The virus and its aftermath are another example where they felt it was showing how inept she was but I felt otherwise. People get viruses. She did a good job at figuring out how it was spreading and acting quickly to repair all of the hard drives that had been exposed. In real life, most of the time, when you have something like that to resolve, are you going to ask a man for help? Sure, most of the time you are. This is a good lesson to teach Barbie's readers. Do it right away. Don't be "ashamed about who got the virus". This shame is only on the part of Gizmodo. Barbie didn't overreact.
The last point I'll touch on is when Barbie began her project as a designer but then ended up claiming "I guess I am an engineer". This could be painful for professionals, both men and women, to digest. However, for many young women, computer engineering is reasonably intimidating - for some reason they often think of it as something that is hard for them. Perhaps awkward sexual attitudes from male programmers are part of the struggle. Perhaps everyone is a little awkward. But for Barbie's readers, they get a little shot in the arm of "I can do this". It doesn't matter if she had to write a lot of code on the preceding page of the book. What matters is that she is encouraging people to think that they can do that if they choose to!
I'm not saying the book couldn't have been better. But I felt that the attention to details in the plot was good. Always having her thumb drive, for example - that's a great habit! Designing something before you start coding - sure! The programming team could have been half men and half women, yes. Of course. Barbie could have saved the day by doing research instead of asking for help (although that's not really good advice when you get a virus). There may also be things that I missed that will end up amounting to poor role modeling for young women. But on the whole I think there's some good stuff in here and I hope that it doesn't all get lost in the backlash.
I mean a double D.
A Developer, Developer?
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
"Math class is tough!"
I love Barbie.
It was enough to read a few pages from this book and realise what a pile of crud it is. And how it blatantly discourages girls from being all they can be and actually pursuing careers in comp sci, or indeed, just plain thinking for themselves.
Then I had to read the first few responses which were all like "this is how it is". No! This is how it's been in the past, and that's the LAST FUCKING THING WE WANT TO TEACH GIRLS!.
Fact: girls can code just as well as boys, given the same platforms and understandings. Fact: gender doesn't determine your ability to solve problems and translate those solutions into an intermediatary language which a machine can act upon. Fact: a lot of geek guys don't like these facts because then they have to realise that they aren't inherintly better than all the girls out there.
Girls are taught to be second-class citizens and that needs to stop. If a girl wants to pursue a career in X, then that's great. If she wants to be a stay-at-home mother, that's also great (and a super-noble calling which, as a guy, I would be very hard-pressed to compete with, especially considering existing gender-based pressures). The point is that, after actually reading some of this book, I'm GLAD that it's been pulled and saddened that the rest of the geek community isn't united in solidarity against this kind of trash.
I'm not an super-sensitive person (indeed, I believe a lot of people need to suck it the fuck up), but this book, really, is derogatory. Go read some of it. Barbie is made out to be an airhead who couldn't possibly succeed in life without some male assistance. I call complete bollocks.
That may be, because I'm actually from Ukraine... But, more likely than not I did not "fail at Russian" — you are just being overly pedantic.
There are some exceptions, yes, but there far fewer of them, than in English. That was my point.
"Vinnie" (as in "Cousin") and "Winnie" (the Pooh) sound exactly the same to all native Russian and Ukrainian speakers (and readers) and both names are transcribed exactly the same.
You'd have had a point, if we were talking about names like "Watson" or "Welles" — which are, indeed, written differently in different editions of "Sherlock Holmes" and "War of the Worlds" respectively. But "Vinnie" vs. "Winnie" — no. These two would always be written with (a Cyrillic equivalent of) "v".
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.