Siân Brooke

Dr Siân Brooke is a Research Associate at the University of Oxford with over six years of experience researching and teaching computational social science at world-leading universities. She is currently based at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) in the Department of Methodology where she focuses on implementing novel data science methods to study inequality in computing. With a background in political philosophy, sociology, and data science, she focuses on how we interact with technologies and what interventions improve the experiences of platforms.

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@SianJMBrooke

From April 2022, Siân has been awarded the Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship, to investigate sexism on collaborative computing platforms. Her project combines cultural and computational methods to understand sexism in technology and increase gender equity in the technology sector. She also holds a Fellowship in Computational Social Science at LSE, where she teaches a range of courses on computer programming (python), machine learning (R, Python), and social research methodology. She is affiliated with the Alan Turing Institute and Data Science Institute and runs a workshop on the ethics of computational research design and the emancipatory potential of data science.

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 proposes mechanisms for platforms to intervene in online labour discrimination.

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

As a Doctoral Student at the University of Oxford Siân was a Clarendon Scholar, whose 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. The components of her thesis have been published in leading academic journals, including a non-binary computational analysis of gender on the world’s largest programming forum Stack Overflow.