Malala Yousafzai and husband join “Barbie” craze: “This Barbie has a Nobel Prize. He’s just Ken”

“Barbie” has touted itself as being a film for everyone. And apparently, that includes the renowned girls’ education activist Malala Yousafzai. 

“This Barbie has a Nobel Prize,” she wrote on Instagram along with an image of her and her husband, Asser Malik, in a “Barbie” movie prop box, joking: “He’s just Ken.”

The post is a riff on the film’s marketing, which consisted of a series of posters of the various Barbies in the film and their roles — a Nobel Prize winner in physics, a doctor, a president — while the Kens of the film got a message saying, “He’s just Ken.” 

Joking back, her husband responded, “I’m Kenough.” 

“We loved the movie, it was so funny and thoughtful,” Yousafzai said of the Greta Gerwig-directed blockbuster. “I hope this caption doesn’t hurt all the Kens as much as the movie Ken.” 

Yousafzai rose to international prominence after she was shot in the head as a teenager on her way home from school in Pakistan in 2012 by the Taliban, who targeted her for speaking out about the importance of education for girls. The militant who shot her had boarded her school van yelling, “Who is Malala,” and the group later said they were responsible for the attack because she was promoting “Western thinking.” 

She survived and used the international spotlight to become even more vocal in her activism. 

Two years later, Yousafzai became the youngest person to receive a Nobel Peace Prize for showing that “children and young people, too, can contribute to improving their own situations.” She later graduated from Oxford University. 

She married Malik, a manager with the Pakistan Cricket Board, in 2021.