In a move that should not be as surprising as it is, Barbie has found another way to screw over young women.

A new licensed book, Barbie: I Can Be a Computer Engineer, published by Random House, epically fails to portray women as able to code, or even touch computers without messing something up.

The book follows Barbie through a brief plotline that is sort of peripherally related to coding, if you squint.

Barbie, a computer engineering student in this installment of what is, no doubt, a diverse and inspirational array of career-focused children’s books, does not appear to have any rudimentary knowledge of laptop use.

Over the course of the book, Barbie is quick to inform the reader that although she is designing a cute, educational game, she will need the help of two male characters for all of the coding. She then displays a profound lack of ability to handle a computer virus, receives the help of the male characters to fix her sister’s computer and, in the end, determines that she can be a computer engineer too!

One of these things is not like the other.

Here’s the thing, Random House: women should absolutely be encouraged to go into STEM careers. Despite the existence of associations for women in math, science and engineering careers, we occupy far fewer than half of the positions in most of those areas. And informing young girls, even indirectly, that men need to code for them and fix what they are apparently unable to handle themselves? That’s not helping anything.

The idea that women can’t or shouldn’t go into computer-related fields has been around for a while. And sadly, this book’s message – get the boys to fix things for you, Barbie – plays right into the issues that women with technology already face.

The Internet has come to the rescue, thank the Powers That Be, with a series of “remixes” of the book. In a particularly meta-solution to the problematic storyline, Georgia Tech Human-Centered Computing Ph.D. candidate Casey Fiesler reworked the wording to let Barbie explore the issues that women in STEM fields face, like sexism.

“If you don’t like the narrative, change it,” Fiesler wrote on her website, something other websites have done as well. But if we’re going to encourage women in books to code, and we should, Fiesler’s empowering take on the issue is the right one.

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