The Nature article covers that. The study is not yet published, but the initial take is that there isn’t much difference due to gender. ETA: But individual accounts look like out of those targeted, the level of hate speech is increased for those who are women or POC.
To some extent, this harassment of scientists reflects their rising status as public figures. “The more prominent you are, the more abuse you’re going to get,” says historian Heidi Tworek at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, who is studying online abuse of health communicators in the pandemic. Most US public-health departments have also received harassment directed at staff and officials, adds Beth Resnick, a public-health researcher at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, Maryland, who has surveyed 580 departments in a study that is not yet published.
And such attacks might have little to do with the science itself and more to do with who’s talking. “If you’re a woman, or a person of colour from a marginalized group, that abuse will probably include abuse of your personal characteristics,” says Tworek. For instance, Canada’s chief public-health officer Theresa Tam is Asian Canadian, and abuse levelled against her included a layer of racism, Tworek says. Kuppalli, a female scientist of colour, says she also experienced this. Abusers told her she “needs to go back where she came from”.
Both the Australian SMC and Nature ’s survey, however, found no clear difference between the proportions of violent threats received by men and women. “We were surprised,” Byford says. “We really felt women would be bearing more of a brunt in terms of the abuse that they got.”
