Abstract
Politicians today are facing unprecedented quantities of psychological violence, the vast majority of which occurs as online hostility on social media platforms. The predominant narrative suggests that men and women politicians encounter similarly hostile online environments, yet women politicians are less capable of withstanding such abuse than men. The implication is that online abuse wields a devastating blow to women’s political ambition, and thus, the descriptive representation of half the US population. Across three chapters focusing on US state legislators, this dissertation overturns the conventional wisdom on gender and online political hostility. In the first chapter, I address the prevailing view that women and men politicians experience similarly hostile online environments. By developing a novel computational method to distinguish between general and gendered hostility, I demonstrate that incorporating gendered content into text-based analyses validates women politicians' reports of a uniquely hostile online environment. I consider the downstream consequences of gendered online hostility on women’s political ambition in the subsequent chapters. In the second chapter, I identify whether a hostile online environment asymmetrically drives women to exit political office. Focusing on a sample of 1,247 state legislators, I hand-collect the politician’s career choices spanning nearly a decade. I pair this data with analyses of the fourteen million mentions the same politicians concurrently encounter on Twitter, now known as X. Contrary to the preponderant hypothesis, I find that although women receive more severe and gender-based online hostility, women are less likely than men to exit office in response to online abuse. In the third chapter, I evaluate whether online abuse is preventing women from entering political office in the first place. I develop a novel method for evaluating nascent political ambition by asking them how much monetary compensation they would require to campaign. Using two survey experiments conducted with respective samples of 2,017 and 3,002 US-based respondents, I show that witnessing online abuse toward politicians does not uniquely impede women’s interest in political careers. Taken together, this dissertation spotlights the exceptional resilience of women politicians to an online environment which is disproportionately hostile toward them. Although online hostility doubtless has other costs beyond the scope of these essays, women are neither letting trolls push them from office nor prevent them from entering.
Committee Chair
Diana O'Brien
Committee Members
Dan Butler; Lucia Motolinia; Mirya Holman; Taylor Carlson
Degree
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Author's Department
Political Science
Document Type
Dissertation
Date of Award
4-28-2026
Language
English (en)
DOI
https://doi.org/10.7936/39p0-bk29
Author's ORCID
https://orcid.org/0009-0001-7718-3621
Recommended Citation
Jarman, Annie, "Breaking the Glass Screen: Gendered Hostility Online and Women's Political Ambition" (2026). Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations. 3770.
The definitive version is available at https://doi.org/10.7936/39p0-bk29