Having this week been woken at 12am by the winds of Storm Hector a thought emerged out of the dreary half-consciousness of my not-quite-awakeness: most below-the-line comments online are left by men. Satisfied by this fleeting moment of night-time revelation I turned over and went back to sleep. 

Given that my thesis was a) conceived after consuming at bottle of wine b) would make a psychoanalyst’s ears prick up in excitement as to what they might discover in my sub-consciousness and c) had no empirical basis whatsoever, I took to the internet and found that according to recent research my midnight thesis was not a Freudian blip but actually seemed to be correct.

In a recent study, Dr Fiona Martin of Sydney University analysed 15 major websites categorising below-the-line commenters as either ‘Male’, ‘Female’, or ‘Ambiguous’. The results showed that online comments were far more likely to be left by men than women. Only 3% of comments on the Guardian website, 5% of those on the BBC, and 6% on the Washington Post were left by women. 

Another study by Emma Pierson found similar results. Pierson looked at nearly one million comments left on the New York Post website in 2014. She found that, despite only accounting for 56% of the readership, 75% of the comments were left by men.

According to this article in the New Yorker what is also interesting is that as the age of a user decreases their “reluctance to link a real name with an online remark increases; forty per cent of people in the eighteen-to-twenty-nine-year-old demographic have posted anonymously.” When the content of these anonymous comments were analysed researchers found that fifty-three per cent of comments were “uncivil, as opposed to twenty-nine per cent of registered, non-anonymous commenters.” It’s amazing what the anonymity of a screen can give people the courage to say. Even when the user’s real name is used I often find myself astonished by some of the things people are willing to say. 

According to The Guardian “articles written by women attract more abuse and dismissive trolling than those written by men, regardless of what the article is about.” They found that out of the 10 regular opinion writers on their website who got the most abuse eight were “women (four white and four non-white).” The 10 regular writers that got the least abuse were all men. The Guardian decided to investigate this further and treated the 70m online comments that it had received as a data set for analysis. They found that “articles written by women got more blocked (ie abusive or disruptive) comments across almost all sections. But the more male-dominated the section, the more blocked comments the women who wrote there got.” 

But do online comments really matter? Seemingly so. Buried among the porn-bots, trolls, advertisements for PPI claims and Nigerian princes wanting to offer you millions in riches, are real people offering real opinions. These comments can and do effect peoples perceptions. In particular with regard to bias in media depictions — especially those of presidential candidates. In addition below-the-line comments can “influence perceptions of how much online news affects the political attitudes of others.” Negative online comments —particularly personal comments — can quickly snowball into vicious online mob style abuse. I’ve noticed this a lot in the North of Ireland where opinions about many issues run deep —for example think about how you felt when you read the phrase ‘the North of Ireland’ instead of ‘Northern Ireland’.   

Nobody really knows why most below-the-line comments are left by men — often angry young men, with extreme political or religious views. According to Pierson women’s lack of participation could be because of broader social forces which show that “women are less inclined to speak up even in childhood.” 

Whatever the reason is the evidence shows that serious gender inequality exists below-the-line. The discourse is dominated by men; young anonymous men often holding extreme views that as the evidence suggest does effect what other people think, how they process media information and even who they might vote for. Food for thought.