This Is What It’s Like To Be A Female Scientist On YouTube

"Thumbs up for the Skyrim reference, it made me chortle. I assume that was written by Michael."

by Steph Harmon 3 December 2013

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Emily Graslie is a science reporter for the Field Museum, with a YouTube channel called ‘The Brain Scoop‘. She has 172,000 subscribers, and most of them are lovely, supportive and engaged.

But some people who watch her work are terrible, as she explained in her most recent post, uploaded five days ago. For her regular ‘Ask Emily’ series, she was asked what parts of her job she doesn’t like, and whether she experiences sexism.

Yes she does experience sexism, she answered. And comments like this are the parts of her job that she doesn’t like:

“This is the weirdest lesbian porn I’ve ever seen.”

“I can’t stop looking at her nose… It looks so weird. It kind of makes her look like a nerdy pig.”

“Emily, even though the clothes you’re wearing kinda disguise it, you look like you might be pretty hot under them, perhaps you should consider wearing slightly racier clothing; besides obviously pleasing to straight males and gay females, it might boost your self-esteem.”

“Thumbs up for the Skyrim reference, it made me chortle. I assume that was written by Michael.”

Emily puts a compelling case forward, blaming comments like this — and the values that underpin them — for the rarity of female-hosted STEM (science, technology, engineering, maths) channels online. Women may be deterred because they’re under more pressure to be “the whole package”, lest they be subjected to personal, negative, insulting and sexist comments like the ones that Emily receives. She calls it internet bullying.

“We have a fear of the feedback from our subscribers and commenters because we’re afraid that our audience is more focused on our appearence than the quality of our content,” she says. “Even more than that … we’re not convinced that people are watching for the content in the first place.”