When Sexism Becomes the Norm: The Effect of Sexism on Women’s Participation in Political Online Discussions

Publicly visible women in political news are often met with sexist backlash in social media’s comment sections. We take a social norms perspective to argue that the presence of politically active women in the news sets a descriptive norm to increase female social media users’ participation in online discussions (role model hypothesis). However, sexist comments against visible women function as signals of injunctive norms and decrease participation (sexist backlash hypothesis). A preregistered nested-stimuli experiment with a sample of German women provided no support for the role model hypothesis but some support for the adverse effects of sexist attacks. The findings indicate that the increase of women in prominent public positions might harm, instead of nourish, women’s discursive participation intention as long as the sexist backlash against women in public roles prevails.