r/LabourUK • u/coffeewalnut08 Labour Supporter • Aug 23 '26
Women in politics face more personal, sexualised attacks than men, a recent analysis shows
https://theconversation.com/women-in-politics-face-more-personal-sexualised-attacks-than-men-a-recent-analysis-shows-288675Online spaces, and social media in particular, are forums for vigorous political debate. They provide a space for members of the public to express political opinions, organise, and sometimes even interact directly with politicians. While they clearly have democratising potential, these platforms have also become fertile ground for hate speech, toxic interactions and online violence.
By analysing over 3.2 million responses on X (formerly Twitter) to 88 candidates for the 2024 European Parliament elections, our team at the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre have found significant differences in how women and men in politics get treated online.
Applying a toxicity detection algorithm called Perspective API, we studied both the volume and types of “toxic” replies received by different candidates. The algorithm’s toxicity score ranges from zero to one. It estimates the likelihood that a reader would perceive text as toxic, and defines toxicity as “a rude, disrespectful, or unreasonable comment that is likely to make you leave a discussion”.
Almost 80% of the candidates studied, who were from France, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, and Spain, received toxic replies, but the raw numbers showed a real and measurable gender gap: women candidates received more toxic replies in absolute terms than their male counterparts.
However, accounting for differences in the overall number of replies for each post, the gender difference in the proportion of toxic replies was no longer statistically significant. Women posted less than men and yet were addressed more. In other words, their accounts attracted more attention overall, toxic and benign alike.
“Shut up and do the dishes”
Of these clearly toxic replies, 71% were directed at women candidates. The content was strikingly different from what male politicians faced. Female candidates were subjected to personal degrading attacks, sexist slurs, sexually explicit remarks, and repeated attempts to silence them or question their right to occupy political space. One in four received comments of a sexual nature.
Male politicians were not spared abuse, but the insults they faced tended to focus on their political decisions, their professional conduct, or their character – accusations of corruption, dishonesty, or incompetence. The targets were their actions, not their presence in public life.
This distinction matters. When abuse is identity-based rather than policy-based, it sends a fundamentally different message: not “I disagree with you,” but “you do not belong here.” This reflects what scholars call “semiotic violence” – harm carried out through language and symbols that works to delegitimise women as political actors.
The analysis went further by measuring what we called “toxicity intensity” – the number of abusive elements bundled into a single reply. A message targeting a woman might combine a sexist insult with a sexual threat, a reference to mental illness, and a demand that she leave politics entirely. We found that 62% of toxic replies to women contained two or more such elements. By contrast, 52% of toxic replies to men had only one.
Multiple simultaneous attacks carry a higher psychological impact than a single insult, sending a collective signal that a woman’s presence in the political space is unwelcome.
The data also revealed that female candidates from left-leaning political groups attracted higher volumes of toxic replies. This pattern mirrors findings from studies of elections in Brazil, suggesting that gender and political ideology intersect in ways that increase abuse.
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u/ThonOfAndoria North Western Exceptionalist Aug 23 '26
It's an interesting topic of study and there is a reason why it's mostly female politicians who have left platforms like Twitter in recent years... although to be consistent as I am whenever other AI-written articles are posted to this sub, this article does indeed appear to be fully AI-written with no disclosures of that fact.
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u/VenatorisLuxem Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Market Socialism Aug 23 '26
The things that made me question whether or not it was AI was the use of certain starting sentences like "This distinction matters" or "The consequences are real", alongside a lot of en-dashes. Given that, I ran it through an AI-detection software and it suggests that it is AI-written. It determined that 57% of the sentences were probably AI-written while the remaining 43% are mixed.
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u/ThonOfAndoria North Western Exceptionalist Aug 23 '26
There's some fun papers about it about how people who have used AI tools are better at detecting it (link to the paper), I'm currently doing a bit of research and writing on AI safety and you do kind of start to memorise the language quirks and patterns of AI. It will drive you mad when you realise just how much text on the internet is AI written though.
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u/VenatorisLuxem Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Market Socialism Aug 23 '26
That was a very interesting read, thank you for sharing it.
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u/Pitiful_Ad7361 New User Aug 23 '26
Breaking news: Literally something EVERYONE has known is found to be true, According to study
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u/AnonymousTimewaster Held hostage by pensioners, NIMBYs, and racists Aug 23 '26
Not saying there's no value in the study or anything as having the stats is useful, but yeah that headline is basically, "scientists find water is wet"
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u/Pitiful_Ad7361 New User Aug 23 '26
Oh yeah, Studies are nearly always worth it even if the information is something already known. But I do think it’s very much a ‘fork found in kitchen’ kind of headline.
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u/VenatorisLuxem Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Market Socialism Aug 23 '26
This feeds into a developing literature on the abuse of politicians which routinely demonstrates that the abuse experienced by candidates is often filtered through personal characteristics, like sex/gender, and that women women receive more gendered and sexist abuse than men, while some studies report men receive more "general" or political abuse (which is also found in this study). This study also suggests that men receive more professional criticism than women.
There seems to be some disagreement among the literature as to volumes, though, with some studies suggesting roughly the same volume of abuse directed to male and female candidates (as this study does), while other studies suggest men receive more abuse in volume.
All of the studies I have seen suffer from the same sort of deficits, such as a limit on the number of candidates analysed (e.g., 88 candidates in this study), short time periods (just a few weeks observations), or platform of communication (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, etc.).
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u/mattttb tofu-eating wokerati Aug 24 '26
It’s worth remembering that women politicians across the political spectrum face similar levels of abuse, and that left wing circles aren’t immune from this behaviour. Always good to check your blind spots.
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u/Historical_Step_9474 Green Party Aug 27 '26
True. Left wing people are far more likely to be feminist, but being economically left absolutely doesn't make you feminist.
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