Sexism Against Female Politicians: Evidence from Big Data on Twitter

Comments posted online provide an opportunity to observe the benign and hostile sexism experienced by female politicians. We analyze the comments addressed to all Spanish politicians elected to national and regional parliaments on Twitter. First, we examine if male and female politicians are addressed about different topics and using different vocabulary online. Second, we train an automatic classifier to identify sexist tweets and examine if female politicians suffer more sexist comments about their appearance and body image, with references to the role of woman in the family, and are addressed with words suggestive of domination by men. Finally, we examine if receiving sexist comments makes female politicians less likely to be active online, hence providing evidence about a mechanism that sets back female politicians.