Barbie is the first woman to appear in a Google image search for 'CEO'

Fake CEO Barbie
(Image credit: Screenshot)

It's true — Barbie is apparently the most notable female figure paving the way for women in the workplace:

The worst part of that already-bad sentence? This CEO Barbie is not even a real Barbie; the image is actually from a 2005 Onion article, as The Verge points out. The article "sarcastically observed that 'women don't run companies,' they just 'work behind the scenes to bring a man's vision to light.' Ouch. Ten years later, that hits a little too close to home.

The observation comes in the wake of a study by the University of Washington that suggests gender representations in Google image searches can affect users' worldviews. The study concluded that women were significantly underrepresented in several jobs, including CEOs; only 11 percent of search results were women, whereas 27 percent of CEOs are female. Women were over-represented in the search for "telemarketer," however.

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So much for a crack in the glass ceiling.

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Stephanie Talmadge

Stephanie is an editorial assistant at TheWeek.com. She has previously worked for USA Today and Modern Luxury Media.