Science communication lessons from the Women Doing Science Instagram

Abstract:

Instagram is being increasingly recognized as a powerful platform to catalyze social change. Women Doing Science, one such social media project, was founded in 2018 with the goal of increasing the visibility of women in STEM. Now, the page has featured over 500 female scientists’ stories, reaching an audience of over 80,000 followers from around the world. In these two years of sharing science globally, we have learned powerful lessons on science communication. The first is the need to communicate beyond the common language of English, especially with broad audiences. Over 20% of our posts appear in two language and our team of scientists has over a dozen translators. We will overview the editing process of our posts prior to bilingual publishing and the rewards we have seen from these efforts. Similarly, we will discuss a new spin-off of Women Doing Science called Mujeres Haciendo Ciencia, a Latin American focused page that will post solely in Spanish and Portuguese. The second lesson learned relates to diversity. Here, we have learned that active effort is required to have representation across fields, ethnicities, ages, experiences, etc. To meet this need we have grown a team of diversity officers to seek out diverse stories and encourage participation. Further, in the wake of the resurging Black Lives Matter movement, the Women Doing Science team also responded by specifically amplifying the voices of Black female scientists on our platform. In addition, we worked to establish a new endowed travel grant to send Black and Indigenous Women to AGU conferences called the WONDER Fund, which we hope to expand in coming years.