Instagram & Women in Stem: An analysis of a layered identity

Scholars have increasingly recognised the importance of female role models in STEM for young girls (Steinke & Duncan, 2023), a need that social media has greatly facilitated by enabling women to share experiences and reclaim the narrative of what it means to belong in STEM (Semenzin, 2022; Kim et al., 2018). Despite a growing body of research on STEM identity and women on social media (Steinke et al., 2024), studies adopting a multimodal perspective on the discursive co-construction of such identity remain scarce. This study partly addresses that gap by investigating how STEM identity is both discursively performed and co-constructed through interaction on Instagram. The corpus consists of posts published by 15 female STEM PhD, Master's, and postdoctoral students during the week surrounding the International Day of Women and Girls in Science (11 February 2024), along with ten comments per post. The analysis examines both the discursive and audio-visual resources deployed by participants, as well as the dialogic processes through which identity is collectively reinforced via interaction. The findings reveal a layered STEM identity shaped by both personal and community processes, and deeply enabled by Instagram's affordances — particularly likes, comments, and viral audio-visual trends. Rather than serving as a neutral backdrop, Instagram emerges as an active agent in the co-construction of STEM identity, transforming and inflecting the very process it hosts. These results underscore the analytical value of combining discursive and multimodal approaches when studying identity formation in digital environments.