The "Barbie" movie was huge last summer. It broke box office records and created something of a pink-inspired cultural phenomenon. But, did it also inspire a new generation of women to go to the gynecologist?
That’s the question Christopher Worsham asked in a new study published in JAMA. Worsham is an ICU doctor and professor at Harvard Medical School, and he told The Show, it was all inspired by the very last scene in the movie when Barbie emerges as a fully realized woman.
The Show spoke with Worsham about what came next.
Full conversation
CHRISTOPHER WORSHAM: So this is all in the context of, there's a number of studies out there showing that pop culture does influence our health behaviors. And so, it might not be a natural thought to think of this, but movies, TV, celebrities, they are part of our public health system. Whether we like it or not, what's happening out there in the culture does kind of dictate our behaviors in many ways, and health is one of them.
So, we wanted to know — take a look, at least, at the data — whether this final joke at the end of the movie was having any impact out there.
LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. So, I mean, that's like a difficult thing — it would seem to me, at least — to determine, to be able to study in an academic, official way. How did you go about doing it?
WORSHAM: So, at the core of this is we want to see: Did the "Barbie" movie cause some sort of change in behaviors about gynecologists? Right? And when we study cause and effect, the most powerful tool we have in research is randomization.
Now, obviously we can't do a randomized, controlled trial of the "Barbie" movie — certainly not a year later. But we can take advantage of randomness when it happens by accident. And so in this case, the "Barbie" movie's release was not random. Right? The movie studios like movies to come out in the summer.
But, when it comes to the general public's interest in gynecologists, the timing of the "Barbie" movie's release was random. Right? There's no thing happening in July that makes people more interested in gynecologists.
So, what we thought was, well, if we just look at Google search data for gynecologists — obviously people are googling gynecologists all the time, and it's at some baseline level. But if we were to see that there was an increase around the time the "Barbie" movie came out, as long as there was nothing else going on that would make there be a national interest in gynecologists — which there wasn't — we could attribute that increase to the "Barbie" movie.
And this has been done in prior studies. So, 10 or 20 years ago, Katie Couric livestreamed her colonoscopy on television.
GILGER: Of course, I remember this. This was like a big moment. Yeah.
WORSHAM: Right, and, again, the timing of Katie Couric's colonoscopy was random with respect to everybody else's interest in colonoscopies. So, after that colonoscopy, there was about a 21% increase in colonoscopy rates. So, it was transient, but very real.
And a similar thing happened when Angelina Jolie, a couple years later, wrote an op-ed about the BRCA breast cancer gene mutation. Similarly, after that came out, there was this sudden transient increase in genetic testing for breast cancer.
So, again, taking advantage of that randomness and building on some of these other studies looking at how pop culture and celebrities are influencing our health, this was sort of a fun thing to look at. Especially, considering that "Barbie" was really meant to explore some issues — real issues — related to womanhood in a comedic way.
So, we thought this was a nice, complimentary thing to look at.
GILGER: Yeah, yeah. Probably an unintentional byproduct by the filmmakers, but a very interesting one. And you were able to prove here that there was a big jump, right? And at least searches, people being interested in this.
WORSHAM: Exactly. So, this is what we found. When we looked at searches for just gynecologist, there was a pretty big jump in searches just for the word gynecologist, and there was another smaller spike for gynecologist definition — again, so people sort of wanting to know what a gynecologist was. And if we look at the absolute numbers, there were thousands of people across the country looking up gynecologists around the time that this movie came out in that week there.
When we looked at other things — so we want to see, okay, people are interested in gynecologists. Was this translating into people seeking gynecological care or learning more about women's health?
So, again, looking at search data, we looked for were people googling gynecologist appointment, gynecologist near me, those kinds of things. We didn't see any spike there. We also looked at a lot of women's health subjects. No spikes there. And then we looked at medical care more broadly, doctors more broadly. Didn't see any spikes there.
So, we concluded that it seemed like the "Barbie" movie — and to the extent there was a "Barbie" effect — it did create some interest in gynecologists and learning about what they were, but, at least from a Google searches standpoint, we didn't see that translating into people trying to go see their gynecologist.
GILGER: Okay, well, there may be something there that's residual down the line, we can hope. But that's really interesting. Talk a little bit about the need here. Are there a lot of people, women who do not see a gynecologist, clearly don't know what it is, and maybe should?
WORSHAM: I mean, a lot of the care that gynecologists — and obviously other doctors provide, too — is preventive, and it's challenging to get people into preventive care. So, I think one thing that we really hope to see that — like you just said — we might see this down the line, is just: if there's more awareness about what a gynecologist is and what a gynecologist does, could that translate down the road into people getting better preventive care, or just generally seeking out women's health care that they may not be inclined to seek out otherwise?
A funny thing, when we submitted this article for peer review, one of the peer reviewers came back and said, how do you know that these people searching for gynecologists weren't just a bunch of teenage boys who didn't know what a gynecologist was? And our response to that was, we don't know. We don't know who was searching for this.
But isn't that a great thing if — assuming they're all teenage boys who don't know what a gynecologist is — that now thousands of them do know what a gynecologist is? Right?
So, just this idea that — we use the term health literacy when we talk about public health — this idea that people just understand medicine, women's health care a little bit better as a result of a single joke in this movie. I think that's important, and it tells us something about the real role that pop culture, movies, TV shows, celebrities can play in public health.
GILGER: A real role, in fact. That's amazing. All right, we will leave it there. That is Christopher Worsham, assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, co-author of the book "Random Acts of Medicine," an ICU doctor and professor joining us to talk more about this most recent study on the "Barbie" effect. Christopher, thank you for coming on. I really appreciate you taking the time to explain this.
WORSHAM: Thank you so much for having me.
