Jarman, Annie. Clicks and Stones: The High Stakes of Visibility for Women in Politics. Accepted, British Journal of Political Science.
- Sophonisba Breckinridge Award for Best Paper on Women and Politics (MPSA, 2024)
Women politicians report that social media abuse harms their personal and professional lives. However, prior text-based research finds that men receive more general online hostility than women—except among the most visible politicians. I hypothesize that backlash to perceived gender role violations - such as public visibility - will include distinctly gendered content, such as slurs and references to appearance. Using a novel and replicable method, I analyze hostile and gendered language in three million Twitter mentions of US state representatives. I find that hostility toward visible women differs from men in content, not volume. Visible women face similar volumes of generic hostility but twice as much gender-specific abuse as men. This pattern holds across two alternate measures of perceived conformity to traditional gender roles: legislator tone and the presence of women in the chamber. Incorporating gendered content into text-based analyses reconciles discrepancies between observational and self-reported data and validates women politicians' reports.
Jarman, Annie. The Toll of Trolls: Online Hostility and Women's Campaign Decisions
- Honorable Mention for Cutting Edge Research on Women and Politics by Empirical Study of Gender Networks (EGEN, 2024)
This paper addresses whether the disproportionate abuse women politicians receive online decreases their political ambition. By pairing a novel method of distinguishing gendered hostility from general hostility in tweets directed to politicians with hand-collected panel data on the career decisions of 1,247 U.S. state legislators across four election cycles, I shed new light on the conventional wisdom. Contrary to the widespread expectation that online hostility drives incumbent women from politics, I show that women’s political ambition is resilient to gendered hostility. Although women politicians receive more severe and gender-based online hostility than men, they are less likely than men to exit office in response. These findings suggest a gender-based selection effect, where only the most thick-skinned women pursue political office.