Last week, just ahead of International Women’s Day, ESA’s Chief Diversity Officer Ersilia Vaudo Scarpetta joined a roundtable webinar hosted by Mattel about ‘Challenging the Dream Gap: The Importance of Female Role Models in a post-COVID World’.

Launched in 2018 to celebrate the Barbie doll’s 60th anniversary, the ‘Dream Gap Project’ is based on research that has shown that, because of cultural stereotypes and media representations, young girls start to think as they grow up that they are not suitable for certain types of activity.

The initiative aims to challenge these mental barriers by showing young girls their potential is not limited, and one such example was the collaboration with ESA to create two Samantha Cristoforetti lookalike Barbie dolls in order to highlight careers that are under-represented by women. The dolls, while not presently commercially available to the public, were used by Barbie Mattel Italia to promote the ‘Dream Gap Project’ in various events and campaigns.

Connection with inspirational role models has become even more important for young girls since the start of the global pandemic, as recent studies have demonstrated that media coverage of COVID-19 has been dominated by men, that female experts are more likely to be ignored, that the pandemic is more likely to cut off access to education for girls, and that mothers have consistently been more likely to sacrifice work to meet childcare needs.

The virtual roundtable on 4 March included speakers Dagmar Schumacher (Director, UN Women’s Brussels office), Delores Morton (CEO, Step Up), Miriam González (founder and chair, Inspiring Girls), Isabel Ferrer (Marketing Director, Barbie EMEA) with special guests Clara Amfo (British broadcaster) and Kristina Vogel (cycling champion), and was moderated by Andrea Thompson, editor-in-chief of Marie Claire UK.