Clicks and Stones: Women Politicians and Gendered Hostility Online

Women politicians report that social media abuse harms their personal and professional lives. However, prior text-based research finds that men receive more general online hostility than women – except among the most visible politicians. I hypothesize that backlash to perceived gender-role violations – such as public visibility – will include distinctly gendered content, such as slurs and references to appearance. Using a novel and replicable method, I analyze hostile and gendered language in three million social media mentions of US state representatives. I find that hostility towards visible women differs from men in content, not volume. Visible women face similar volumes of generic hostility but twice as much gender-specific abuse as men. This pattern holds across two alternate measures of perceived conformity to traditional gender roles: legislator tone and the presence of women in the chamber. Incorporating gendered content into text-based analyses reconciles discrepancies between observational and self-reported data and validates women politicians’ reports.