The gender variable in the dissemination of scientific content on Twitter/X: an analysis of disseminators from Latin America and Spain during COVID-19 (2020)

The digital age has brought with it new forms of communication and dissemination of information. Within the scientific field, the popularization of science has resorted to new social spaces to communicate its findings. However, although scientific production increased during the covid-19 pandemic, the existing gender gap in the social environment was aggravated in the scientific field. A mixed, descriptive-correlational and cross-sectional research was carried out, focused on the analysis of 13,165 publications of 17 scientific disseminators-men and women who are characterized as micro-influencers of the social network Twitter/X that were published between March and June 2020 (first wave of covid19). The main conclusions show that the women scientific communicators studied produce less of their own content than their male peers, in addition to having more disadvantaged metrics; Likewise, men and women present opposite metrics of comments and relevance. In the same way, at the beginning of the pandemic, when a man and a woman with the same number of followers published, if one of them acquired more favs or retweets, the other acquired more comments, and vice versa. Finally, it is highlighted that a gender approach is necessary that allows recognizing the difference in work between male and female scientists in science and in scientific dissemination itself.