A massive study by The Guardian has found what many of us already expected to be true – that female writers cop the most abuse when it comes to publishing stories online.
The Guardian commissioned research into 70 million comments left on stories across its network of international websites since 2006, and found that eight of the ten most abused writers are women. The two male writers in the list are black.
This is despite the fact the majority of its opinion writers are actually white men. Indeed, the research found the ten writers that received the least abuse were ALL men.
When we launched Women’s Agenda back in 2012, we were open about the fact we’d build a supportive and thriving community, and would not tolerate any form of abuse or harassment in the comments section.
Unfortunately we found that no amount of policies or advice regarding ‘how to comment’ could prevent people from landing on the site to abuse writers, editors and readers.
As this Guardian research finds, we’re prime targets for such abuse. Ninety percent of our writers are female, and we regularly discuss issues that can bring up a whole lot of fear – like the gender pay gap (you want women to get paid the same as MEN, but they’re women?)
We often found that those doing the abusing were not typical Women’s Agenda readers, but had randomly landed on the site through Google or elsewhere. Often we’d find the same IP address leaving abusive comments over and over again – using different names.
For years, we did feature plenty of excellent comments and opinions on some of the pieces we featured. These became great sources of support for women, provided further story ideas and even (happily) informed us of sloppy copy and grammatical errors.
But what our readers didn’t see were the many, many comments that never made it on the page.
A good majority of these got caught in our spam filters, immediately activated by certain, abusive words. Others were manually removed. Usually abusive comments (abusive does not mean a difference of opinion) appeared on political pieces – indeed Julia Gillard’s time as Prime Minister saw our moderators being particularly busy.
Certain issues of course inspired more abuse than others. For example, a piece on reproductive rights would almost certainly guarantee at least one accusation of being a ‘baby killer’, while daring to write about the gender pay gap could quickly see you dismissed as, “a dumb bitch bimbo who never finished school”.
The comments that disturbed me the most were the ones made in reference to profile pieces of interesting and inspiring women. They appeared to be reactive, and again somewhat fearful. For some individuals, and I can’t say if they’re male or female for sure, seeing a woman in a position of power was reason enough to (attempt to) post revolting, sexist comments. This was extremely rare but the occasions when this did happen left me feeling rather depressed regarding just how much work we still have to do.
The problem is that we often compare the level of progress regarding the elimination of sexism that we see in our friends and our immediate circles as indicative of progress out there in the general community. It’s not. And for all the great things the online world has provided, it’s also offered a safe haven for people to anonymously publish hurtful and hateful remarks about those they don’t understand, are afraid of, or can’t relate to.
We’ve removed the option for commenting on our stories – for now – but do hope to switch this tool on again in the future, possibly through Facebook which requires users to have an active profile to participate and where we already find some great conversations regarding our stories occurring.
We simply found that our very limited resources could be spent on things better than moderating comments, and giving yet more oxygen to a segment of society that can frankly go and spit their stupidity, fear and intolerance elsewhere.
It’s a shame that the good majority of readers should lose the opportunity to offer their views on Women’s Agenda due to the behaviour of a small – and particularly prolific – few.
But that’s for now, only. I agree with the Guardian in that, “journalism is enriched by responses from its readers” and commend it for looking into the problem.
Check out more on The Guardian’s research here.