Women astronauts are challenging the image of who belongs in science through fashion, family, and pop culture
Three women astronauts use Instagram to blend science with personal stories, pop culture and fashion while challenging STEM stereotypes.
Pink flight jackets, Taylor Swift references, and Astronaut Barbies don’t look much like science outreach. A new study suggests they’re part of how three women astronauts share science on Instagram. On the researchers’ reading, the personal posts and pop-culture nods worked alongside the science, aimed at wider audiences while each woman built a recognizable personal brand.
Graduate students Karen Shalev and Shannon Pappas carried out the study with Jocelyn Steinke, a professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Connecticut. The team studied the posts themselves rather than asking the astronauts what they intended.
“Our major finding was that these three science influencers were strategic in the way they framed messages on Instagram,” Steinke said.
Five months of astronaut posts
In June 2024, Virgin Galactic announced a research flight planned for 2026 with the International Institute for Astronautical Sciences. Its all-women, international crew would continue research on how fluids behave in weightlessness.
Kellie Gerardi, an American bioastronautics researcher, leads the crew. Shawna Pandya is a Canadian physician and aquanaut, and Norah Patten is an Irish aeronautical engineer.
At the time of the study, Gerardi had about 1.4 million followers, Patten about 99,000 and Pandya about 30,000. Gerardi accounted for most of the combined following.
A social media analytics company, Infegy, supplied the public posts the three shared from June 24 to November 24, 2024. That came to 194 posts, and the researchers watched every video, listened to the audio, and read the captions, hashtags, and emojis.
They sorted what they found into six recurring subjects, seven ways of framing those subjects, and five tactics for catching a viewer’s attention.
Women astronauts challenge stereotypes
One of the clearest examples came from Gerardi. A video opens with her pulling the badges off her navy flight jacket and putting them on a pink one. The on-screen caption reads, “When my 6-year-old daughter asks why my flight jacket can’t be pink.”
In the next clip, her daughter, Delta, jumps up and points at the TV, where her mother is giving an interview in the pink jacket. The song lyrics over the clips include “Mama said that it was okay.” In the caption, Gerardi thanked the institute for adding to the crew’s jacket options and wrote about showing girls that femininity and fun don’t undermine credibility.
The researchers grouped posts like this with others that challenge ideas about who belongs in science. Between them, the three women post as astronauts, doctors, mothers, daughters, and fans of fashion and music.
In an interview with Earth.com, Steinke was asked what a young woman considering a career in science should take from this. “By viewing posts about their career journeys, research activities, achievements, challenges, and personal lives, young women can find inspiration and insights to help them envision and navigate their own STEM pathways,” she said.
Pop culture framed the science
The posts often resembled other popular Instagram content, and the researchers read that as deliberate. Gerardi called herself a “bratstronaut,” a nod to Charli XCX’s album “brat.” Patten posted “move over Taylor Swift, Norah is back in town” after Swift’s recent shows in Ireland.
Pandya set clips of the crew to David Bowie’s “Space Oddity,” timed so the team is shown weightless just as Bowie sings about floating. The authors wrote, citing earlier work, that trending sounds like these make a post more likely to reach people’s feeds beyond its own followers.
The science often arrived inside the fun. Gerardi asked Delta to guess what a small stuffed octopus would do in weightlessness. Delta said its tentacles would float up and down, and the next clip, filmed in flight, showed the toy doing exactly that.
“I was impressed by how creatively these science influencers told their stories, sharing not only their accomplishments as women in STEM but also their STEM journeys and personal life experiences in imaginative and compelling ways,” Steinke told Earth.com.
Each astronaut built a brand
Plenty of posts had nothing to do with space. Gerardi wrote openly about pregnancy loss, IVF and infertility. Patten shared a photo of herself at 15 at the Kennedy Space Center, recalling “the excitement and awe I felt walking under the Saturn V.” Pandya posted that her interest in space began with watching Roberta Bondar, Canada’s first female astronaut.
The authors wrote that moments like these make the astronauts easier to relate to. Each woman also has her own style.
Gerardi, the most followed, takes the more influencer-focused approach, pairing outreach with sponsored events such as a New York Fashion Week runway walk with her daughter. She has also shown off an Astronaut Barbie.
Pandya’s posts are more scientist-focused, such as a narrated look inside the pool where the crew trains.
Earth.com also asked Steinke what doing this well would look like for someone just starting out as a science influencer. “Communicating science well on Instagram involves not only sharing scientific knowledge but also thinking about science from the audience’s perspective,” she said.
The next steps, in her view, are deciding how to frame the message and images and then adding popular Instagram trends. She said that last step appears to be especially important for reaching younger audiences.
What remains unknown
The researchers looked at three women’s posts on one platform over five months. They couldn’t tell whether every choice was planned or whether anyone helped run the accounts.
They also didn’t look at how followers read the posts or which ones drew the most likes and comments. The authors wrote that their own perspectives shaped what they saw, and they didn’t count how often each theme appeared.
For now, the record is what three astronauts chose to post, not what anyone watching took away from it.
The team suggests interviewing science influencers about their goals and comparing the answers with what shows up in their feeds. Researchers could also survey the people watching and study more platforms and more fields, to find out whether the pattern holds beyond three astronauts.
The full study was published in the journal Journal of Science Communication.
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