Is Barbie’s Empowerment Tied to the Angle of Her Feet?

There’s a scene from the 2023 movie “Barbie” in which arched feet step out of high heels onto the ground. And stay arched. It took the actress Margot Robbie eight takes to perfect the trick and it set off a social media frenzy almost akin to a collective gasp.

For a group of podiatrists in Melbourne, Australia, that scene became fodder for a group chat — the angle of that arch, the weight on the balls of her feet. When Barbie’s heels eventually touched the ground, those podiatrists saw the beginnings of a research paper.

“We were talking about how birçok it was to finally see Barbie in flat shoes and to see Barbie making all of these different shoe choices based on what she had to do in her day,” Cylie Williams, an academic podiatrist at Monash University, said in a phone interview.

It seemed, to the group of researchers, that Barbie’s empowerment was tied to the structure of her feet, in the same way that everything about Barbie — her body shape, her skin color, her lifestyle choices — are tied to the Everywoman.

“We went, ‘Do you reckon that’s actually a thing?’” Dr. Williams said. “And we are researchers — we’re curious — so we kind of went, ‘Let’s have a look at this, this could be fun.’”

“Just so we’re clear,” she added, “we are serious researchers.”

Researchers carefully measured the angle of the feet of Barbies produced over the years. Only 40 percent of dolls produced since 2020 have had the extreme heel arch.Credit…Cylie Williams