“If you’re on Twitter then you’re asking for it”—responses to sexual harassment online and offline

by admin 24/02/2017

Exploring what sorts of reactions people might have to examples of assault and how they might differ online and offline.

by admin 24/02/2017

Conversation between Laura Bates, Judy Wajcman (speaking) and Helen Margetts, at the Everyday Sexism Datahack, organised by the OII to encourage creative engagement with the textual data gathered by the Everyday Sexism project.

To encourage new ways of thinking about the problem of sexism in daily life, the OII’s recent Everyday Sexism Datahack brought together twenty people from a range of disciplinary backgrounds to analyse the written accounts of sexism and harassment gathered by the Everyday Sexism project. Founded by Laura Bates in 2012, Everyday Sexism has gathered more than 120,000 accounts submitted by members of the public. A research team at the OII has already been analysing the content, and provided cleaned data to the datahack participants that could be analysed through qualitative and quantitative methods. Following an introduction to the project by Laura Bates, an outline of the dataset by Taha Yasseri, and a speed-networking session led by Kathryn Eccles we fell into two teams to work with the data. Our own group wanted to examine the question of how people interact with the threat of public space. We were also interested in how public space is divided between online and offline, and the social perception of being online versus offline. We wanted to explore what sorts of reactions people might have to examples of assault, or strategies or things they might do in response to something happening to them—and how they might differ online and offline. We spent the first hour collecting keywords that might indicate reactions to either online or offline harassment, including identifying a perceived threat and coping with it. We then searched the raw data for responses like “I tried to ignore it,” “I felt safe/unsafe,” “I identified a risk,” “I was feeling worried, feeling anxious or nervous”; and also looked at online versus offline actions. So for online action we were looking for specific platforms being named, and people saying things like “comment, response, delete, remove” in relation to social media posts. For offline we were looking for things like “I carried a [specific item]” or “I hid or avoided certain areas“ or “I walked faster”…

Social Data Science

Sexism Typology: Literature Review

by taha yasseri 31/05/2016

Drawing 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.

by taha yasseri 31/05/2016

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…

Social Data Science

Creating a semantic map of sexism worldwide: topic modelling of content from the “Everyday Sexism” project

by taha yasseri 07/10/2015

What are the most common types of sexism globally, and (how) do they relate to each other? Do experiences of sexism change from one country to another?

by taha yasseri 07/10/2015

When barrister Charlotte Proudman recently spoke out regarding a sexist comment that she had received on the professional networking website LinkedIn, hundreds of women praised her actions in highlighting the issue of workplace sexism—and many of them began to tell similar stories of their own. It soon became apparent that Proudman was not alone in experiencing this kind of sexism, a fact further corroborated by Laura Bates of the Everyday Sexism Project, who asserted that workplace harassment is “the most reported kind of incident” on the project’s UK website. Proudman’s experience and Bates’ comments on the number of submissions to her site concerning harassment at work provokes a conversation about the nature of sexism, not only in the UK but also at a global level. We know that since its launch in 2012, the Everyday Sexism Project has received over 100,000 submissions in more than 13 different languages, concerning a variety of topics. But what are these topics? As Bates has stated, in the UK, workplace sexism is the most commonly discussed subject on the website – but is this also the case for the Everyday Sexism sites in France, Japan, or Brazil? What are the most common types of sexism globally, and (how) do they relate to each other? Do experiences of sexism change from one country to another? The multi-lingual reports submitted to the Everyday Sexism project are undoubtedly a gold mine of crowdsourced information with great potential for answering important questions about instances of sexism worldwide, as well as drawing an overall picture of how sexism is experienced in different societies. So far much of the research relating to the Everyday Sexism project has focused on qualitative content analysis, and has been limited to the submissions written in English. Along with Principal Investigators Taha Yasseri and Kathryn Eccles, I will be acting as Research Assistant on a new project funded by the John Fell Oxford University Press…