Topic Modeling of Everyday Sexism Project Entries

Sophie Melville,Kathryn Eccles,Taha Yasseri

doi:10.3389/fdigh.2018.00028

Sophie Melville, Kathryn Eccles + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3389/fdigh.2018.00028

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Abstract

The Everyday Sexism Project documents everyday examples of sexism reported by volunteer contributors from all around the world. It collected 100,000 entries in 13+ languages within the first 3 years of its existence. The content of reports in various languages submitted to Everyday Sexism is a valuable source of crowdsourced information with great potential for feminist and gender studies. In this paper, we take a computational approach to analyze the content of reports. We use topic-modelling techniques to extract emerging topics and concepts from the reports, and to map the semantic relations between those topics. The resulting picture closely resembles and adds to that arrived at through qualitative analysis, showing that this form of topic modeling could be useful for sifting through datasets that had not previously been subject to any analysis. More precisely, we come up with a map of topics for two different resolutions of our topic model and discuss the connection between the identified topics. In the low resolution picture, for instance, we found Public space/Street, Online, Work related/Office, Transport, School, Media harassment, and Domestic abuse. Among these, the strongest connection is between Public space/Street harassment and Domestic abuse and sexism in personal relationships.The strength of the relationships between topics illustrates the fluid and ubiquitous nature of sexism, with no single experience being unrelated to another.

Highlights

“Women across the country - and all over the world, - are discovering new ways to leverage the internet to make fundamental progress in the unfinished revolution of feminism” - #FemFutureReport (Femfuture, 2017)
Analysis of the Everyday Sexism data has hitherto largely been qualitative in nature, with themes and sites associated with experiences of sexism drawn out in Bates’ book, Everyday Sexism (Bates, 2015) and journalism
Bates identifies common sites of sexism drawn from the Everyday Sexism submissions, which include: Young Women Learning, Women in Public Spaces, Women in the Media, Women in the Workplace, and Motherhood

Summary

Introduction

“Women across the country - and all over the world, - are discovering new ways to leverage the internet to make fundamental progress in the unfinished revolution of feminism” - #FemFutureReport (Femfuture, 2017). Our research seeks to draw on the rich history of gender studies in the social sciences, coupling it with emerging computational methods for topic modeling, to better understand the content of reports to the Everyday Sexism Project and the lived experiences of those who post them.

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Conclusion