To reach science influencers, you first have to make your way through the most popular social media niches: fashion, beauty, wellness, health, food and travel. Then you must navigate a legion of pseudoscientists with highly visited profiles whose theories lack any shred of truth; finally, you must circumvent algorithmic biases that associate STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) with men. And finally, there they are: the women who argue that the digital noise flooding Instagram, YouTube and TikTok must be fought with scientific knowledge.
They began over the past 10 years, especially since the Covid pandemic, pushing against the current to counter two trends at once: the surge of misinformation, and the dominance of their male peers on social networks explaining physics, chemistry and mathematics. Now, each from her own specialty, they cover everything: from the nanoscale to the planetary scale, from abstract theories to the most mundane applications, from landmark laws to the limits of what is considered scientific.
Anna Morales, 31, invented a format as unexpected as it is original: she explains nanoscience through Pokémon. The Spaniard earned her doctorate in Switzerland with a specialization in nanomaterials. Hence the name she chose for her profile: @sizematters; although it lends itself to misunderstandings, she is referring to a fundamental property at the nanoscale: the smaller a particle, the greater the surface area exposed. “Since nearly all my followers are guys, some are a bit defensive,” she says about the handle.
She records and edits her videos, which are followed by more than 300,000 people, from her home studio in Sant Cugat del Vallès, in Spain’s Catalonia region. She is as expert in nanoscience as she is in Pokémon, whose lesser-known properties she tracks to explain different scientific theories and laws. Her biggest effort is breaking down a formula and presenting it in an entertaining way. To do so she uses characters such as Charizard, Blastoise or Golisopod to teach thermodynamics, power, water flow or what isopods are.
More than 80% of her audience is male. That was to be expected considering that video games and the branches of science unrelated to health are heavily male-dominated. It does not happen every day, and perhaps for that reason one of the greatest professional satisfactions comes when a man praises her work. “In general, they find it very hard to compliment a woman,” she says.
Like the other interviewees, she monetizes her work: she accepts advertising for products she can somehow relate to her specialty. As with any influencer, posting videos in which she takes political positions can affect the number of offers she receives. Size Matters does not comment on scientific topics that may have political correlates—such as climate change or bioethical issues—in principle because they fall outside her specialty. The most political piece she created was about Sci-Hub, a pirated library that provides access to millions of scientific articles, in which she opened a debate about the free availability of knowledge.
Rocío Vidal (@Lagatadeschrodinger) is a communicator with 946,000 YouTube subscribers and nearly half a million on Instagram. She has received multiple awards and has also been involved in controversies for taking positions on current debates. Trained in journalism and science communication, she specializes in debunking hoaxes that circulate online. Flat-earth theories, pseudotherapies, men advocating abstinence from masturbation, various conspiracy theories such as chemtrails (the idea that planes spray the population) or the claim that expensive water is of better quality than cheap water are some of the topics that draw her attention.
Unlike Size Matters, whose main merit is simplifying and making highly technical theories entertaining, La Gata de Schrödinger’s work is journalistic in nature. One of the daily questions the 32-year-old must ask herself is: when is it worth untangling a hoax, and when does speaking about it instead amplify it? She answers: “Every day I get sent hoaxes. I don’t cover them in a video until I see they are something of concern.”
One topic that particularly interests her is the manosphere, a circuit of men who feel in crisis and emphasize their masculinity online. In one of her recent videos, La Gata de Schrödinger debunks a theory claiming that women can become pregnant by someone they had sex with years earlier. These men build their hypotheses on false syllogisms; yet the theories are widely popular. “It’s clear they dress an ideology up as science. I feel the need to dismantle these claims, because it’s really easy—there’s no support for them anywhere,” reflects this influencer.
But taking them on has a cost. She says she has been harassed, trivialized, threatened more than once and even been the target of hate campaigns. She accepts that it is a systemic problem: “Violence on social networks is much greater against us. Obviously I was sexualized. If I make a video in the summer wearing a tank top, half the comments refer to my physical appearance. I have breasts; I can’t take them off, what am I supposed to do? Immediately there’s the shadow of doubt about whether I’m exploiting my body to get more views.”
A 2022 study by the University of Valencia confirmed that women suffer more harassment than men on social media. Years earlier, Amnesty International warned that one in five women was a victim of online harassment and that, as a result, they changed their behavior on social media: half stopped posting their opinions. The study confirms that discrimination is suffered more by women.
Alba Moreno, 25), whose online handle is @fisicamr, also points to this phenomenon: “Since my look doesn’t fit, people decide to criticize that instead of what I’m saying. Why don’t you debate the black holes, instead of the top I’m wearing.” She has the word physis tattooed on her neck, the transliteration of “physics” in ancient Greek. She shows up for the interview wrapped in a full-length fur coat. Underneath, a black garment covers her chest and she wears camouflage shorts. She sports very long nails and stiletto boots. Since moving from Andalusia to Madrid, this influencer has become known in the scene as La Física. She has built a loyal audience of nearly a million followers on Instagram. On that platform, with her Bad Gyal–style looks, she talks about black holes, zero gravity and quantum superposition.
Since she can remember she has been fascinated with the universe, the sky and the stars, and she recalls explaining math and science to her friends before exams when she was little. Her mother always encouraged her: at 10 she gave her a telescope, which she still uses. With such a passion for the universe, she never took an interest in astrology, which, like much of the scientific community, she denounces—calling it “the horoscope.” Her family includes social workers, clerical staff and surveyors, but no scientists, so she had reservations about studying an exact science.
“I was lucky that when I was a teenager there was the internet. So I did a search and found many women scientists and physicists who had made incredible discoveries, like Lise Meitner or Vera Rubin. Their work had been taken from them by a male colleague; they had not been recognized,” she recalls. As in most fields of knowledge, women scientists were first ignored in their discoveries, then barred from publication spaces for being women and, finally, excluded from historical canons. Cases like that of the creator of the first algorithm, Ada Lovelace, whose work for years was attributed to Charles Babbage, were common.
Rather than letting historical discrimination hold her back, discovering these women became an incentive for La Física. “It was a rush. I thought: well, I can too.” Like a chain, that same impulse she received from past colleagues she passes on to younger women and girls. “Many write to tell me that thanks to me they bought their first physics book or that they felt incapable of studying and are now enrolled in the degree.” Despite a discouraging professor, she decided to study physics. Since she couldn’t find a group of peers at university to debate the topics that interested her, she thought: “Why not look for that community on social media?” She started in 2021 with the aim of fostering conversation, as if it were a 2000s-era blog.
The number of women in scientific studies has increased in recent years, but even today they do not exceed 35% of enrolled students, according to data provided by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities. Being fewer does not mean they have more opportunities. On the contrary, the glass ceiling remains unbroken: women do not reach 30% of the highest academic positions. Teresa Arnandis (@ladyscienceofficial), a 39-year-old influencer from Valencia, says women scientists must work harder to be recognized. “In the lab I had to do twice as many experiments. I had to work four times as hard—as a researcher, as a teacher and earlier as a student,” she says in a conversation at the cafeteria of the Príncipe Felipe Science Museum. La Física shares the same impression from her time as a student relative to her male peers, although between one woman’s experiences and the other’s studies the fourth wave of feminism has also made an impact.
Lady Science is a total scientist: she has a PhD in biochemistry and biomedicine, a postdoctoral fellowship in molecular oncology, diplomas in pharmacy and optics and optometry, and master’s degrees in molecular biology and in nutrition and health. In addition to being a researcher she was a university lecturer: “That’s what I prepared for all my life,” she says. Today, communication occupies all of her time except what she devotes to motherhood, which she does not downplay: “I am in favor of present mothers. After all, someone has to raise the children.”
As a child she spent hours in her father’s pharmacy, where there were telescopes, incubators and experiments. There she experienced what other children only dream of: “One day we had fertilized chicken eggs. We put them in my father’s incubator at the pharmacy. The next day it was full of chicks. I found it super fascinating.” During the pandemic she taught histology at the university. Faced with the large volume of hoaxes and false news, she felt, she says, a moral obligation to fight them.
Gradually, while caring for her baby and as her work as an influencer went increasingly well, she quit research and teaching to devote herself entirely to social media: “I could not do four things badly,” she explains. “And it never occurred to me that you could make a living from outreach.” She already had basic photography skills from studying optics, and she learned to edit videos with TikTok’s editor. In addition to updates in biochemistry and molecular biology, such as new vaccines or oncology treatments, she covers topics aimed at a more general audience: she answers scientifically grounded questions like why ice floats or why cats have vertical pupils.
As she tells her story, and during the photo session, she never stops smiling. She is the only interviewee who showed up without a representative or a stylist. Blonde, very tall and fair-skinned, her appearance prompts an inevitable question. On social networks, can her image be as decisive as her PhDs and academic excellence? After taking a few seconds to think, she answers: “Physically you need something of a hook, right? I call it a personal brand. I understand it’s necessary to make other groups visible, other kinds of personal stamps.” To that end, to make diversity visible, the interests that drive algorithms still have a long way to go.
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