I had a nasty experience with a “STEM-inist” influencer online last Spring for criticizing her unrealistic and bad advice. So many of her followers were gleeful and hopeful based on her ‘advice’. This woman has a PhD. I have a PhD. What could go wrong?
By her and her followers, I was harassed and my handle messaged out to her tens of thousands I followers. A 5 second Google Search of her name revealed that she was incredibly well-connected and had very positive, wholesome media online presence. She loves wearing pink and conforms to traditional, Western white beauty standards. She got an unbelievably high six-figure starting salary right out of her PhD (the starting salary for most PhDs is between $60,000-$80,000 US dollars). Yet, she consistently posts unrealistic financial advice.
I filed multiple complaints against her, but nobody responded to me. I liberally blocked many accounts and unfollowed anyone of my followers who followed her. It took weeks until it settled down. I have now had issues being locked out of my account periodically. And you know what? I’m a nobody on Instagram. I have < 1000 followers. Why the is she threatened by me? I’m a mouse to her elephant.
Reading Jo’s great posts on the toxicity of White Feminism, plus this incident and my interest in tech, this made me research the dynamics of “Mean Girl Social Media”.
It’s not Cool to be Queen Bee Anymore
As someone actively navigating the job market, networking online, and promoting a Substack, I’ve come across quite a few influencers. Not makeup influencers. Not fashion influencers. Women-in-STEM influencers.
At first glance, it all seems empowering. We see pink keyboards and lab coats as they lean into the camera and narrate their work. They easily have over 30K followers on their platform of choice (usually Instagram, but LinkedIn, TikTok are big players too). They get dozens of comments, usually of glowing adoration.
But I’m increasingly unsettled by the polished “girlboss in the lab” aesthetic. Maybe I’m cynical, but the whole thing feels strangely performative. Something about it smells fishy, reminiscent of the whole Queen Bee trope from high school days.
The Queen Bees of yesteryear—from Mean Girls to Gossip Girl to Heathers, and a myriad of sitcoms obsessed with girls gaining popularity—have been so satirized in popular media that nobody wants to be Queen Bee anymore.
There are more sophisticated psychological tactics at play as well. Content creators thrive on creating the illusion of authenticity and truthfulness, even when the opposite may be true. To complicate matters, the Queen Bee of the 2000s and Girlboss of the 2010s has fallen out of disfavor.
In the 2020s, many creators want to portray themselves as kind, benevolent, and helpful. So, they have their followers do the dirty work for them of gatekeeping and maintaining their status. Many also defend puffy-pink feminism and consider a bland, androgynous style of dress (often required in lab environments) as a key characteristic of their oppression. So, they embrace a hyper-polished femininity in the lab (some influencers flaunt their designer clothes while walking down lab aisles) as a pseudo-form of self-empowerment.
Aggression among women and girls has been significantly understudied. It was not until the 1970s, that women’s psychology was examined as separate to a man’s. And it was not until the 1980s when female relationships and aggression were studied in-depth. Phyllis Chelser in “Women’s Inhumanity to Women” wrote that:
Status-seeking girls tend to be rejected or excluded by other girls. As we shall see, girls view members who are in any way better or worse than other group members as less desirable friends. When men exclude a woman, it may indeed have dire consequences both economically and socially. However, being excluded by boys and men is not as emotionally devastating to a girl or woman as being excluded by others of her own gender p82-83
Perhaps such aggression is ignored since it has not as frequently manifested itself in physical violence. Hierarchies of women and dynamics among teenaged girls have done some work to establish bullying dynamics often covert hostility, social exclusion, rather than physical aggression. Some ambitious non-conformist girls will adopt a ‘deliberate silence’ (p. 100) in order to deflect hostility from their female peers.
Self-Silencing
Numerous second wave feminists have examined how women pressure women into performing painful beauty practices. Foot-binding, corset-wearing, makeup, bras, high heels, plastic surgery, you get the drift. Older women were co-opted to perpetrate toxic norms on younger generations.
Speak (1999) by Laurie Halse Anderson explores these toxic interpersonal dynamics. The protagonist of the novel, Melinda, a freshman in high school, is raped at a party and calls the police. Subsequently, her friends shun her since many of the attendees ‘got into trouble’ for the party. She adopts this ‘deliberate silence’ in school, almost never speaking with her friends, family, or teachers for fear of not being believed (which happens later in the book) but mainly to deflect hostility from her peers and teachers after a few disturbing incidents of food being flung on her, people cussing her out, and teachers targeting her in class, in the first few days of school. Forced to attend school with her rapist, she tries to make herself as invisible and silent as possible, often hiding in janitor’s closet, but still cannot escape being attacked again by her rapist.
Similarly, by the early 2010s when social media wars were ramping up, a Puerto Rican trans woman working on a PhD wrote about her hesitation of publishing online, for fear the wrath of online enforcers:
This self-silencing still very much exists today. But now, there is an even more pernicious dimension-the influencer who wants to be homy, loved, and wholesome. According to Chesler, aggression is rated negatively among women, and nobody wants to be perceived as ‘aggressive’. Nobody wants to be Blair Waldorf.
Social Media
What happens when those “mean girls” grow up? Social media aesthetic favors the wealthy, the well-connected, and privileged adult white woman.
People can purchase followers for platforms like Instagram.
Instagram will offer for your posts to be boosted in the algorithm—for a fee
Many influencers use fancy editing programs to create aesthetically pleasing content across platforms.
However, they lack a feminist framing, and understanding of how the patriarchy exacerbated these hierarchies. Namely, that certain women felt compelled to uphold the patriarchy and gatekeep because they received marginal benefit from it. Perhaps because they had a child and were being financially supported by a husband. Or because they were beautiful and got promoted quickly in the job. Or because their polished embrace of femininity online (satisfies toxic algorithm) leads to dopamine hits, followers, or money.
In Carless People the narrator admits that Sheryl Sandberg boosted her engagement metrics on the Facebook algorithm in the mid 2010s. She does not elaborate on how. In the current days of bots and AI and LLMs, surely bots might be a culprit. But are women hiring people to make them look loved?
To maintain her image, the queen bee has other sycophants do their dirty work for them.
Brigading
Being called out as a “hater” by an influencer to 37k followers is a stressful form of harassment. Such a move seeks to generate engagement through artificial outrage. They message out the offending handle, her followers swarm with nasty comments, messages, and reports, and the queen bee sits back and watches with glee as her engagement metrics soar. Even when influencers do not directly ask for it, their followers may attack anyone the influencer deems an enemy.
The queen bee can then engage in a sophisticated form of DARVO, creating a highly effective shield for toxic influencers and leaders:
Deny: Rejecting empirical evidence or testimonies of wrongdoing
Attack: Sycophants launch smear campaigns against the challenger
Reverse Victim and Offender: Leader claims to be the targets of a malicious attack, reframing their abuse of power as righteous self-defense.
Furthermore, followers form a parasocial relationship with influencers online—some feel that an attack on the influencers is an attack on themselves. The addictive nature of social media can ramp up the emotions and feelings of personal attack. Toxic fan bases have launched social media attacks against critics.
This is perhaps a new strategy—having the followers do the dirty work to keep the influencer’s reputation ‘clean’. In the 2010s Twitter-sphere, several famous female authors with tens of thousands of followers, money, influence, and power online dragged critics online, something demeaning to their acclaimed professional status, and something they were deservedly criticized for.
Conclusion
The polished women-in-STEM influencer may present herself as your friend— but the large followings, carefully constructed aesthetics, algorithmic incentives, and highly loyal audiences, reproduce the same hierarchies and exclusion associated with the Queen Bee. This is not new. Those writers that dragged and dog-piled people on Twitter? My opinion of you is forever altered. The issue is not that women are ambitious, feminine, successful, or influential. But that this power should be used carefully. It is that platforms can transform into hierarchies—overprioritizing puffy pink feminism, or creating leaders and sycophants who are not being educated but making profit off our submission.
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References
Anderson, L. H. (1999). Speak. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Chesler, P. (2001). Woman's inhumanity to woman. Thunder's Mouth Press
Chesler, P. (2005). Women and madness (Rev. ed.). Palgrave Macmillan.
Wynn-Williams, S. (2025). Careless people: A cautionary tale of power, greed, and lost idealism. Flatiron Books.
Yes! I cover this in my book CLEANING HOUSE, many STEM oriented influencers are downright mean, condescending, are bullies (have been actively targeted by them). And ironically their approach is using the same tactics they critique of the anti-science crowd. At the end of the day, the issue I work on, environmental health is complex and many STEM influencers don't fully understand the science. Their attacks are not only inappropriate, many have racial undertones, and fail to advance true scientific literacy.