Recently, a friend of mine commented that scientists "don't use Twitter much." The statement may have been true in the past, but as evidenced by #IAmAScientistBecause and #BeyondMarieCurie, scientists and science enthusiasts are now driving some trending topics on Twitter.
Yesterday, a story on Nature.com explained how these two popular hashtags have encouraged scientists to speak out. The first was created by the NatureCareers team in summer 2014, and the hashtag's popularity suddenly increased earlier this week after Jon Tennant (@Protohedgehog), a graduate student studying paleontology at Imperial College London, shared the hashtag with his 6,000 some followers on Twitter. By Tuesday, the hashtag was trending on Twitter.
The resulting flood of tweets rallied scientists like epidemiologist Chelsea Polis, PhD, (@cbpolis) who told Nature.com she spent a day following the IAmAScientistBecause Twitter campaign online. “Despite all of the negatives, there’s so much that’s beautiful about science,” Polis said.
Meanwhile, a separate empowering conversation began when science editor Melissa Vaught (@biochembelle) tweeted about Rachel Swaby's (@rachelswaby) Wired.com story on scientific achievements made by women. In her story, Swaby states that one woman tends to dominate conversations of female scientists and that we need to open our eyes to the many contributions other female scientists have made, and are making, to science:
Today if you ask someone to name a woman scientist, the first and only name they'll offer is Marie Curie. It's one of the biggest obstacles to better representation of women in science and technology, and it's time to cut it out. Stop talking about Marie Curie; she wouldn't have wanted things this way.
Vaught told Nature.com that she created #BeyondMarieCurie as a response to Swaby's article because “we need diverse stories of women in science."
As I scrolled through the hundreds of Tweets aggregated by the two hashtags one post in particular stood out. As shown above, chemist Carina Jensen, PhD, (@Chem_Monkey) tweeted, "IAmAScientistBecause a professor said women don't do well in Chemistry. I proved him wrong." For me, this unites the sentiments of the two hashtags beautifully.
Previously: The power of social media: How one man uses it to help amputees get prosthetics, A day in the lab: Stanford scientists share their stories, what fuels their work, Chipping away at stereotypes about older women and science, one story at a time, What's holding women in the sciences back? and Women in science: A rare breed
