The Power of Social Media in Connecting People From Groups Where They Are Marginalized

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I wonder if people still in that commercial book market world would still celebrate and see the achievements of women scientists. I think social media has been extraordinarily powerful for connecting people from groups where they are marginalized. Some American scientific funding is now requiring EDI statement on a research proposal. And you can sit down as someone like me who really cares about this a lot and really articulate yourself in the word, right? Or ask chat GPT to write you anEDI statement. It could make it better or worse than we currently have - but there's no easy answer.

Jessica Wade is a physicist at Imperial College London who, while spending her day working on special carbon-based materials that can be used as semiconductors, has spent her nights writing nearly 2,000 Wikipedia entries about underrepresented figures in science. That, along with numerous other forms of public engagement—including writing a children’s book about nanotechnology—is all in an effort to actually do something productive to correct gender and racial biases in STEM.

She joined Tyler to discuss if there are any useful gender stereotypes in science, distinguishing between productive and unproductive ways to encourage women in science, whether science Twitter is biased toward men, how AI will affect gender participation gaps, how Wikipedia should be improved, how she judges the effectiveness of her Wikipedia articles, how she’d improve science funding, her work on chiral materials and its near-term applications, whether writing a kid’s science book should be rewarded in academia, what she learned spending a year studying art in Florence, what she’ll do next, and more.

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Recorded February 21st, 2023

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