Accessibility, Efficacy and Self-Censorship: Barriers to Women’s Participation in Online Abortion Law Debates

A common mistake that early proponents of the internet as a space for activism and engagement made was to consider the internet as a separate space, running parallel to our offline lives but somehow separate from the constraints that exist within them. We now know that this is not an accurate conceptualisation for most people’s lives. Our political lives exist in a liminal space that is both online and offline, and power is not created and maintained in an overly-simplified top-down fashion; power is created through discourse development, spread, and maintenance, and its structures are recreated through everyday interactions, leading to an (often unintentional) continuation of systemic inequalities (Powers, 2015, pp.30-31). This paper builds upon this idea, engaging theory surrounding gendered political communication, discourse creation and engagement, and online political debate to establish existing conditions for women participating in Twitter-based online debate surrounding abortion law in the US. This in turn draws together this existing research to create a comprehensive theoretical framework. This topic is the centre of this research as it represents an interesting dichotomy: abortion is easily categorised as a “women’s” issue, due to the fact that women make up the overwhelming majority of pregnant people, yet in practice it is being predominantly argued over and legislated by men. This contrast, combined with the timeliness and relevance of the issue means that it is an ideal area in which to examine the barriers to women’s participation in the online political sphere. This paper identifies and separates pre-existing research and theory into three overarching reasons for lower levels of women’s participation: issues with accessing space, differing gender-based levels of efficacy and entitlement, and gendered harassment and mistreatment online. The first section demonstrates how not all people have equal access to online spaces, identifying inequalities of usage dependent on factors such as gender, age, race and socioeconomic status (Anderson & Kumar, 2019; Caren, Andrew & Lu, 2020; Hargittai, 2020). Second, the paper looks at how women demonstrate lower levels of willingness to voice opinions in the public sphere, preferring to politically engage on closed platforms and rejecting platforms that require more public visibility such as Twitter (Halpern, Valvenzuela & Katz, 2017; Schradie, 2018; Koc-Michalska et al., 2021). Finally, this paper discusses the treatment of women when they are able to access these spaces. We know that women often shape their participation in offline public spaces with consideration to avoidance of gendered violence, and there is evidence to suggest that this same pattern occurs online, with reports of high levels of gendered violence and harassment due to gender highlighting the potential of internet spaces to recreate already gendered struggles (Valentine, 1989; Amnesty International, 2017; Eckert & Metzger-Riftkin, 2020; Sobieraj, 2020; Vogels, 2021). These issues demonstrate considerable barriers to accessing online political spaces for women, and it is these barriers this paper examines. Focusing on abortion law allows for an understanding of how even voices that are relevant and should be prominent can be marginalised in online spaces.