Cape Town - Toy Maker Mattel has raced to pull an offensive Barbie book off Amazon after a social media storm over the content that appears to dismiss young women.
According to a report on TechCrunch, the toy maker pulled I Can Be A Computer Engineer from the Amazon website because of an outcry that the book does nothing to portray women computer engineers positively.
The book is filled with episodes where Barbie is helpless around computers and two male characters, Steve and Brian, do the real work.
Here are a couple of tweets on the topic:
And a few dude-non-developer types. RT @mashable: Dear Barbie, get it together. Love, female developers everywhere. http://t.co/yk22HGRKgb
— Mark Kats (@ActualKats) November 20, 2014
@mashable so in the book, is Barbie a designer or an engineer? They are two different things.
— Samantha Wikan (@Swikan) November 20, 2014
Despite the social media outcry, screenwriter Pamela Ribon wrote this riposte on Gizmodo, saying the book is essentially Barbie: I can be an Actress upside down.
"Helen Jane and I were so livid after reading this book we spent the first fifteen minutes spitting out syllables and half-sounds. We'd go from outraged to defeated to livid in the span of ten seconds," she writes.
Twitter user Kathleen Tuite (@kaflurbaleen) put together a website where users can "Help Barbie be the competent, independent, bad-ass engineer that she wants to be".