Witty divas,nice mothers and tough girls in a sexist world: experiences and strategies of female influencers in online political debates

Introduction

The rise of social network sites (SNSs) at the beginning of the 21st century opened space for optimistic views that this environment could not only compensate for the gradual loss of citizens’ interest and trust in traditional forms of (parliamentary) politics in Western democracies (Dahlgren, 2005; Davis, 2010; Jakubowicz, 2013; Weber et al., 2003) but also weaken inequalities in political participation which have traditionally been based mainly on individual sociodemographic characteristics (Dahlgren, 2013; Enjolras et al., 2012; Holt et al., 2013; Norris, 2002; Vitak et al., 2011). Soon after political actors started to adopt social media as a tool for political communication, citizens’ online political participation became the subject of interdisciplinary research, including communication and media studies (Lilleker and Jackson, 2010), and some scholars have suggested to include online deliberation in definitions of participation (Casteltrione, 2015; Jungherr, 2012), regardless of the fact that it might not directly influence the decision-making processes (Carpentier, 2011). A growing number of scholars have emphasized terms like ‘e-expressive forms of participation’ or ‘online political expression’ (Gibson and Cantijoch, 2013).1 Casteltrione (2015) stresses the specific character of political participation on SNSs as ‘a discursive performance designed to express a political identity’ (p. 17), rather than intended primarily as a tool for social and political change.

Nevertheless, a significant body of research remains sceptical about the emancipatory and equalizing potential of the Internet. Instead, it focuses on enduring differences in online (political) participation stemming from different socio-economic and sociodemographic characteristics and concludes that the ‘digital divide’ shows that the Internet may even deepen the existing inequalities (Brundidge and Rice, 2008; Davis, 2010; Larsson and Moe, 2012; Norris, 2001; Zillien and Hargittai, 2009).

For several decades, research on political participation gathered empirical evidence that women participate less than men in politics in general (Burns et al., 1997; Gallego, 2007; Lutz et al., 2014; Norris, 2002). Yet, current research stresses that the significance of gender differences (as well as differences based on some other sociodemographic characteristics) in political participation in traditional Western democracies as well as in the Central and East European countries is growing weaker (Gil de Zúñiga et al., 2009; Vesnic-Alujevic, 2012; Vráblíková, 2009). The relatively new field of research on online political participation which forms the frame of this study offers results both supporting and questioning the above-stated conclusion about the dwindling importance of gender in online participation. Research pointing out that the marginalization of women persists in the digital sphere shows that this is the case mainly concerning some more visible forms of online political expression (Bode, 2016; Gil de Zúñiga et al., 2014b; Hampton et al., 2011; Junco, 2013; Strandberg, 2013; Vesnic-Alujevic, 2012).

The aim of this study is to add to this thus far still understudied issue by focusing on gender as one of the traditional categories of marginalization and discussing the aspects and possible transformation of the gendered digital divide. Results of previous research indicate that the gender gap in online participation is still a relevant topic in the Czech Republic – showing that men are much more active participants in online political discussions on Facebook than women in the context of both the national and European election campaigns (Vochocová et al., 2016). Building on these findings and on the research tradition explaining the lack of women in public forums as a result of the forums’ ‘group style’ (Polletta and Chen, 2013), this article focuses on possible reasons behind the striking difference in e-expression between Czech women and men. Adopting a qualitative approach, this study explores the experiences of a selected group of women who are among the most active SNS users in the Czech Republic. By means of in-depth interviews conducted with 11 women who are both very active on Facebook and who are also considered to be significant influencers on this social networking site, I am interested in discovering how they perceive the position of women in public debates on different political issues in the online environment, what their motivations are and what feedback they are getting, and what kind of strategies they adopt when dealing with hostility and the trivialization of their opinions by other, predominantly male Facebook users. The analysis of data from these interviews not only offers insiders’ insight into the possible obstacles to a more gender-balanced online public sphere in the Czech Republic, a post-transformation country in Central Europe, but also has implications for broadening of our understanding of the gendered character of online public sphere.

Women and political participation

Traditional research on political participation stresses that women not only participate less in politics, but they are also less interested in politics and less politically informed than men (Burns et al., 1997; Gallego, 2007; Lutz et al., 2014; Norris, 2002). Feminist theory and research started to draw attention to the gender gap in political participation in the 1970s, pointing out that the marginalization of women in this field was related to a more general distribution of power and status in society (Bourque and Grossholtz, 1974). We are currently witnessing a change in perspective in participation research reflecting the fading relevance of gender as an influence on political participation not only in the so-called Western liberal democracies (Gil de Zúñiga et al., 2009; Vesnic-Alujevic, 2012) but also in the post-socialist countries of Central and Eastern Europe (Vráblíková, 2009).

This shift becomes even more obvious if we focus on the gender-related aspects of online participation – the majority of research does not involve gender as a key variable and studies which do control for gender usually do not find significant differences in participation between men and women (Gil de Zúñiga et al., 2014a; Lutz et al., 2014; Strandberg, 2013). While in 2003 Weber et al. (2003: 36) concluded that Internet participation is headed by males, approximately 10 years later scholars found out, much to the surprise of some of them (Gil de Zúñiga et al., 2014b), that both men and women were represented equally in SNS political communication (Vesnic-Alujevic, 2012) or even that female participants were more active than men (Gil de Zúñiga et al., 2014b; Strandberg, 2013).

However, Harrison and Munn (2007) offer a rather sceptical explanation of such a trend in the results of participation research – instead of being too optimistic about the gender equilibrium in the online sphere, they suggest that maybe the method is the message – research depending largely on surveys as a dominant research method may hide the fact that women overestimate their activity due to cultural expectations in the changing gender order in liberal democracies (Harrison and Munn, 2007). Data from our previous quantitative research (Vochocová et al., 2016) on the gender-related aspects of online political expression seem to support this hypothesis. In the analysis of data from a survey based on a representative sample of the adult Czech population, the only statistically significant difference between the e-expressive activities of men and women was in commenting on political content (10% of female users of Facebook compared to 16% of male users of Facebook), and this difference was rather moderate. But when me and my colleagues analysed the actual content of Facebook communication in the same period, women constituted only approximately 27% among the contributors as compared to 70% of men (Vochocová et al., 2016). Motivated by such a surprising gender-based difference in online political expression, I want to move further – from description to a deeper understanding of what is or can be the cause of this gendered digital divide.

Why do women participate less in online politics?

Traditionally, we can understand this marginalization of women as a result of the exclusion of women from the public sphere (Bourque and Grossholtz, 1974; Lorber, 1998; McLaughlin, 1993; Young, 1981). Important for our understanding of why women tend to avoid online political discussions in some cases is the conclusion of Coffé and Bolzendahl (2010) that women are more active in the sphere of ‘private activism’ and less interested in formal, institutionalized politics as well as in more ‘visible’ political activities. According to the authors, women are more reluctant than men to publicly express their political ideas (Coffé and Bolzendahl, 2010; see Norris et al., 2004, for a similar conclusion).

Given the often negative and conflict-based character of political discussions, especially during the escalated election period, and the specifics of the online sphere, it is inspiring to focus on psychologically oriented participation research. It concludes that women tend to use the Internet to build their relationships more than men do which results in different strategies and communication styles (Joiner et al., 2014; Junco, 2013; Lin and Lu, 2011; Polletta and Chen, 2013). Scholars suggest that the visibility of published content can be an important factor predicting differences in participation of men and women. According to Joiner et al. (2014), there are significant gender differences in public commenting on other people’s statuses, whereas these differences disappear in private online communication (such as sending messages). This might indicate that in their public display, women take into consideration the prescribed gendered norms of traditionally ‘consensual’ women and ‘conflictual’ men (Joiner et al., 2014).

Following a similar argument, some authors connect the willingness of women to participate in public debates to the (gendered) character of the public discussion forum (Norris et al., 2004; Polletta and Chen, 2013). Polletta and Chen (2013) point out that as men usually ‘monopolize’ public talk, women may feel discouraged from participation by this group style and by a systematic interpretation of politics as a masculine domain (Polletta and Chen, 2013; see also Norris et al., 2004). Friz and Gehl (2016) conclude that many SNSs ‘are criticized for being hyper-competitive, prurient, sexist, and full of insults and ad hominem attacks’ (p. 701), some of the characteristics associated dominantly with men and masculine bias. This claim leads us to another research tradition focusing on the alleged dominance of impolite and uncivil discourses in the cyberspace. Papacharissi (2004: 274) stresses the need to differentiate between impoliteness as name-calling, pejorative speak, vulgarity or words indicating non-cooperation, none of which poses a real threat to democracy, and incivility demonstrated by verbalized threats to democracy, assigning stereotypes (group labelling) and threatening other individuals’ rights (such as personal freedom and freedom to speak). The latter can affect women in online discussions powerfully, as will be demonstrated in my research data presented in this article. Therefore, I find useful a more critical approach towards the so-called ‘on-line vitriol’ or ‘e-bile’, terms introduced by Jane (2014a, 2014b) who stresses the clearly gendered character of e-bile, ‘any text or speech act which relies on technology for communication and/or publication, and is perceived by a sender, receiver, or outside observer as involving hostility’ (Jane, 2014a: 533), and points out that it is often based on ad hominem invectives (Jane, 2014b), ‘commonly includes charges of unintelligence, hysteria, and ugliness’ combined with ‘threats and/or fantasies of violent sex acts’ often framed as correctives (Jane, 2014a). Jane (2014a) perceives e-bile as a common strategy to dismiss women’s arguments in ideological or political discussions and considers it a widespread problem as ‘a great many women in the public domain […] are being subjected to high levels of on-line hostility’ (p. 535). The author concludes that the popular advice to ‘not feed the trolls’ is ineffective and describes the usual reactions of female e-bile targets – they often begin to censor themselves, switch to anonymous commenting only or even withdraw from online engagement completely (Jane, 2014a).

Research questions and methodology

In order to search for possible explanations for the persisting gender gap in online political communication revealed by previous research (Vochocová et al., 2016), I have decided to examine the experience of women who are among the most visible and active participants in the online discussions on political or public issues. My research questions are focusing on the motivations of female influencers to become active participants in the public and political debates, on their perception of the position of women in these debates and on the strategies they employ to deal with gender discrimination.

The sample was constituted by women identified as influencers by means of snowball sampling (Noy, 2008). To be considered an influencer, women had to be recommended by at least three Czech (data) journalists, media scholars, civic activists and other influential people. I first started by interviewing women chosen to constitute the most diverse sample, controlling mainly for age and the ideological diversity to ensure there was not a strong liberal or conservative bias in the sample.2 Then, I continued asking my interviewees to recommend other women they considered influential. I conducted in-depth interviews with 11 women aged 26–47 years representing different occupations in the field of communication, culture, social sciences and administration (journalists, translators, psychologists, white-collar workers, politicians, sociologists, philosophers, writers, musicians and film-makers) and politically identifying themselves as liberal (both left and right), ‘red-conservative’, catholic-conservative, libertarian (right-wing) or socialist. The gathered data led to the theoretical saturation of my sample, and these 11 women also represent a significant number among Czech women who are active in the online realm given the low engagement of women in politics in the Czech Republic – as demonstrated, among others, by the low ranking of the country in the Political Empowerment Index of the Global Gender Gap Report 2016 (Schwab et al., 2016). I analysed the interview data by the method of open and axial coding (Strauss and Corbin, 1998) and created a typology of active female participants of online political debates according to the research questions outlined above.

From self-promotion to cultivation and fun: motivations for participating in online political discussions

All women in my sample connected their most visible public online activities mainly with the SNS Facebook which corresponds to the prevalence of Facebook among Czech Internet users. When explaining the history of their position as influencers in the Czech online ‘public sphere’, the interviewees offer two basic groups of reasons why they entered this sphere: the first describes their own, personal motivations, and the second is connected to their work duties or alleged public mission. Many of them started to participate in online discussions as part of their work as journalists or publicists. The role of journalists often intersects with certain feeling of public duty or mission – such as ‘making the society better’3 (I3, similarly described by I6) or ‘cultivating the public debate which is sometimes reaching beyond the democratic frame’ (I4). Interviewees who do not work as journalists also stress the public importance of their participation which lies in promoting marginalized topics (I1, I8), ‘opposing the rise of extremist sentiments in society’ (I7), contributing to public debate ‘there where I know more than others about the topic’ (I11) or simply trying to equilibrate a one-sided debate and maintain a symbolic balance (I10). Interestingly, freelancers among my interviewees describe their motivation to participate as a strategy of promotion of themselves as a ‘comprehensive brand’ (I5) and of ‘creating a certain image or a certain brand connected with my name’ (I6) as different from their ‘private personality’ (I6, similarly by I5), although on the border between public (professional) and personal motivations. Some of the answers of female influencers concerning their personal motivations challenge both the popular image of consensual, cooperative women and the empirical research results connecting women with pleasant social interaction (Joiner et al., 2014; Lin and Lu, 2011; Polletta and Chen, 2013). Interviewees mention an occasional desire to participate in conflict-filled interactions about political issues for pure personal amusement (or something we may call ritual use of online political discussions):

Sometimes you simply want to argue … and to have fun while arguing. So of course I know where to go in a moment like that and what to write there to provoke the reaction I need (laughing). (I2)

Elaborating on the surprising tendency of some women to seek out conflict in online discussions just for fun, we can identify a dominant tendency among the interviewed women to stress that they prefer heterogeneous online discussions. This, again, challenges the general idea that women tend to prefer peaceful interactions in order to maintain relationships (as already questioned by Joiner et al., 2014). Some admit that they have personal relationships in mind when publishing their political opinion, but they say this does not affect their participation – they either believe that true friends respect their point of view (I3, I8) or accept the possible loss (I4):

It does not prevent me from posting … I just think to myself: ‘Oh, shit, maybe I’m gonna lose a friend again because I’m gonna be … I don’t know … too radical or not radical enough’. (I10)

Most of the interviewees mention the problem of ‘bubbles’, that is, homogeneous, same-opinion islands in the online environment, also known as the ‘echo chambers’ (Black, 2011). Many of the interviewed women are aware of their tricky nature as they ‘hide what exists somewhere behind the walls of our beautiful world’ (I5) or confuse our perception of the opinion milieu. Those who perceive their SNS environment as such a bubble express the need to ‘stray to the other side of the playground from time to time’ (I7) to become familiar with opinions they do not share. Generally, the interviewees do not require strictly rational debate in the Habermasian sense and do not refuse profanity or vulgar expressions – what worries them is debate lacking factuality or discussion full of ad hominem attacks. Personal attacks and escalated conflict lacking arguments represent the moment when the form of communication starts to matter to the interviewees who reflect the polarization of both society and online discussions and employ certain strategies to avoid this kind of online contact, as further described below.

Being a woman in online political debates: a specific experience?

All women in my sample consider political discussions on Facebook and other sites a gendered environment. Many of them mentioned gender-related aspects of these interactions spontaneously, and the majority of them started to talk about gender bias when I asked them whether women are treated differently than men. Nevertheless, some of the interviewees deny experiencing any gender-based discrimination during their online political participation. When categorizing their narrations, we can group them into three types of responses to gender-related aspects of online political discussions basically reproducing the traditional typology of the impact of the Internet on political participation (Casteltrione, 2015) – the sceptical or pessimistic (stressing the negative influence of the online environment on the approach to women, mainly because it is easier to be rude when there is no face-to-face contact), the normalizing (perceiving the SNS environment as simply reproducing general gender bias) and the optimistic approach (present mainly in the declared option to avoid gender discrimination by maintaining contact only with those who are respectful). These perspectives are often combined in the narrations of individual interviewees.

Traditionally feminine or emulating men: strategies of self-defence

While talking about their experience with personal attacks addressing their appearance or life satisfaction, influential women spontaneously describe several strategies they employ to protect themselves from such unpleasant interactions. In their narrations, I identified four main categories of these strategies which I named using in vivo codes (Strauss and Corbin, 1998), that is, combinations of expressions used by the interviewees themselves: witty diva, nice mother, tough girl and masculine identity. These types represent two basic strategies – women either emphasize the traditionally feminine characteristics (diva and mother) or adopt a traditionally masculine approach (tough girl) which, in some cases, results in directly borrowing masculine identity. These categories show that women employ different strategies to preventively minimize the risk of being attacked as ugly (divas) or fanatical feminists (both nice mothers and divas) or adopt the communication strategies they consider appropriate and functional in the masculine environment (tough girls). These strategies are, of course, ideal types and are usually combined by individual women in my sample.

The strategy of a diva is described as a very sophisticated combination of thoughtful visual presentation and interesting, intelligent content which is aimed at challenging the traditional gender stereotype of women who are either intelligent or beautiful but not both at once. The divas put emphasis on the selection of their photographic portraits (‘so that they can’t say that I am ugly’ – I5) and stylize themselves as ‘femmes fatales’ (I11) while simultaneously disparaging themselves in a witty manner (I5) or intelligently commenting on current issues:

I do not suppress my intelligence … I just play with this identity very consciously. I want to look visually sexy in the traditional way, but I don’t want to make an impression that they can objectify me. I want to be perceived as an independently thinking personality in an attractive wrapping – which may give the impression of a slight contradiction. And that is precisely what I am playing with. (I5)

To avoid the risk of being labelled as ‘stupid’ or to simply avoid controversy they are not comfortable with, divas rarely join serious discussions on politics (‘I am not properly trained to discuss politics seriously so they would in fact be right to call me a stupid woman’ – I11) and choose to ‘scratch the surface’ (I5). They prefer to stay in a ‘safe area’ of humorous content which, according to their experience, gets positive feedback which is very important to them. Some of the interviewees use humour to promote ‘anti-patriarchal thoughts’ or simply feminist ideas and criticism (I6, I5) and believe that humour together with their stylization as divas can guarantee a better reception of these thoughts. However, this strategy may be tricky as other female influencers warn of the problematic reception of humour in the online sphere (‘you post something funny and people take it seriously and get bogged down in terrible, hostile discussions’ – I1).

Another peaceful way the interviewees use to avoid being labelled as inappropriately engaged in anything ‘dangerous’ (such as activism, feminism, etc.) is to manifest their parental qualities. Nice mothers describe the paradox of being less politically active online than in their ‘real life’ and posting photographs of and stories concerning their children to give the impression of a sympathetic mother and to create space for occasional online activism:

I have to alternate politics with something like this to let the people rest and prevent them from thinking that I am some kind of a fanatic or nutcase. I need them to perceive me as a nice mother who has the same worries as they do … and then … I throw something political at them. (I3)

Contrary to the above-mentioned strategies to emphasize qualities considered traditionally feminine (divas or mothers), interviewees also borrow from the list of traditionally masculine characteristics to be able to compete in the environment dominated by men. The strategy of a tough girl is aimed by the influential women at protecting themselves from emotional harm as well:

I became rough lately. For a long time, I was a nice girl on Facebook as I thought that it functions better in virtual communication. But now I don’t hesitate to tell people to fuck off, basically to protect myself because the attacks hurt. I even mock people … those who are more stupid than me (laughing). (I3)

Influential women describe the strategy of being tough as a necessary condition of their effective involvement in online political discussions (I8) – they had to learn to be predatory, to adopt aggressive masculine behaviour, to accept the struggle for power (‘I observed how the men behave, what kind of arguments they use and I tried to assimilate’ – I10).

An extreme form of adopting the masculine strategies employed by two of my interviewees consists in using an alternative masculine profile and virtually becoming ‘one of the boys’. These women claim that thanks to their cover they liberated themselves from sexual comments (‘no comments on my tits, surprisingly’ – I4) and trivialization of their opinion and experienced more factual discussions and respect (‘they even called me “dude” and appreciated my sense of humour’ – I2).

Discussion and conclusion

This research was motivated by an attempt to explore the possible roots of the persisting gender gap in online political participation or e-expression in the Czech Republic revealed by previous research of myself and my colleagues (Vochocová et al., 2016). Drawing on academic discussion connecting the willingness of women to participate in discussions with the group style of the forums, while pointing at growing tendency towards aggressive, ad hominem verbal attacks targeted predominantly at women, I designed my interviews with active and influential female participants in order to capture their own experiences with discussions about politics and public issues on social media. In doing so, I aimed at discovering their motivations to join and participate in these debates, as well as their perceptions of the gendered character of these political discussions and of the social media environment as a whole.

Contrary to the existing research results and popular beliefs, data gathered through the interviews do not support the notion that women tend to avoid conflict or arguments and prefer consensual communication. The women in my sample, who are among the most active and followed female Facebook users in the Czech Republic, expressed the urge to discuss issues with people representing different points of view and even admitted that they occasionally search for conflict and arguments. Hence, mere dissent or conflict-filled interactions do not seem to prevent women from participation – some of them consider these the very point of online political discussions. What my interviewees find really problematic are personal, ad hominem attacks on their physical appearance and other personal qualities unrelated to the discussed topics, which is something they experience on a regular basis. Most of them believe that these practices of trivialization and objectification of women in the online sphere prevent women from taking part in the discussions, thus deepening the gendered digital divide and further symbolically annihilating women. Nevertheless, it has to be pointed out that some women with allegedly unproblematic experiences with the online environment do not completely share this narrative and tend to stress that women themselves are to be blamed, mainly because they are too passive.

Every woman in my sample mentioned that they actively create their own environment (e.g. their personal profile on Facebook) by carefully choosing people in their network and regularly de-friending or blocking problematic people to avoid emotionally exhausting interactions. They also stress the importance of their specific status (as influencers, high-profile women) which helps them overcome difficult situations connected with ad hominem attacks or mocking by other users.

The interviews revealed that most of the influential women employ several strategies to succeed in the environment still dominated by men and to protect themselves from the above-mentioned gendered online vitriol. Some of them emphasize traditional female characteristics and stylize themselves in ‘divas’ or ‘nice mothers’ to prevent others from attacking them for their appearance or for too visible ideological stances. Others accommodate to the masculine character of the environment by adopting a ‘tough’ approach, while some even experiment with masculine profiles. These strategies seem to reproduce the traditional patriarchal binary frame and show that there is probably no ‘third way’ for women to become successful in the masculine domain of online political discussions – at least unless women reach a critical mass and stop being dependent on the communication rules set by men who dominate the environment. For now, Czech female influencers seem to strategically subordinate themselves to these rules.

Having focused on influential women’s perception of the gendered aspects of online political discussions, this article hopes to shed light on the reasons behind the persisting gender gap in online political discussions. Becoming familiar with the motivations of and strategies employed by women who are successful in this online environment, and understanding the difficulties they are experiencing, helps us understand why most women probably do not feel attracted by these debates and prefer not to join them in the first place. The limitation of this research of course is that it elaborates solely on influential women’s self-image and their subjective evaluation of the gendered aspects of the SNS environment. In this sense, this research represents the first insight into the possible roots of women’s marginalization in this sphere borrowing from the experience of women who managed to cope with the gender-based discrimination present in the SNSs. Qualitative analysis of the content of these debates would be necessary to fully understand the gender dynamics of online political discussions and better understand the particular ways women are being trivialized, offended and marginalized in these debates.