Is There a Cyber War on Women?

Article here. Excerpt:

'Last month, freelance journalist Amanda Hess, in a lengthy feature in Pacific Standard, declared that women are not welcome on the Internet. After describing her own frightening experience of online stalking, Hess lists other ugly incidents and cites statistics and studies arguing that women on the Internet—journalists, bloggers, and general users—are routinely terrorized solely because of their sex. New York Times conservative columnist Ross Douthat called the article “a candidate for the most troubling magazine essay of 2014.”
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As evidence of the perils of being a woman online, Hess states that, “of the 3,787 people who reported harassment incidents from 2000 to 2012 to the volunteer organization Working to Halt Online Abuse, 72.5 percent were female.” This is an average of 288 women per year and these numbers hardly indicate an epidemic. Moreover, only a minority of the reports involved threats of violence (20 percent on average, and as few as seven percent in 2011-2012).

It’s important to note that men make up a nontrivial percentage of the victims of online harassment. Some of the disparity is likely due to self-selection; men who are harassed may be less inclined to complain than women. When American Internet users in a random survey by the Pew Research Center last year were asked if they had ever been stalked or harassed online, 13 percent of the women said yes—but so did 11 percent of the men. This is a surprisingly small gap within the poll’s margin of error.

Hess’s article does not include these statistics, but cites another finding from the same study: “A Pew survey reported that five percent of women who used the Internet said ‘something happened online’ that led them into ‘physical danger.’” For men that figure was three percent. Again, a gender gap so trivial it wasn’t even mentioned in the Pew report on the survey, which gave a combined figure of four percent for both sexes.
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Just as the victims of cyber-warfare are not always female, the offenders are not always male. On average, about a third of the reports of online harassment to Working to Halt Online Abuse identify the aggressor as female (with the perpetrator’s gender unknown in another one-fifth of the incidents).'