Dr Siân Brooke

Dr Siân Brooke

Researcher

Department of Methodology

Room No
CON.1.05
Office Hours
Fridays 15:00 - 17:00
Connect with me

Languages
English
Key Expertise
Sociology, Communication, Inequality, Culture, Anonymity, Gender

About me

"My activism extends beyond my work to include feminist campaigning, widening participation in universities, and outreach with teaching programming. I organise events with the Data Science Institute, the Oxford Internet Institute, Alan Turing Institute and Hertie School to bring together graduate students and junior scholars who use data science to challenge inequality. It is vitally important to me that academia and computing is as open and accessible to everyone."
- Dr Siân Brooke discusses her passion for diversity in computing as part of our 30th Anniversary celebrations. Read the full close-up with Methodology faculty.

 

Dr Siân Brooke (she/her) is a Researcher in the Department of Methodology (previously an LSE Fellow in Computational Social Science) and Research Associate at the University Oxford (Oxford Internet Institute). Siân has been awarded the Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship, to investigate sexism on collaborative computing platforms. He project will combine cultural and computational methods to understand sexism in technology and increase gender equity in the technical sector. She has also received the 2022 Enrichment Award from the Alan Turing Institute and is affiliated with the LSE Data Science Institute, running a workshop on the ethics of computational research design and the emancipatory potential of data science.

With a background in political philosophy, sociology, and data science, she focuses on how technologies perpetuate gendered inequality and what interventions are effective against online discrimination. Siân’s passion for diversity in computing extends beyond her academic work, to activism, and engagement with outreach programmes focused on greater diversity in programming.

She is the Principle Investigator on a project on intersectional discrimination in online labour markets and is funded by the British Academy and The Suntory and Toyota International Centres for Economics and Related Disciplines (STICERD). In multidisciplinary collaboration with researchers from economics, the sociology of inequality, and human-computer interaction, the project will propose mechanisms to intervene in online labour discrimination.

As a Doctoral Student at the OII Siân was a Clarendon Scholar, who’s research was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council. Entitled Breaking Gender Code, her thesis is a radically interdisciplinary examination of gender and participation in programming. She combined a non-binary inference of gender on programming forums with an ethnography of hackathons to understand how identity shapes assumptions of technical knowledge, even in anonymity. One of the components of her thesis has been published in Information, Communication, and Society. In this study she conducts a non-binary computational analysis of gender on the world’s largest programming forum Stack Overflow.

Siân also studies how memes remix and represent identity in online forums. She has published peer-reviewed articles on how women and feminists are represented in memes, focusing on anonymous forums such as Reddit and 4chan. She has presented this work on memes at a wide variety of conferences, both computational and sociological. Her recent work in this area looks at masculine stereotypes and sexuality in memes, examining the construction of Incels and virginity.

Her expertise on gender and technology have been featured on a wide range of media, including the New York Times, BBC, Marie Claire and 5 News. She is a regular contributor to Screen Shot Magazine and Mashable, where she brings expertise outside of traditional news media.  

Siân welcomes emails from anyone and everyone who is interested in her work and activities, with information available on her website: www.sianbrooke.com

Expertise Details

Computational social science; Sociology; Communication; Inequality; Culture; Anonymity; Gender

Publications

  • Brooke, S. & Véliz, C. (2020) Views on Privacy: A Survey. In Data, Privacy, and the Individual. Center for the Governance of Change.
  • Brooke, S. (2019). “There are no girls on the Internet”: Gender performances in Advice Animal memes. First Monday, 24 (10).
  • Brooke, S. (2019, August). “Condescending, Rude, Assholes”: Framing gender and hostility on Stack Overflow. In Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Abusive Language Online (pp. 172-180)
  • Brooke, S. (2018). Breaking gender code: hackathons, gender, and the social dynamics of competitive creation. In Conference on human factors in computing systems (pp. 1-6).