08/04/2022
I’m not playing diversity; I’m publishing it!
So excited that the .doing.science team was able to publish our first paper!
Traditional media constantly underrepresent women, especially women of color and Black Indigenous women of color. This can have a severe impact on women developing positive STEM identities that allow them to not only thrive but stay in the STEM fields.
That’s why the WDS Instagram was started by founder .a.phillips , to use social media as a change agent to knockdown those stereotypes in order to show that .
In 4 years, our project has featured 800+ women scientist globally. We realized that this dataset was too important not to analyze the impact that the page has had!
We analyzed posts to see:
1⃣ if we highlight diverse
2⃣ if these posts get higher engagement
3⃣ the effects on our followers
What did we find? We were successful!
- 37% of their posts feature WOC and a third with bilingual captions
- Posts of BIWOC/WOC and bilingual posts have higher engagement and more likely to mention other themes beyond science
- We feature diverse, international scientists by leveraging the grad student community, which is more diverse
- Actively recruiting and soliciting BIWOC/WOC to be featured and prioritizing these features increased the racial diversity on our page
- Followers engage with the page “for inspiration” and “for role models”
Overall, developing a positive STEM identity is important in recruiting and retaining women, especially WOC in STEM. Until institutions prioritize diversity, recruitment, retainment, women will look to social media for those role models and mentors we so desperately need.
Link in bio to read the full paper!
