In a psychology lab at Oregon State University, 37 girls ages 4 to 7 have finally demonstrated what feminists have long warned: that playing with Barbie dolls drives home cultural stereotypes about a woman’s place and suppresses a little girl’s career ambitions.

But here’s an unexpected, though preliminary, finding: Playing with Mrs. Potato Head, by contrast, appears to have the effect of attending a “Lean In” circle on little girls.

After spending just five minutes with Jane Potato-Head, girls believed they could grow up to do pretty much anything a boy could do.

This small but telling experiment, published Wednesday in the journal Sex Roles, probably will do little to stem sales of Mattel’s Barbie dolls. But among equal-opportunity-conscious parents, it might spur a sales bump for Playskool’s Mrs. Potato Head, who, compared with Barbie, has a shape decidedly closer to that of most American women and apparently a lot more going on between her detachable ears.

And don’t be fooled by those career girl Barbies dressed up as doctors, astronauts, politicians and ocean explorers. The authors of the latest study report that whether girls played with “Doctor Barbie” or “Fashion Barbie,” they were likely to judge themselves capable of plying, on average, 1.5 fewer occupations than a boy could.

“Although the marketing slogan suggest(s) that Barbie can ‘Be Anything,’ girls playing with Barbie appear to believe that there are more careers for boys than for themselves,” wrote authors and psychology professors Aurora M. Sherman of Oregon State University and Eileen L. Zurbriggen of the University of California, Santa Cruz.