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1. What a B!tch!: Cyber Aggression toward Women of Color.

   Felmlee, D.; Rodis, P.I.; Francisco, S.C. (October 2018, Advances in gender research)

   Online aggression represents a serious, and regularly occurring, social problem. In this piece the authors consider derogatory, harmful messages on the social media platform, Twitter, that target one of three groups of women, Asians, Blacks, and Latinx. The research focuses on messages that include one of the most common female slurs, “b!tch.” The findings of this chapter reveal that aggressive messages oriented toward women of color can be vicious and easily accessible (located in fewer than 30 seconds). Using an intersectional approach, the authors note the distinctive experiences of online harassment for women of color. The findings highlight the manner in which detrimental stereotypes are reinforced, including that of the “eroticized and obedient Asian woman,” the “angry Black woman,” and the “poor Latinx woman.” In some exceptions, women use the term “b!tch” in a positive and empowering manner, likely in an attempt to “reclaim” one of the common words used to attack females. Applying a social network perspective, we illustrate the tendency of typically hostile tweets to develop into interactive network conversations, where the original message spreads beyond the victim, and in the case of public individuals, quite widely. This research contributes to a deeper understanding of the processes that lead to online harassment, including the fortification of typical norms and social dominance. Finally, the authors find that messages that use the word “b!tch” to insult Asian, Black, and Latinx women are particularly damaging in that they reinforce traditional stereotypes of women and ethno-racial minorities, and these messages possess the ability to extend to wider audiences. 

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2. What a B!tch!: Cyber Aggression toward Women of Color

   Felmlee, D; Rodis, P; Francisco, S (October 2018, Advances in gender research)

   Online aggression represents a serious, and regularly occurring, social problem. In this piece the authors consider derogatory, harmful messages on the social media platform, Twitter, that target one of three groups of women, Asians, Blacks, and Latinx. The research focuses on messages that include one of the most common female slurs, “b!tch.” The findings of this chapter reveal that aggressive messages oriented toward women of color can be vicious and easily accessible (located in fewer than 30 seconds). Using an intersectional approach, the authors note the distinctive experiences of online harassment for women of color. The findings highlight the manner in which detrimental stereotypes are reinforced, including that of the “eroticized and obedient Asian woman,” the “angry Black woman,” and the “poor Latinx woman.” In some exceptions, women use the term “b!tch” in a positive and empowering manner, likely in an attempt to “reclaim” one of the common words used to attack females. Applying a social network perspective, we illustrate the tendency of typically hostile tweets to develop into interactive network conversations, where the original message spreads beyond the victim, and in the case of public individuals, quite widely. This research contributes to a deeper understanding of the processes that lead to online harassment, including the fortification of typical norms and social dominance. Finally, the authors find that messages that use the word “b!tch” to insult Asian, Black, and Latinx women are particularly damaging in that they reinforce traditional stereotypes of women and ethno-racial minorities, and these messages possess the ability to extend to wider audiences. 

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3. To Code-Switch or Not to Code-Switch: The Psychosocial Ramifications of Being Resilient Black Women Engineering and Computing Doctoral Students

   https://doi.org/10.1080/00380237.2022.2054482  

   Spencer, Breauna M.; Artis, Sharnnia; Shavers, Marjorie; LeSure, Stacie; Joshi, Aishwarya (April 2022, Sociological Focus)

   This qualitative study explored how 21 Black women enrolled in engineering and computing doctoral programs characterize and understand how they code-switch. We define code-switching as when Black women consciously or unconsciously modify the way they behave in engineering and computing environments to dissociate themselves from negative stereotypes held against their intersectional identities across gender and race. Utilizing Black feminist thought (BFT) as a theoretical framework, this study found that Black women experienced a host of detrimental challenges. Due to their environ- ments, participants modified how they dressed and spoke in a conscious attempt to avoid reinforcing negative stereotypes held against Black women (i.e., the angry Black woman, the incompetent Black woman scientist, nega- tive connotations of Black sounding names, and respectability politics of Black womanhood) and instead dispel these myths. To cope with the effects of code-switching, Black women relied heavily on their spirituality and identifying ways to reaffirm their Blackness. The implications of the findings indicate that Black women experience stress due to code-switching because of the stereotypes they encounter at the intersection of their gender and race. 

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4. Can Social Media Anti-abuse Policies Work? A Quasi-experimental Study of Online Sexist and Racist Slurs

   https://doi.org/10.1177/2378023120948711  

   Felmlee, Diane; DellaPosta, Daniel; Rodis, Paulina_d_C_Inara; Matthews, Stephen_A (August 2020, Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World)

   The authors use the timing of a change in Twitter’s rules regarding abusive content to test the effectiveness of organizational policies aimed at stemming online harassment. Institutionalist theories of social control suggest that such interventions can be efficacious if they are perceived as legitimate, whereas theories of psychological reactance suggest that users may instead ratchet up aggressive behavior in response to the sanctioning authority. In a sample of 3.6 million tweets spanning one month before and one month after Twitter’s policy change, the authors find evidence of a modest positive shift in the average sentiment of tweets with slurs targeting women and/or African Americans. The authors further illustrate this trend by tracking the network spread of specific tweets and individual users. Retweeted messages are more negative than those not forwarded. These patterns suggest that organizational “anti-abuse” policies can play a role in stemming hateful speech on social media without inflaming further abuse. 

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5. Bystanders’ thresholds for intervention in Black vs. White women’s sexual harassment

   https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0296755  

   Schachtman, Rebecca; Kaiser, Cheryl R (February 2024, PLOS ONE)

   Olorunlana, Adetayo (Ed.)

   Black women’s sexual harassment is often overlooked and dismissed relative to White women’s harassment. In three pre-registered experiments, we test whether this neglect extends to bystander intervention in sexual harassment. Participants observed an ostensibly live job interview between a man manager and a Black or White woman job candidate. The manager’s questions were pre-programmed to grow increasingly harassing, and participants were asked to intervene if/when they found the interview inappropriate. A meta-analysis of the three studies (N= 1487), revealed that bystanders did not differ in their threshold for intervention when sexual harassment targeted the Black vs. White woman. Despite evidence for the relative neglect of Black women in responses to sexual harassment, these data suggest that bystanders may respond similarly for Black and White women. 

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