The Everyday Sexism Project catalogues instances of sexism experienced by women on a day to day basis. We will be using computational techniques to extract the most commonly occurring sexism-related topics.
As Laura Bates, founder of the Everyday Sexism project, has recently highlighted, “it seems to be increasingly difficult to talk about sexism, equality, and women’s rights” (Everyday Sexism Project, 2015). With many theorists suggesting that we have entered a so-called “post-feminist” era in which gender equality has been achieved (cf. McRobbie, 2008; Modleski, 1991), to complain about sexism not only risks being labelled as “uptight”, “prudish”, or a “militant feminist”, but also exposes those who speak out to sustained, and at times vicious, personal attacks (Everyday Sexism Project, 2015). Despite this, thousands of women are speaking out, through Bates’ project, about their experiences of everyday sexism. Our research seeks to draw on the rich history of gender studies in the social sciences, coupling it with emerging computational methods for topic modelling, to better understand the content of reports to the Everyday Sexism Project and the lived experiences of those who post them. Here, we outline the literature which contextualises our study. Studies on sexism are far from new. Indeed, particularly amongst feminist theorists and sociologists, the analysis (and deconstruction) of “inequality based on sex or gender categorisation” (Harper, 2008) has formed a central tenet of both academic inquiry and a radical politics of female emancipation for several decades (De Beauvoir, 1949; Friedan, 1963; Rubin, 1975; Millett, 1971). Reflecting its feminist origins, historical research on sexism has broadly focused on defining sexist interactions (cf. Glick and Fiske, 1997) and on highlighting the problematic, biologically rooted ‘gender roles’ that form the foundation of inequality between men and women (Millett, 1971; Renzetti and Curran, 1992; Chodorow, 1995). More recent studies, particularly in the field of psychology, have shifted the focus away from whether and how sexism exists, towards an examination of the psychological, personal, and social implications that sexist incidents have for the women who experience them. As such, theorists such as Matteson and Moradi (2005), Swim et al (2001) and Jost and…