The intensifying attacks against women elected leaders

Evidence is mounting that authoritarian leaders like Donald Trump are instigating a climate that is erasing women’s political rights – and the internet is their playground to do it

[Editor’s note: This is Part III of my ongoing analysis/commentary about “What happened in the presidential election on Nov 5?” Here are links to Part I and Part II]

One of the more puzzling jolts from Kamala Harris’s loss to Donald Trump was how much Harris struggled to win votes from women voters. The numbers are revealing:

* Harris won the women’s vote overall, 53-45, but that was a much smaller margin than Joe Biden vs Trump, 57-42. If Harris had won as many women voters as Biden, she would have been elected president.

* Among white women, Trump actually outpolled Harris, 53-46.

* Trump also improved his vote share among Latina women by 17 points

* In 2020, voters who supported abortion rights backed Joe Biden by 38 points over Donald Trump. In 2024, despite Harris’ clear focus on abortion policy, these pro-choice voters split evenly between her and Trump. That 38 point shift amounted to a tidal wave that threw the Democrats into chaos.

Many experts and pundits have scratched their heads over this. Was Harris simply a bad candidate? Was gender solidarity overrun by greater concerns about the economy, high prices and immigration?

As I wrote here, yes and yes. But in truth, another important factor is at work in this era of increasing authoritarian leadership in the US, and in other nations.

The context for Trump is that his regal restoration is part of a global backlash against women’s political rise. This reactionary rebound has all the hallmarks of a winner-take-all, zero sum game: a perception by many that, for women to win, men will have to lose. And so for men to win, women must lose. The battle is already on, and its signs have been hiding in plain sight as part of an ongoing assault on decades-long support for a more egalitarian, democratic society.

One of the most visible signs is the attack on a woman’s right to determine what to do with her pregnant bodies. Fifty years of women’s reproductive rights have been tossed to the political winds. But another visible sign that I want to highlight in this article is the little-recognized reality that women elected officials are being intimidated, harassed and threatened in growing and alarming numbers. And the internet has become a primary weapon in the women-haters’ arsenal.

Bullies "Я" Us

A study by the Brennan Center found that women holding state and local office in the US were three to four times as likely as men to experience gender-based abuse; and women state legislators were nearly four times as likely as men to experience abuse of a sexual nature. Moreover, women as well as people of color legislators reported experiencing more severe and threatening forms of abuse than male or white respondents.

In interviews, one female state legislator discussed her experience with strangers “identifying my address or talking about my daughter or my mom or, you know, making overt rape or death threats. . . . My husband just showed me a thread on Reddit yesterday about people talking about — men — what they would do to me. And we women just sort of have to compartmentalize it.”

Another female legislator said of her harassers, “They don’t directly say, ‘I’m going to kill her children.’ But they’ll make comments like, ‘We’re going to take over her home. Here’s the address. Here’s a photo of it. She lives here in [town], but her kids don’t go to school [in town] — they go in [neighboring town].’”

A female state representative from Texas, said, “Sometimes we’re on the legislative floor, and in the galleries above us there are people who are armed. And especially when we’re having those controversial debates, I’m thinking, ‘God, one person. It just takes one person.’ We’re like sitting ducks. I’m still going to do what I’m going to do as far as legislating. But I’m not naive enough to think it could never happen to us.”

High profile attacks like the brutal shooting and near-murder of Congresswoman Gabby Giffords outside a supermarket where the congresswoman was meeting with constituents in Tucson AZ, the attempted kidnapping of Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer in 2020, and the hammer attack on Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s husband by a right-wing conspiracy psychopath looking for the Speaker in her San Francisco home, have grimly reinforced this reality.

Not surprisingly women in office, and especially women of color, report having to take extra time and adopt special tactics to stay safe. Women state legislators are nearly twice as likely as men to change their travel routes because of abuse concerns, and more than six times as likely as men to avoid traveling alone. Fifty-five percent of women of color legislators said they avoid traveling alone. And tragically, nearly half of women officeholders said they were less willing to run for reelection or higher office because of the shocking levels of threats and abuse.

This is serious, Taliban-like stuff. Another study found that female mayors are more likely than men to experience physical violence, harassment and psychological abuse, and those who suffered physical violence were more likely to have considered curtailing their political careers. A separate study by two of the same researchers concluded that women state senators with higher levels of power (party or committee leaders) were more likely than other women to experience psychological abuse and sexualized abuse and violence, and Democratic women state senators faced more sexualized abuse and violence than Republican women. Another study found that among congressional candidates, women of color were most likely to experience sexist, racist and violent abuse online.

The role of the internet in attacks on women leaders

It’s hardly new to hear that the internet and digital media platforms have turbocharged these harms, providing a global platform to bad actors intent on doing bad things to their targeted victims. This is much more than simply the continuation of sexism by other means. These are technologies that have unleashed the worst impulses of the worst specimens of humanity, and allowed them to find each other anywhere in the world, and encourage, strategize and share tactics together. And we are only at the beginning of these communications technologies-on-steroids.

Heavily male extremist groups like the Proud Boys and Boogaloo Bois right-wing militias have provided a safe harbor for men wishing to find supportive collaborators for their abusive and violent tendencies. Among the features that make them most dangerous is that they congregate in clandestine Facebook Groups that can be walled off as “hidden” or secret and accessible only to admitted members. Other secret meet-ups on the internet can be found on platforms like subReddits, Parler, Signal, Telegram, WhatsApp, and chat rooms on 4chan and 8kun. Some of these are encrypted against unauthorized entry into private groups by either law enforcement or the platforms themselves. In their digital lairs, participants have circulated links to manuals on bomb construction, kidnapping, making flash stun grenades, snipers, and murder. Some of these groups have had thousands of members.

What the internet has facilitated, according to Stanford law professor and researcher Nathaniel Persily, is the creation of hidden digital hideouts in which real extremists can “make common cause,” unconstrained by real-world geography, with “people they would not find in their neighborhood or in face-to-face forums.” In years past, if you were the only person in your area who had extremist views, organizing with like-minded but geographically dispersed compatriots was costly and logistically difficult. Now, the use of digital media drastically reduces these costs and allows such individuals to find each other more easily to organize and collaborate. This capacity of digital platforms is powerful—and dangerous, much as a firearm, a shoulder-fired rocket, or any other weapon is powerful and dangerous.

These forums are filled with men of all ages hiding behind the anonymity of the internet. Inside their digital Fight Club of fury they are able to easily direct their bitter hostility at their chosen targets of women in general, and female elected leaders in particular. Most alarmingly, polls indicate that younger generations of men are less supportive of women’s rights than their elders. An Ipsos survey of respondents in 31 countries found that 60 percent of Generation Z men believe gender equality discriminates against them, compared with 43 percent of Boomer generation men.

These “het-bro” digital hideouts are now increasingly accompanied by other technologies, such as self-learning artificial intelligence and highly realistic immersive technologies, resulting in a proliferation in the production of deepfakes, the vast majority of which are imitative pornography videos featuring the likenesses of real women. Fake nude images have spread all over the internet, increasing by 290 percent in recent years. Linda Robinson, a Senior Fellow for Women and Foreign Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations, says “The radicalization of politics on the right and the power of toxic tech are reinforcing and accelerating long-standing gender bias rather than breaking it down.”

This is a double blow: the liberatory qualities and euphoria of the early years of the internet have been strangled in the crib by the refusal of tech companies to take responsibility or liability for the harms of their products, and the failure of governments to mount effective regulation.

Male populists popularize the backlash

The targeting of women political leaders by far-right extremists and elected autocratic populists, both online and offline, shouldn’t come as a surprise in the Trump/Putin/Bolsonaro/Milei/Modi era, yet I confess that I thought the US was further along in its egalitarian development. But Trump’s election shows otherwise.

And this is not just a US phenomenon. Around the world, almost half of women legislators have received violent threats and are much more likely to be targeted for their gender than are men, according to the Inter-Parliamentary Union, an international organization of national parliaments. The study found that sexism, harassment and violence against women parliamentarians are very real and pervasive, and exists to different degrees in every country.

The IPU report shows a shocking list of harmful and dangerous behaviors directed at the female parliamentarians, stretching out along a malicious continuum of abuse: 66% were subject to humiliating sexual or sexist remarks; 42% had extremely humiliating or sexually charged images of themselves spread through social media; 44% were subjected to threats of death, rape, beatings or abduction; 33% were the victims of harassment in the form of insistent and uninvited behavior, unwanted attention or unwelcome verbal contact or interaction that some of the targets found frightening; 26% were subjected to one or more acts of physical violence, and 22% were subjected to one or more acts of sexual violence.

How can a woman legislator focus on doing her job when she is subject to such a hostile work environment, and when she is hearing constant stories from her female colleagues of their own abuse and mistreatment? The fact that they continue in the face of this persistent male bellicosity and posturing shows an astounding amount of courage.

Online hate, harassment and violent threats have become frighteningly common, as right-wing politicians and media figures in the US and elsewhere increasingly make gender-based appeals to win votes, including to young men and men of color. The rising popularity of right-wing political leaders around the world poses a threat to women and democracy, says Linda Robinson from the Council on Foreign Relations, as “populist politicians explicitly attack feminism and gender equality or cloak their regressive stands behind the rhetoric of restoring ‘traditional family values.’”

When Javier Milei was elected president of Argentina – a nation that was formerly considered a leader in South America for women’s rights -- three days after his inauguration he eliminated the Ministry of Women, Gender, and Diversity. Milei has said abortion is “aggravated murder” and that he wants to overturn his country’s 2020 legalization of abortion. Former Brasilian President Jair Bolsonaro regularly attacked and insulted women journalists and notoriously claimed a legislator was “not worth” raping. His grope-bro Donald Trump also suggested that his female accusers were too unattractive to sexually assault.

Women’s slow leakage of political power

This ongoing demeaning of women by the world’s most powerful male leaders is setting an example that appears to be reversing women’s political gains over the past 20 years. The tragedy is that, for three decades, the share of women legislators across the globe grew thanks to reforms like mandated quotas in many countries. But the rate of increase has stalled in recent years. Given the hostile treatment and environment, women are shying away from political office because of this onslaught of violent threats and online abuse.

Consequently, women today occupy only 27 percent of the world’s legislative seats (about the same as in the US), even as the number of women leading their countries’ governments has sharply declined. The number of women serving as head of state or government in 195 countries has fallen from a high of 38 in 2023 to 27 today. High profile female heads-of-state in New Zealand, Finland, Slovakia, Scotland and the Netherlands have resigned or chosen not to run for reelection due to the harassing environment. According to the Center for American Women and Politics, the number of likely women candidates in the US has declined 21 percent since 2022, when the total was 513.

These are very worrisome trends. Donald Trump hasn’t even been sworn in yet, but his restoration may well accelerate this aggressive backlash and retrenchment against women’s political leadership and rights. The world will be the worse for it.

Steven Hill @StevenHill1776