Social media platforms are a ubiquitous communication tool, with nearly 2 billion people using Facebook every day, for example. But these platforms curate their offering, with neural networks using algorithms to recommend content to their users, using inputs such as age, gender and location. For sciences, including astronomy, the result is a largely male audience watching, listening and reading to content from men. Now one leading woman astronomer, Dr. Becky Smethurst of the University of Oxford, is finding ways to overcome this bias, not least via her YouTube channel and its 400,000 subscribers. She presented her work at the National Astronomy Meeting at the University of Warwick on Tuesday 13 July.
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Source: Phys.org