The Online Paradox: Do Female Role Models Help or Hurt Women's Political Voice?

We often hear that seeing more women in powerful political roles should inspire other women to get involved in politics. It makes sense, right? When you see someone like you succeeding, it can feel like a green light to step into the arena yourself.

But online, there's a dark side to this visibility. Women in the public eye, especially in politics, often face a torrent of sexist abuse in social media comment sections. This creates a troubling paradox: does the positive effect of a role model outweigh the chilling effect of the sexist backlash she receives?

My co-author, Sabine Reich, and I wanted to get to the bottom of this. In our new article published in Communication Research, "When Sexism Becomes the Norm," we investigated how these two forces—positive visibility and negative backlash—affect women's desire to participate in online political discussions.

Our Experiment: Simulating the Social Media Experience

To find answers, we designed a carefully controlled online experiment where over 500 German women each viewed a series of realistic-looking social media posts from a major German news outlet, Tagesschau. The posts were all about politics, but as the participants looked through them, we systematically varied two key things:

1. The Role Model: A post might quote a female politician, or it might quote a male politician.

2. The Comments: The comment section below the post also changed. Sometimes, the comments were neutral and civil. At other times, we included sexist attacks against the female politician—showing either a single sexist comment or three of them.

We then asked the women after each post how likely they would be to "like" it or write a comment, how qualified they felt to join the discussion, and whether they would be afraid of being harassed if they did.

What We Discovered: A Chilling Reality

Our findings were both surprising and sobering.

Finding 1: The Role Model Effect Was Missing

We expected that seeing a news story featuring a female politician would act as a descriptive norm—showing women that "people like us" are active in politics—and thus boost their confidence and willingness to participate.

Surprisingly, this wasn't the case. Seeing a female politician didn't make our participants any more likely to want to comment or like the post compared to seeing a male politician. The presence of a role model alone was not enough to move the needle.

Finding 2: The Sexist Backlash is Real and Powerful

What did have a powerful effect was the presence of sexist comments. These comments acted as an injunctive norm—a signal of what kind of behavior is socially punished in that space.

• When women viewed a post with even a single sexist comment, their fear of being harassed significantly increased. It also made them less likely to engage in even a low-effort way, like "liking" the post.

• When women saw posts with three sexist comments, the effect was even stronger. It not only amplified their fear of being attacked but also significantly lowered their own perceived confidence and qualification to participate in the discussion.

In other words, witnessing sexist attacks on a female politician served as a potent warning shot, effectively telling other women: "You are not welcome here, and if you speak up, you could be next."

Why This Matters: Visibility Isn't Enough

Our research provides causal evidence for what many women already feel intuitively: sexist online environments silence women's voices.

The key takeaway is that simply increasing the number of women in visible political roles is not a silver bullet for closing the gender gap in political participation. If that increased visibility is met with unmoderated, hostile sexism, it can actually backfire. The negative "warning" from the backlash can overwhelm the positive "invitation" from the role model.

This places a critical responsibility on social media platforms to foster safer, more civil environments through effective moderation. It also highlights the power of bystanders and allies to shift online norms by challenging sexism when they see it.

Ultimately, for women's voices to be fully heard in the digital public square, we must move beyond just celebrating their presence and start actively protecting their participation.

Want to learn more? You can read the full academic article, including our detailed methodology and analysis, for free  at the Communication Research website: https://doi.org/10.1177/00936502251343988

The article is the result of a joint project with Dr. Sabine Reich (Uni Bremen).

Academic Abstract: 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.

Reich, S., & Bachl, M. (2025). When sexism becomes the norm: The effect of sexism on women’s participation in political online discussions. Communication Research. https://doi.org/10/g9qbvk