GoKawiilJuliet Turner was harassed on social media after posting about the successful completion of her PhD.Credit: Simon Kershenbaum
After devoting nearly four years to my PhD research on how insects cooperate and divide labour, I thought nothing of posting a photo on social media to celebrate passing the final oral examination of my degree. I wore a traditional academic gown, smiling in front of the golden limestone walls of New College at the University of Oxford, UK. “You can call me Doctor,” I wrote, punctuated with a sunglasses emoji. Maybe a bit cheeky, but harmless. Or so I thought.
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. One such post now has more than 21 million views.
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.
Meeting misogyny head-on
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.
I began reposting the best examples with commentary. Here are some highlights.
“I’m sure [your thesis] keeps you warm at night while your eggs shrivel and die.”
“If you follow an academic career, you will be unlikely to ever have or raise children — thus billions of years of evolution and suffering ends with you and your thesis.”
“Congrats on successfully becoming a biologist, but failing at biology. You are 30 years old with no husband or kids — a genetic dead end in an unbroken line of succession from your ancestors since the beginning of time. But hey, at least you have your cats to keep you company!”
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