How I turned online misogyny about my PhD into momentum for my career

"In just a few hours, a screenshot of my post had been circulated widely on the social-media platform X, accompanied by comments questioning my competence and the wisdom of my life choices, rating my physical appearance and speculating about my fertility. One read, 'they just handing doctorates out to anyone now' and another suggested that I would have spent my time better by having four babies instead of studying."

"I'd seen this kind of hostility before: a year earlier, an academic at the University of Cambridge, UK, had posted about her thesis on the politics of smell and was subjected to similar derision. Naively, I assumed that by working in a scientific field, I was safe. It quickly became clear that the common denominator between people targeted for 'daring' to post about their academic accomplishments was not their discipline, but their gender."

"When the backlash escalated, I had three options: stay silent, delete the post or confront the comments. I decided on the last, mostly because these comments and beliefs just seemed so bizarre and entertaining to me that I felt I should share them with the world. It was so difficult to take them seriously that I started finding them funny."

A female researcher at Oxford University posted a celebratory photo after completing her PhD in insect cooperation and labor division. The post quickly went viral on social media, attracting hostile comments questioning her competence, appearance, and life choices, with one post reaching over 21 million views. She recognized this harassment pattern extended beyond her discipline to other female academics, such as a Cambridge researcher studying the politics of smell. Rather than remaining silent or deleting the post, she chose to confront the misogynistic comments by reposting them with commentary, finding the attacks so absurd that she responded with humor and public exposure of the vitriol directed at women in academia.

Read at Nature