The 2023 Career of the Year for Mattel’s
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“I was blown away,” Dr. Jen Welter, the first female coach in the NFL and the first woman to play running back in men’s professional football, said about finding out Barbie was choosing Women in Sports for its Career of the Year. “As a little girl, I didn’t have this. Now a little girl takes her out of the box and can see herself doing that. I never had that in football throughout my career.”
Having highlighted more than 250 careers, the folks at Mattel say they want to inspire the limitless potential in every girl by taking on culturally relevant and aspirational roles in fields where women are underrepresented.
The 2021 Sports Media Racial and Gender Report Card: Associated Press Sports Editors (APSE) Racial and Gender Report Card found just 16.7% of sports editors are women, and it’s not any better when you look at reporters (17.8%) and columnists (14.4%).
The first female general manager in Major League Baseball (Kim Ng of the Miami Marlins) was just hired in 2020. And although women are increasingly holding assistant general manager roles in the NBA, NFL and NHL, there are currently no female general managers in any of those sports.
Dr. Welter was the first female coach in the NFL in 2015 when she was hired by the Arizona Cardinals. When asked at what age she started thinking about coaching as a career path, she said she didn’t.
“I never ever imagined that I could coach football, because there was no one who looked like me. Football was the first place in the world that somebody told me that girls and boys did different things. I remember distinctly being told girls don’t do that.”
Dr. Welter credits her Army dad for instilling in her a belief that things should be decided on meritocracy.
“He let me go fishing with the boys, and it wasn’t like he only let me take the rod when it was a small fish. He believed if it was your fish, you took it, and you either caught it or you didn’t. And when I finally got an opportunity to try out for my first football team, it was the same thing.”
Girls, however, have to be given that opportunity to believe they can be in these positions previously reserved for men, Dr. Welter says.
“Everything that I’ve done, every first, was impossible until it wasn’t. The permission to dream is the start of that because then once you have that dream, you can do the work. You’re driven to do the same things that the guys are doing. But if we don’t have that early idea, then where does that same permission come from?”
Dr. Welter says it was former Dallas Cowboy Wendell Davis who gave her that permission.
“After I played in pro football, he told me I had to coach. I instinctively said no, girls don’t coach football. Thankfully, he took the job on my behalf and told me about it later. He said I couldn’t quit or the entire narrative surrounding women coaching in men’s pro football would be about how there once had been a women but she quit.”
She didn’t quit, instead paving a path for future women on the sidelines. By the 2022 season, there were 15 female coaches in the NFL. There were also three female game officials last season. The Hula Bowl even had an all-female officiating crew in 2023.
“Me as a visible example down on the sidelines, when you see it, you can’t unsee it. Girls could say, ‘That looks cool. I want to do that.’ Now you have a brand like Barbie, with a big giant corporation like Mattel, saying they want to change this for girls. This is how we’re going to start. That doesn’t mean it’s a finish. It’s a start.”
In addition to the new collection, Barbie is committing to support and empower the next generation of female leaders in sports by partnering with VOICEINSPORT, a community that connects and inspires girls through sports.
As part of the partnership, Barbie and VOICEINSPORT will host an inspirational 45-minute virtual mentoring session on “Building a Career in Sports” on September 12 for girls ages 12-13. Dr. Welter and VOICEINSPORT CEO Stef Strack will be the featured speakers, alongside host Pepper Parsley, a 12-year-old sports journalist who hosts her own show, Dish with Pepper.
The Career of Year Women in Sports dolls are available from Mattel beginning today and retail for $49.99.
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