Thread by @paldhous

In this story on Jeffrey Epstein's close ties to John Brockman's Edge Foundation, I called @edge a "boys club." Thread with some context on that, starting with the Twitter account 1/
buzzfeednews.com/article/petera…

@edge 2/ Recent media from John Brockman's @edge account. All of these things are like the others.

@edge 3/ ~80% at edge.org/people are men. But it's a legacy list, maybe diversity has increased recently? Not judging from tweets in June this year, when Brockman shared contributors' suggestions for a final @edge question

@edge 4/ From those tweets, gender pronouns indicate 79% men. Here's the code for this and subsequent analysis gist.github.com/paldhous/4eeb5…

@edge 5/ If you look at top mentions and RTs from @edge for all available tweets, the gender split is even more stark. None of the top 20 accounts retweeted by Brockman and only two of the top 20 accounts for all mentions are women (at positions 15 and 17).

@edge 6/ Here's what @edge's main financial backer, Jeffrey Epstein, told @sciencemagazine about diversity in 2017: "Now, I’m all for diversity, but I’m for diversity of excellent ideas, not for diversity in the people who receive grants."
sciencemag.org/news/2019/09/w…

@edge @sciencemagazine 7/ Here are @page88's observations on interacting with John Brockman and @edge
wired.com/story/an-end-t…

@edge @sciencemagazine @page88 8/ And here are @grok_'s. When asked to provide her "final question," Kate commented to Brockman on the lack of diversity among contributors. He didn't reply, she told me.
theguardian.com/commentisfree/…

@edge @sciencemagazine @page88 @grok_ 9/ Do you have experiences of @edge that you'd like to share? DMs are open, email buzzfeednews.com/author/peteral… Ask for Signal