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— Written by San Choudhury and Reece Barlow

  One year into our experiment with establishing a para-academic, independent scholarly community, by many measures it looks like a success. Scholar Square has become a hub for events that bring scholars together. Since launching in September 2025, our community has hosted 5 guest lectures, 10 seminars on topics ranging from critique to effective note-taking and more than 200 co-working sessions. In one week's time, applications will close for the first round of micro-grants administered by the community to support the scholarship of our members.

The scholars who gather in Scholar Square appear to form a broadly representative cross-section of the global scholarly community. Our members are undergraduates, Masters and PhD students, postdocs, and faculty, active in research areas spanning theoretical physics, marine biology, literature, architecture, law, fashion studies and theology. Some have children. One even has grandchildren. One group, however, is conspicuously under-represented. 

Only 22 of nearly 150 members are men. 

This imbalance is not only reflected in membership of Scholar Square, but also in participation in the activities that emerge from the community. Recently, an online workshop was developed and facilitated by 4 members with the aim of using collective imagination to envision desirable futures for scholarship. Only 2 out of the 12 participants were men, neither of whom were members of Scholar Square. The organising team itself was an all-women team. 

The relative absence of men has us absolutely fascinated. Where are they? 

Within academia, this discrepancy between the presence of women and the absence of men is not mirrored. In fact, it has taken decades of concerted effort, at both government and grassroots level, for women’s participation in academia to improve. And even as percentages have improved, approaching or even reaching parity in some countries, women remain considerably less represented at senior levels. In the US, for instance, women made up around 33% of faculty in 1987. This figure grew steadily over subsequent decades, with women comprising 51.8% of faculty by 2023. Yet this overall parity masks a persistent imbalance at the top: in 2023–24, only around 38% of full professors were women. A similar pattern can be seen in the UK. In 2013–14, women made up 45% of academic staff, but only 22% of professors, itself an improvement on the 15% recorded a decade earlier. By 2024–25, women were close to parity among UK academics overall, yet accounted for only around 32% of professors. 

The formal academic landscape, then, has become considerably more gender-balanced, but this balance remains unevenly distributed across academic hierarchies. Women’s striking over-representation in our own, more informal organisation of scholarship, situated in what some have referred to as an academic ‘third space’, therefore perplexes us. 

On the other hand, we have noticed that men tend to be far more conspicuous in another space where the two of us, San and Reece, are highly visible: our respective Instagram accounts. Scholars today tend to have relatively large digital footprints, both as creators of content and as consumers of it. In our attempts to build the community we are so proud of, our combined digital footprint as creators is larger than most, amounting to an audience of around 260,000. As far as we can tell from the digital traces left by the scholars who consume our content, men make up a significant proportion of that audience. However, the footprints they leave also tend to have a particular flavour: disproportionately negative. While both men and women interact with the content we publish on social media, the most vocal critics of our experiment in independent scholarship, at least in our comment sections, tend to be men. A comment that belittles, discourages, scoffs at, or predicts the failure of what we are trying to do is, nine times out of ten, written by a man.

One morning over coffee, after going through the comment section of one of Reece’s Instagram Reel about pursuing a PhD independently, which had received 600,000 views, Reece lamented:

“There are so many horrible comments, most of them from men. It’s like they see it as their duty to cut me down to size, or put me back in my place or something. I just don’t get why they have to be so mean?”

After the sting of the injuries inflicted by these, unnecessarily hurtful, comments fades, the question emerges: why? Why is it that men seem to be largely absent from positive engagement with our aims and efforts to build an alternative space for scholarship, while women seem to be overwhelmingly present through encouragement, participation, and involvement? How come women participate in meaningful ways that help us build, while men seem disproportionately present when it comes to breaking us down? 

   As we began entertaining possible explanations for this absence-presence dynamic between women and women, we first wondered whether the greater visibility and participation of women in our initiatives might simply be the product of the demographic biases of our own audiences. To put it in less-scientific terms, could it simply be because more women than men follow us? 

Following this hunch, we compared the numbers. The breakdown of our respective followers, expressed as a women-to-men ration is as follows: 

San: 67:33
Reece: 51:49 

San’s account has significantly more women followers than men, whereas Reece’s audience is close to parity. Nevertheless, across both accounts, women are somewhat more represented than men. This might help explain, at least in part, why there are more women than men in Scholar Square, why more women participated in the workshop we organised, and perhaps even why more women read the newsletter you are currently reading. But when we turn to negative social media engagement, these numbers complicate this neat and tidy statistical explanation. Men are certainly there. They follow us, watch our videos, and encounter our ideas. Yet their visibility appears to take a peculiar form: they seem much more conspicuous among those who respond with hostility, ridicule, or rejection than among those who participate in the projects themselves.  

Our audience demographics, then, may explain some of the greater participation of women, but they do not explain why men appear disproportionately among our most hostile interlocutors. Around 90% of hostile comments seem to come from men. We should be clear: this is not an accurately measured statistic but what we can only call a ‘feeling-number’, an impression accumulated from years of reading our own comment sections. Still, if the impression is even approximately right, underlying audience composition cannot explain the discrepancy by itself. On Reece’s account in particular, where men and women are represented in almost equal proportions, the gender imbalance among hostile commenters remains striking. 

So our original question persists, albeit in a slightly different form. It is not simply: where are the men? They are there. The more interesting question might be: why do men and women appear to be showing up differently? 

   The explanation for why men show up the way they do, whether through their relative absence from or rejection of our initiatives, or by quite explicitly launching ‘mean’ comments towards us, could be linked to what some research already tells us about gender and aggressive behaviour online. For instance, a meta-analysis by Barlett and Coyne (2014) found that males were overall slightly more likely than females to engage in cyberbullying, although this difference varied with age and other moderating factors. Wright and Li (2013), in a study of young adults, similarly found that men self-reported more cyber relational and verbal aggression than women. We don’t feel like the comments we receive are cyberbullying or harassment. But technically-speaking, many could reasonably be described as forms of verbal aggressions. In this regard, perhaps there is nothing at all remarkable about the hostility we encounter from men online. Some research suggests that males may be more likely to engage in certain forms of online aggression, and our comment sections could be one small manifestation of this broader pattern.  

But what of the other half of our puzzle: why don’t they participate?

Research on online aggression might help us understand why a man is more likely to tell us that what we are doing is stupid, impossible, or destined to fail. It does not, however, explain why men are so poorly represented among the people joining Scholar Square, volunteering to organise community activities, or participating in a workshop dedicated to imagining alternative, utopian futures for scholarship. Are these two observations somehow connected? Does whatever makes certain forms of antagonistic online engagement more common among men also make participation in spaces like ours less appealing? Or are we looking at two entirely different phenomena that happen to produce the same curious absence-presence dynamic? 

On the other hand, the comparatively greater presence of women among our followers and participants might also have a more conventional explanation. Our accounts talk predominantly about scholarship, research, knowledge, and academia, and there is a long history of research into gendered patterns of cultural and educational participation. Women have frequently been reported to participate more heavily in certain forms of cultural consumption. For instance, women have not only been found to be more active in the sphere of highbrow culture, which includes activities related to books and intellectual participation, than their male counterparts, but also engage more than men in book reading groups. Even the Bookstagram community on social media may be said to comprise majority women as most research typically reports on data gathered predominantly from female participants. Explaining the higher participation of women in book clubs and communities, Kieren notes that women tend to seek affinity and connectedness through reading, contrasting with men who often view reading as part of individuation and separation. There is, in other words, already a possible explanation grounded in gendered consumption patterns. Women are not necessarily more attracted to our particular vision of doing scholarship differently. Instead, they are just more likely to consume the kinds of cultural and educational spaces within which that vision is being communicated. 

However, something about this explanation does not satisfy us. Consumption might explain why women encounter our work, follow our accounts, or read our newsletter. But it does not quite explain why they seem so willing to do something with it. Joining a community is one thing. Volunteering to organise its activities is another. Four women voluntarily came together to design and facilitate a 2-day workshop about the future of scholarship. Ten women gave up parts of two working days to participate in it. Women have repeatedly volunteered their time, labour, and ideas to help us build Scholar Square. It is hard to explain this away with a theory of gender difference in the consumption of scholarly content. Instead, we wonder if it is down to a gender difference in the appetite for changing the conditions under which scholarship takes place. 

   Women might just be simply more interested in changing scholarship because they have historically had more reason to want it changed.

Universities were not institutions built with women in mind. Women entered them very late, and even when they did enter, they encountered both formal and informal barriers to participation. Even today, despite enormous improvements in representation, women continue to be disproportionately absent from their most senior positions. Feminist scholarship has documented the many other ways in which academic institutions remain gendered: distribution of care and service work, experiences of precarity and harassment, recognition and authority, and even the compatibility of academic career structures with responsibilities outside the university. If one’s experience of an institution repeatedly reminds you that its arrangements do not accommodate you, it is only reasonable to want to actively seek ways to think about different arrangements. 

There might even be some truth to the inverse. That is, men have historically occupied the positions around which universities were organised and continue to be disproportionately represented at their highest levels. This is not to say that individual men necessarily experience academia as easy, nor that they consciously wish to preserve its inequalities. Academic life is precarious, exhausting, and alienating for everyone. But groups that are comparatively better accommodated by an institutional arrangement may have less incentive to question the legitimacy of that arrangement, let alone devote their time to constructing alternatives to it. 

Perhaps, then, men get by. At least, more men than women do. They manage within the existing structures sufficiently well that the prospect doing scholarship differently holds less urgency. An independent, para-academic community organised around mutual support, collective learning, shared intellectual life, and relationships outside conventional institutional structures may answer a problem that fewer men experience as a problem. To us, this explains why fewer men find their way into Scholar Square. 

When it comes to the negative and hostile reactions we receive primarily from men on our related content on Instagram, we wonder whether the same explanation might also help us understand some of the hostility. Much of what we do is deliberately communal and relational. Our members organise things for one another; share knowledge when requested; people give their time without necessarily receiving a badge for their LinkedIn, a citation, a promotion, or some other obvious unit of academic currency in return. Accordingly, our content also often embodies this kind of philosophy. We don’t just advocate for transplanting scholarship from the university to the internet through our content, but instead put forward a somewhat different understanding of scholarly life. We emphasise the need for scholars to depend upon one another. There is, of course, an interesting irony here: the kind of independence we are interested in is not the independence of the solitary scholar pursuing an individual career. It is independence from institutions made possible, in part, through greater dependence on each other. 

   Refusing to participate in an alternative, and insisting that the alternative is illegitimate can both, potentially, express a greater investment in the world as it already exists. When someone tells us that independent scholarship is impossible, they may believe they are simply describing reality. But descriptions of what scholarship is can also help police the boundaries of what scholarship is allowed to become. 

We feel it necessary to say that we cannot (scientifically) establish any of what we have proposed from the gender breakdown of Scholar Square or from years spent scrolling through  Instagram comments. Our passing observations are exactly that: un-methodological observations. We should also note that there are men who enthusiastically support what we do, women who do not, and countless reasons why any particular person might join a community, ignore it, or leave an unpleasant comment underneath a Reel. We are wary of turning a pattern we have noticed into a universal story about men and women. Nevertheless, the pattern we observe leaves us with a question that’s larger than the comment sections from which it emerged: 

When it comes to changing scholarship, who feels that something needs to change in the first place? 

If this essay stirred something, be it a question, a reflection, a story of your own, we want to hear it. Even if it’s something negative, it’s okay. The Scholarly Letter exists because we believe that intellectual life begins in conversation and communing. Respond to this email we want to hear what you have to say and share.