Women in media tend to face intense harassment online. The Guardian recently did an extensive examination of the comments on their site and the findings were stunning:
New research into our own comment threads provides the first quantitative evidence for what female journalists have long suspected: that articles written by women attract more abuse and dismissive trolling than those written by men, regardless of what the article is about.
Although the majority of our regular opinion writers are white men, we found that those who experienced the highest levels of abuse and dismissive trolling were not. The 10 regular writers who got the most abuse were eight women (four white and four non-white) and two black men. Two of the women and one of the men were gay. And of the eight women in the “top 10”, one was Muslim and one Jewish.
Women who work in the male-dominated professional sports industry might have it even worse. The Just Not Sports podcast released the following video showing men reading tweets to Sarah Spain and Julie DiCaro, showing the kind of daily harassment they receive online. Warning: the resulting video is very intense and chock-full of Not-Safe-For-Work language. Many of the men struggled to even read the mean tweets out loud:
[Edit for clarification: the men reading insults are not the actual authors of the mean tweets]