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Why are Instagram posts of scientists important? Women developing STEM identities turn to TV shows/movies for vicarious role models. But there are two big problems 1⃣ most of these scientists are white 2⃣ women are highly stereotyped/tokenized - and nothing has improved over time

Social media can be an agent of change 🙌 I started Women Doing Science (WDS) because I wanted to see hundreds of images of what a scientist looked like - moving beyond typical singular stereotypes. 4 years later, our #scicomm project has featured 800+ scientists from around the world

A few years into the project (& the last year of my PhD), I realized this dataset was begging exploration. I teamed up w/@crewalsh (data sci extraordinaire!) & WDS leadership (Korie Grayson, PhD (she/her), @camillapenney, Fatimagül Husain) & sought advice from my social science hero @JuliePosselt

We got to work! Our study had five main parts: 1⃣ asking featured women about their identities 2⃣ scraping likes and views from posts 3⃣ analyzing themes in captions 4⃣ surveying followers 5⃣ case study of viral posts

Part 1⃣ Demographic survey: We asked featured scientists about many aspects of identity, but only had statistical power to analyze age, race, academic position, and field of study. Let's start with race: 16% of posts featured BIWOC and 21% featured other WOC.

How do we feature so many BIWOC/WOC? 72% of our posts are of grad students, which allows us to be more diverse. We also think showing grad students over established faculty as role models is more effective - the level of knowledge and expertise is inspiring, but still attainable

Also our team actively works on recruitment! You cannot highlight racial diversity on accident. We have a diverse team that scouts BIWOC/WOC, we hold themed weeks for under-represented fields (e.g. robotics, geoscience), and we push posts of non-white women to the top of queues.

Our features are also international - with scientists from around the world and ~30% of posts translated to another language (spanning 29 total languages!). Posts were so successful in Spanish/Portuguese, we even created a second page for this community: instagram.com/mujeres.hacien…

So WDS features diverse, international scientists by leveraging the grad student community. But do these posts do better? For part 2⃣ we scraped "likes" from each post and divided that by the number of views. We found that yes! - posts of BIWOC/WOC have higher engagement.

What about bilingual posts? Those perform better too! But the intersection of language and race is more nuanced - for BIWOC posts did better in just english, but for other WOC, the opposite was observed. This highlights distinct representation needs for sub-audiences within WDS.

When we analyzed caption themes in part 3⃣ we also found that BIWOC and WOC were more likely to mention other themes beyond science - like outreach, mentoring, and specific identities - which is critically important for developing multi-dimensionality in social media role models.

In part 4⃣ we asked followers why they engage w/WDS, finding: "for inspiration" and "for role models." There is even evidence that for some followers, role models move from being vicarious to realized: ~10% have reached out to a scientist after their post.

I also want to thank all of our incredible volunteers on the WDS team and the 800+ women that have trusted us to tell their stories.

Since 2018, Dr Alexandra A Phillips has been highlighting diverse #WomenInSTEM through Women Doing Science. With almost 100K Instagram followers, she has now published a paper analyzing the impact of profiling #WomenInScience on social media. Find out what she learned! 💡news.ucsb.edu/2022/020686/ma…

Key findings from our paper on the Women Doing Science Instagram:

Trending in #Communication: ooir.org/trending.php?d… 1) How China Divides the Transnat'l Left-Wing Alternative Media on Twitter (Media and Communication) 2) Diversifying Representations of Female Scientists on Social Media (Social Media+Society) 3) Speaking Security on Social Media

Our paper is trending! Check out the Women Doing Science recently published paper about the representation of #WomenInSTEM on social media here: journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.11…

Congrats to Dr Alexandra A Phillips and the team at Women Doing Science for this awesome publication!

AGU abstracts are due tomorrow! Did you know that Women of Color get the fewest opportunities at our largest geoscience conference? Let's change that. The Women Doing Science WONDER fund would be the 1st AGU (American Geophysical Union) scholarship specifically for BIWOC. Donate at agu.org/Learn-and-Deve…

Thrilled to be at the SB Library science fair today to talk about Women Doing Science and the diversity of women in STEM 🥰