 I'm a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Western Ontario in their Faculty of Information and Media Studies. I work as a researcher on a Shirk Insight Development Grant that's led by Dr. George Velasianos and Dr. Jaegers-Hodson, who are both at Roe Rhodes University. Also on the research team is another Chandel, Chandel Holden, who is a Ph.D. candidate at McMaster University. Together the four of us have been working on a variety of projects related to online harassment in higher education over the last year and a half, almost two years. Chandel is also joining me today. And we also have Gwen Hill, who was just speaking. Gwen is a research development coordinator at Roe Rhodes University. So if you want to find out a little bit more about our research projects, you can visit our website at www.harassment.thedlrgroup.com. As Gwen mentioned, we're going to be recording this webinar. So if you have to pop in and out or if you know that somebody wanted to check it out but weren't able to make it, that'll be up on our website shortly following the webinar's conclusion. I also want to say that this webinar is the first of what we hope to be several webinars. Chandel is going to be doing one that looks at the coping side of online harassment amongst women scholars sometime in mid-April. So keep an eye out for that. Today I'm going to focus on the first study that we did, which looks at women scholars in particular. We published this paper in first Monday and you can find a link to that paper on our website. We also presented the paper at the Association of Internet Researchers in 2018 last year. So if anybody was attending, then you might hear a little bit of the same thing today. So as I said today, I'm going to talk about the first study we did, which looks at women in particular. But since then, we've also conducted a larger scale survey that focuses on men, women and anyone along the gender diversity scale. So I'm going to talk about the results from the study for about 20 minutes or so, 25 minutes. And then after that, Chandel and I are happy to answer any questions that you might have. As Gwen mentioned, everyone's been muted except for me, but you can type your questions into the chat box. The tab for that should be on the right side of the blue jeans screen or it might be the menu drop down if you're on a smartphone. You can ask questions throughout the interview. I can't see the chat box, but I'll be sure to get to those questions certainly after I'm done the presentation. And also if for some reason you can't use the chat function or if you just want to send a more anonymous question, you can email Gwen at, as she said, Gwen.3Hill at rowroads.ca and she'll be monitoring her email for the duration of the webinar. OK, so the first thing that I want to do is position the problem. So social media and online spaces have become an important part of life and work for many scholars. It's ubiquity and influence makes it easy to disseminate work, collaborate with others and build and maintain networks and connections. Other online spaces serve central roles in our teaching and our research and in our writing responsibilities. But I think that many of us can agree and unfortunately some of us might even know firsthand that social media and online spaces can also be a hotbed for vitriol, for abuse and harassment and that not all voices are encouraged to participate in the same way. For women, scholars in particular, engaging and sharing our work online comes with the increased risk of receiving a disproportionate amount of that abuse and harassment. So although research shows that men and women are both targeted by online harassment, the harassment women receive has a distinct semiotic flavor. It's typically gendered and it takes aim at women's appearance, at their sexuality, their bodily autonomy and the language is often sexist, misogynistic and serves to silence, humiliate and disempower women. So despite there being a large body of literature that looks at using social media and other online tools in higher education and a growing body of literature that examines online abuse and harassment in general, there's actually a lack of research that combines the two. So for this first study, we begin addressing that gap by investigating the kinds of support women scholars report seeking or using after they experience online harassment. So there's two sort of existing streams of literature that help contextualize the importance of this issue. The first is workplace harassment and the second is gendered online abuse. The research that looks at workplace harassment in higher education has found that the impact, that it impacts productivity and mental health of those who experience it. Sexism in the workplace has also been found to have negative impacts, particularly on women's performance-based self-esteem. And performance-based self-esteem can affect and impact things like career aspirations and lead to exhaustion and burnout. In fact, a 2015 study found that just observing sexism in the workplace has a negative impact on people not directly involved in the encounter. So you don't even have to be the person receiving the receiving the sexist comments just by witnessing it. It can have a negative impact on you. In other words, it's clear that a workplace culture where women receive sexism does it a service to everyone. And if we think about a workplace culture as including online spaces, such as email, which we all use as scholars, social media and online courses, the scope and implications of this issue grows even wider. Actually, in a portion of our more recent research, one of the things we're interested in doing is building on Emma Jane's concept of economic vandalism, which points to the economic and professional harms associated with online harassment. Basically, we believe that it might be time to include online spaces as part of one's workplace. And I'll bring this up again in the Q&A because I'm interested to hear what people think. So the literature on online abuse and harassment consistently finds that women experience a, quote, wider variety of online abuse, including more serious violations. And that women who rely on public and online spaces for their work face even greater risks. The consequences of online harassment are not confined to online spaces either. Targets of harassment often experience distress, shame, feelings of self-loathing. And they tend to respond by limiting their participation online, by doing things like deleting their profiles and avoiding the situations or spaces in which harassment occurs. And avoiding the places where harassment occurs is a really bad situation when you need these spaces to access and do your job, thinking email in particular here. While literature focuses on the circumstances surrounding online harassment, the impact it has on those targeted, and the gendered nature of such abuse and harassment, the literature currently doesn't address the types of support targets of online abuse rely on or the way different supports intersect. So given the negative consequences of online abuse, of workplace harassment, and of sexism in general, we believe it's important to understand how women deal with and receive support after they've had these experiences. So I just want to touch briefly on our methods. For this study, we interviewed 14 women, all of whom self-identify as women scholars who have been targeted by online abuse and harassment. Recruitment took place via email and Twitter, which featured a hyperlink to an online recruitment tool that was hosted by Qualtrics, and which provided potential participants with more information about the study. It also gathered some basic demographic information, which you can see here on the slide. And we invited potential participants to leave their email. This demographic information allowed us to conduct a proposed sampling so that we could recruit a diverse range of participants. From there, women scholars were contacted, and the interview process began. To analyze the data, the four researchers, the four of us, coded the data separately, and then came together to discuss, question, and refine the codes identified. This process was repeated multiple times, and participant responses were initially classified according to three large codes. The first was affect, impact, and then response. So in the response code, here we noted any mention of how participants responded to the abuse that they received, why they responded the way they did, how their response unfolded, and how they wish they could have responded. As well, if they shared their experience with other people at the time, we coded for how other individuals responded to their experience. So within this code, this response code, we saw a pattern of support emerge. And so conducting one last round of coding using the subcode support, we found a variety of different types of support on which our participants relied to help them respond to online harassment. So to help us understand the way different supports intersect with one another, as well as the individuals who use them, we used what's called an ecological model. Women scholars are part of an overlapping system of both online and offline influences. The ecological model, which was initially developed by Brofen Brenner back in 1979, considers the multiple levels of influence that shape human behavior. So originally focused in the realm of community development and health research, the ecological model views behaviors as something which is guided by individuals between individuals and communities and between individuals and the state. This model is often applied to recommend mechanisms to change behavior, since it suggests that changes in behavior are most likely to occur when interactions at all levels of the model support the behavior change. There are typically three levels within the ecological model referred to as the micro level, the meso level, and the macro level. So similar to online harassment, literature related to other kinds of abuse suggests that support for victims, survivors, and targets is more efficacious when there is engagement from all levels of the ecological model. So for our analysis, well, rather our analysis revealed that women scholars rely on a variety of different supports. Some of these supports were more public, which, you know, public, including things like relying on policy, law or law enforcement, or the platforms on which the abuse took place. So like relying on Twitter or Facebook to do something for you. And others were more personal or private, such as enlisting the assistance of family and friends to face or respond to the harassment. Overall, our participants described types of support that were associated with the ecological model at all three levels. So at the micro level, the meso level, and the macro level. This table here on the screen shows how we classified support at each level. We used existing literature on the ecological models. And then we mapped types of support that women mentioned in their interviews onto these three main levels and then made further distinctions in each category. The first category, micro level support, represents social and personal types of support and was the most frequently discussed amongst our participants. These types of support include things like turning to friends and family for advice and encouragement, outsourcing comment reading to friends and family or to ask them to help report and help block people who are harassing them. It also included things like learning to de-escalate online debates and sort of try and finesse and shape discourse. For example, Jessica explains, quote, my husband became my designated comment reader. He would actually go to the articles and read the comments for me and say, oh, this one person really liked your article. This person said something really stupid about your article is dumb. He became my intermediary. The second category, macro, sorry, meso level support represents technological, organizational, and sectoral avenues of support. Participants who used technological support described using blocking tools, browser extensions and referenced the terms of service set out by the different social media platforms. Organizational support referred to policies and frameworks that maybe universities implement for dealing with online harassment. And participants generally referred to this type of support as something that they actually just want to see more of. And lastly, sectoral support focuses on law and law enforcement. This was not a common type of support, like reaching out to law, law enforcement, but it was used in cases where targets knew they're harasser. So as an example of sectoral support, Abby said, quote, it's pretty hit or miss. My local precinct, if they knew it was someone they knew it was local, has been pretty good. They documented and give me a report number and it's just kind of, okay, we're gonna file this away, explaining what my options were, that if I really wanted to hire an investigator, I could hire a private investigator that could really go to town and find enough links of this individual to really build a case, or at least a civil case. In other cases, they've been really dismissive. You know, quote, oh, we've gotten a fight on Facebook and now you're expecting me to do something about it? Get out of here. I've got more important stuff to do kind of attitude. The third category, macro level support, represents some of the larger attitudes and discourses present in dominant cultures and which participants referenced as either a source of support or a source of complicating support. Three stood out to us. First, was the existing attitudes toward gender which influenced socialization and for better or for worse, prepared women for dealing with online harassment. Feminism was also included here as it was mentioned as something that underscored the wider support that women received. So in thinking about her feminist community, Jasmine said, you just pissed off feminist Twitter. You're never gonna hear the end of this. You're gonna have to change your name because feminist Twitter is a thing and it's huge, it's glorious, but it really looks after itself. So the second type of macro level support we found was that the way that people embody digital dualism and digital dualism is a term used to describe the habit of making a distinction between online and offline life. In some cases, this distinction created roadblocks for seeking support, like in cases where women's experiences were downplayed because the harassment was quote, just online. The assumption here being that online harassment is easier to ignore or downplay than it's offline counterpart. But alternatively, there were some cases where people did not make the distinction, meaning that they saw online and offline environments as comparable and this was noted as making support seeking a lot easier for a participant, which makes sense, right? Because people are validating the experiences you have online as something that impacts you offline. And then lastly in macro level support was media representations of online harassment, such as things reported in news media, for example, which helped participants identify the issue, sort of give it a name, realize they weren't alone and provided them with suggestions on how to handle the abuse. So our interviews show that there's no one size fits all solution used to support scholars who face online abuse or online harassment. Although women experience support at all levels, our findings show that some levels of the ecological model are relied on a lot more heavily than others. For example, all participants spoke about micro level support spanning over 60 comments. 11 participants discussed mezzo level support over 26 comments and macro level support was discussed among eight participants in 21 comments. As I mentioned, within the micro level of support, participants were most likely to try and deal with the problem themselves by changing their online behaviors or by enlisting the help of close family, spouses or friends to help manage their online presence. While this type of support is immediate and it's essential, it is also important to disperse the responsibility of support to other levels of the ecological model so that private avenues such as friends, family and the self do not become the only mode of support. Relying too heavily on micro support or private avenues could run the risk of making online harassment a private matter whereas sharing the responsibility of support among the three levels of the ecological model helps situate this as a public issue and is the one that requires responses from multiple sectors, from multiple organizations and multiple communities. In other words, we need to seek a better balance. Our findings also indicate that there's a complex relationship with the types of support that women relied on. For example, while only one participant reported relying on institutional support, three others responded that they wish that there was more institutional support available to them, indicating that they have a desire to seek that type of support, meaning they wish that there was a stronger network of support found in their place of work. Stronger support at one's place of work could include things like having somebody who's familiar with organizational and sectoral policies or familiar with the platform's terms of service, understanding how to use reporting and blocking tools quick and efficiently, as well as creating a support culture within universities, which definitely begins with a recognition of this issue and a wider spread discussion about it. Additionally, almost all participants suggested that social media platforms could do more to curb online harassment. While efforts are constantly underway by social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, the volume of content and vast user base limits fast and effective responses on their behalf. Lastly, many participants expressed tension amongst family, friends and colleagues when they reached out and share their experience. So even when their friends and family and colleagues were helpful and supportive, participants explained that sharing their own experiences of harassment and abuse is not always easy on the people in their life. This is understandable and speaks to our earlier concern that online harassment is a public issue and therefore would benefit from a public conversation about how best to support someone impacted by online harassment. Many individuals affected by online harassment and abuse encounter a variety of roadblocks when seeking support. And while the stakes are particularly high for those whose jobs clearly align with digital spaces, I'm thinking here, obviously the work that we do as scholars, but as many of you might know, we've seen this with game developers as well as journalists. So while the stakes are high for those who use online spaces for their job, the consequences of online abuse are indiscriminate. For this reason, these findings easily extend beyond academia and can be applied to support for online harassment and abuse more broadly. And before we end, I just wanted to leave you with a few words about how we can support one another. The first thing I wanna say is that when you see someone being attacked or harassed online, don't assume that someone else has reached out to support them. Sometimes there can be this diffusion of responsibility where we think somebody else close to them has probably reached out to support them. But if you have the time and are able to do so, it's easy to just send them a quick message to tell them that what's happening to them isn't right. A message of support can mean quite a lot in a swamp of nasty messages. Another actually important thing that you can do is ask how you can help, in particular, ask them if they need help sort of detailing or cataloging the harassment. It can be pretty triggering or upsetting to have to stare at these abusive comments or harassing messages and tweets. So if you ask them if you can help catalog some of these, that can actually take a huge load off their shoulders. And an easy way to do that is to go to www.screenshot.guru, which will not only help you take a screenshot, it'll also give you a timestamp, a date, and the full URL details. Next I just want to say that if you want to stand up for someone online, which of course is always a great idea, usually a great idea at least, maybe think about removing their handle from the tweet you're about to send out. You know if you reply to tweet their handle will come up. If you can just remove them from the comments you're going to make, that can kind of help shield them from sort of inviting more harassment. It can also lessen the amount of notifications they're going to have popping up on their screen. And if it's something that you can do, offer support of listening face to face to colleagues. You can also ask future deans and administrators or current deans and administrators about their plan to deal with or support scholars who are impacted by online harassment. You can tell them that it's an issue that matters to you, particularly if they really want your support. And then lastly I want to say be mindful of the drawbacks when you ask each other, your students and yourself to engage online. Social media and other online environments can be a really positive and super helpful tool for scholarly work, but we just don't know what kinds of experiences people have had previously. So I have here just a couple references. At the bottom here, bolded is the citation for the paper that this webinar is based off of. And I'm happy to share these with you. If you want to go to our website or email us, we can send that along. So what I want to do now is open it up to comments or questions if there were any. And this is Gwen, sorry to interrupt Chandel. I will stop the recording now. Okay, great, thank you, Gwen.