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Equity and Gender
Diana Daly
Key Points
The chapter lays a crucial foundation by delineating the distinctions between equity and equality, setting the stage for a nuanced exploration of women’s rights activism.
Online movements transcend borders, uniting local and global initiatives against systematic violence, fostering a sense of shared purpose.
Social media serves as a catalyst, amplifying private struggles into public conversations, providing visibility and support for marginalized voices.
Complexities arise from the close coexistence of individuals identifying as “men” and “women,” impacting activism dynamics and communication patterns.
Striking a balance between online privacy and visibility is explored, especially within the LGBTQIA+ community, shedding light on the challenges faced.
Hashtags, exemplified by movements like #SaveDinaAli and #NiUnaMenos, play a pivotal role, fostering connectivity, spreading awareness, and sometimes succumbing to misinformation.
The #MeToo movement, although not initially labeled creative online activism, prompts critical reflection on inclusivity and complexity amid its widespread impact.
This is a chapter devoted to a selection of activist causes to improve the lives of women. We look closely at two online movements outside of the US, one in each hemisphere. Both integrate the global and the local; both work to liberate women from systematic violence. Then we look at a few movements in the US.
Section 1: What is equity? What is gender?
Passionate public protests: Many protests for women’s rights use the publics of the web to expose private worlds of violence, enacted behind closed doors and silenced with shame.
Stated simply, this chapter is about equity for women. Unlike equality, which means treating everyone the same, equity considers the different circumstances that may lead to different support needs, and adjusts support based on need. The concept of equity can be used when considering rights and resource allocation for many types of groups. It is used here, when referring to challenges women face that play out online, because those challenges can be invisible obstacles. What is salient – what stands out – about women’s movements are the ways the internet is used to enable public conversation around topics previously kept private. Social media in particular affords exposure, drawing matters society guards as private into the public sphere.
People who identify as “men” and people who identify as “women” have lived in the same neighborhoods and households across cultures and time periods. This quality makes gender relationships and activism distinct among activist movements. Issues that arise between groups of different ethnicities, races, and classes are often clearly expressed out in the open; but gender issues are not expressed as openly. Because men and women co-exist so closely in every community, issues between people of different gender identities tend to leak out in whispers and remain more hidden.
Student Insights: The dangers of social media (video by Sydney, Spring 2021)
Women as a gender identity: A disclaimer
In order to look closely at two important online movements for women, I have had to exclude many other movements, moments, and identities from this chapter. The premise of the chapter admittedly works against complex understandings of gender, by presenting “women” as a fixed identity group. The goal is to give you a selection of histories, tools, and examples to help you understand online activist movements.
As the Wikipedia page on gender reflects, a deep understanding of gender and sexuality must also consider where the boundaries between genders come from and what is left unspoken when we rely on binary gender categories. Movements for the rights of transgender women have evolved within, alongside, and sometimes in response to movements by cisgender women, but these histories are often collapsed into a single narrative.
Saudi women: Online and driving change
Saudi Arabian laws and culture enforce a system of male guardianship over women, whereby every woman must get the approval of a male guardian for decisions about her body and life including passport applications, travel, and marriage. Online activism helps women who are resisting the system of male guardianship to connect with fellow activists, read the climate for what they are asking, and connect with specific publics who may support their causes.
#savedinaali
Like campaigns for other identity groups, many social media campaigns for women are branded as leaderless or have masked leadership. A particular feature of social media campaigns for women is the naming of the campaign after a woman who has been persecuted, even though she is not organizing the campaign. Sadly, due to the violence women face that leads to these campaigns, the woman the campaign is named after is often one whose persecution has already ensued.
One example is the campaign to #SaveDinaAli. Dina Ali fled Saudi Arabia but was detained in the Philippines and returned to her family, whom she said would kill her. It is unknown if Dina Ali is severely injured or even alive. However, organizers started the #SaveDinaAli campaign to help her and women in similar situations and draw attention to Saudi women’s human rights abuses. Raising awareness around the situations of particular imprisoned women may lighten the punishment inflicted on them – though it does not guarantee safety or survival.
Recognizing the small beginnings of large media campaigns
Activist movements that become large usually began as small, local efforts for change. This is especially true around women’s rights; whispers about a case or pattern of abuse first spread locally, then grow into regional or global social movements once it’s clear that the abuse is systematic. Take for example the extensive Human Rights Watch campaign to end Male Guardianship in Saudi Arabia. It was many small campaigns like the one to save Dina Ali that led Human Rights Watch to produce a 2016 report entitled Boxed In: Women and Saudi Arabia’s Male Guardianship System. The campaign uses the hashtag #TogetherToEndMaleGuardianship along with video and other content.
Human Rights Watch (HRW) is a large, global organization, but small movements gave them key examples and networks on which to build a larger campaign. HRW’s decision to focus on Twitter as a platform required the organization to monitor smaller movements for evidence that Saudis would use and respond to Twitter hashtags for activism. Those small movements provided the core of the larger networks HRW would use in their campaign.
One prior online network example for campaigns for Saudi women is the campaign to allow them to drive. Women have been putting themselves on the front lines and driving – and celebrating this civil disobedience online. In 2011-2013 the hashtag #W2drive (women to drive) was used by Saudi activists to gather public interest in women’s right to drive, as did the account @SaudiWomenSpring on Facebook.
Section 2: Meming of hashtags and more
The use of any hashtag can expand and complicate the spread of a message across a global audience, particularly if the meme flips to become sarcastic or changes direction.
Hashtags relating to Saudi women’s rights led to numerous memes, but most just added force to the movement. #TogetherToEndMaleGuardianship was of course translated – you might also say, imitated or memed – into Arabic, and it is that tag which Arabic-speaking social media users began spreading prolifically. #StopEnslavingSaudiWomen is another tag channeling similar publics. Like #HandsUpDontShoot in the Black Lives Matter movement, it is a phrase speaking directly to an oppressing force, telling them to change their behavior.
However, there is some evidence of the spread of misinformation through hashtags related to Saudi women. For example, a story about Saudi male scientists declaring women “not human” started out on a satirical website, but it spread to other publics – including some who believed it was true, and others who found it useful in spreading fear of Islam. As this example shows, hashtags are easy targets for appropriation – use for a different cultural purpose than originally intended.
From the Social Media & Ourselves Podcast and iVoices: Hearing from gamers on #backtothekitchen and comebacks in online game spaces
We produced the Social Media & Ourselves podcast with the iVoices project, with the goal of learning from students about online life. In late 2021, one particular student story led me and a team of students down a new path of research. The story was Girl Meets Chud, aired on December 1st, 2021.
In the episode, a student named Kiersten describes how she was driven into an unhealthy online relationship by pandemic loneliness and a toxic gaming environment where girls were regularly told to “Go back to the kitchen.” I thought, wow, people are still saying that to girls and women? And it led me to wonder: How did young players describe and respond to this phrase in networked publics?
By May I was working with a research team of one undergraduate and one graduate research assistant to analyze videos hashtagged #gobacktothekitchen and #backtothekitchen on TikTok. Work produced from this project was presented for the Association for Information Science and Technology annual conference. Here’s the abstract:
This research arose from the iVoices project collection of student technology experiences guiding research. In response to students being told to “go back to the kitchen” while gaming and reading as “female”, our team analyzed TikTok for videos hashtagged #gobacktothekitchen and #backtothekitchen across a one-year period. We also performed deeper analysis on comeback appeals eliciting or offering suggestions of responses to “Go back to the kitchen” and related misogyny and their responses. We found videos were typically created by “girl gamers” toward whom “back to the kitchen” misogyny had been directed, and who tagged them to assign networked meanings to their experiences, encapsulate their struggles for broad publics, and find validation with users sharing similar experiences. A salient theme in comeback appeal posts was performing positions of power to gain leverage over aggressors, while comments frequently offered support from other “girl gamers” and reinforcement of misogynistic stereotypes by male-identified aggressors.
Section 3: How social media can help women’s causes in particular
To understand women’s online movements, including those for Saudi women and women in the Americas (in the next section), it is important to consider relationship communication. First, let’s consider who Saudi women can and cannot speak to and when or where those conversations take place. In traditional Saudi society, women have limited face-to-face contact; they rarely gather or communicate with people beyond their immediate family, and external communications may be under constant surveillance. This limits the communication of women activists with those who are geographically close to them and to moments of low surveillance.
However, communities devoted to women’s activism can interact online on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, and other social media platforms. So the most important affordance of social media for women’s movements is this: movement organizers can orchestrate gatherings and strategies through the use of social media. An example of this is the campaign #women2drive, which Saudi women have been pushing for several years to challenge male guardianship incrementally by focusing on the right to drive.
women2drive is a campaign in Saudi Arabia that counteracts the prohibition of women in public spaces through online, networked publics.
Another affordance of social media for women’s movements is this: social media can extend and deepen communication among activists, transforming short or casual encounters into opportunities for a more profound exchange of ideas. Social media can allow people who will be gathering in person to get a sense before the event of what others are thinking. It also allows people to continue sharing their “staircase thoughts” after they leave the meeting (think of the old TV series Columbo, where the detective seems to be leaving the suspect alone but then turns around just before going downstairs and says: “Oh, there’s just one more thing…”). Staircase thoughts are sometimes considered simply wit that we thought of too late. But l’esprit de l’escalier or “wit of the staircase” as French philosopher Denis Diderot called it, can deepen communication, especially in activist movements that involve covert communications.
Staircase thoughts over mobile phones can deepen communication that was cut short or monitored in person.
A third affordance: Social media gathers and focuses global publics. The web is chaos! But social objects like hashtags cut across the chaos to connect publics focused on certain topics, at times despite great geographic dispersal and distance. Publics drawn to pay attention to online activism include people who are not necessarily organizers of an activist movement but who are paying attention to activist causes.
Some of the publics gathered by social media include large organizations with resources to support movements, leading to a fourth affordance in creating a global movement: Social media connects activists with their publics. Saudi women can feel the support of women activists across the globe with the hashtag #suffrage, and I imagine that is important at moments when the national culture seems to be changing too slowly. Connecting with supportive publics can also lead to organizational and financial support.
The publics gathered through hashtags around Saudi women’s rights and specifically the push to end male guardianship in that country demonstrate how publics can build on and connect to one another, through hashtags among other tools. Saudi women have pushed to end male guardianship in the past, and the gathering of publics by these early movements led to the taking up of the cause by larger organizations.
Section 4: Demonstrations online and across the Americas against gender violence
Ni Una Menos, Vivas Las Queremos. (Image: First march of #NiUnaMenos in Buenos Aires, June 2015 by AnitaAD, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Marcha_Ni_Una_Menos_en_Buenos_Aires.jpg, CC BY-SA)
Ni Una Menos, Vivas Las Queremos
Beginning in 2016, a new hemispheric movement was underway expressing outrage over violence against women in the Americas. Ni Una Menos began in the summer of 2014 in Argentina, culminating in an August 2016 demonstration in Lima that was characterized as the largest demonstration ever seen in Peru. It was reactivated in South American cities including Buenos Aires and Rio Di Janeiro in October 2016, in response to the drugging, rape, and murder of a 16-year-old Argentinian girl.
Hemispheric hashtags coordinating these movements include #NiUnaMenos (not one less or not one fewer) and #vivaslasqueremos (we want them alive) – proactively worded demands that not a single woman or girl be killed by systematic violence. This proactive framing makes every death cause for further protest.
One striking strategy in this movement is its theatricality. From dressing as death in Mexico to applying makeup to simulate bruised and bloodied faces and crotches in this demonstration in Buenos Aires, Argentina, these movements rely upon visual impact. In the United States, it is common to embody the unjustly dead – in #BlackLivesMatter, the #icantbreathe hashtag for Eric Garner and hoodie-posing to say “we are Trayvon Martin” are two of many examples of resurrection through performance. But this practice of embodying a bruised, bloodied woman is distinct from most feminist protests seen in the US.
Although the US has significant issues with sexual violence, protests do not usually include the graphic performances embodying the abused women that are seen in Latin American protests.
The performative, graphic strategies in the Latin American #niunamenos demonstrations were not replicated in the massive Women’s March in the US in January 2017, although many women face violence in the US. Perhaps marchers in the US sought to embody the “they go low, we go high” approach – as in Michelle Obama’s speech at the DNC following the recording of Trump boasting of using his wealth and stature to grab women “by the pussy.” But the difference may come down to class more than nationality.
The performative demonstrations in Latin America reflect the grim reality of being unable to “go high” and hide abuse for many of its survivors. Many abused women wear visible bruises on their faces. The sounds of abuse are more evident on city streets and in smaller apartment buildings than in large houses and suburbs. Abuse of poor women is more visible than abuse of wealthier women – even when poor women don’t live on the streets, lower-class status is generally accompanied by a lack of personally owned or controlled space. As Margaret Rodman has written, “The most powerless people have no place at all.” In these hemispheric demonstrations, the streets become women’s place, with demonstrators of all classes increasingly marching them. By making the marks of women’s abuse and murder public, they drag into the public eye what has long been understood as a feature of women’s private lives in the Americas.
Student Insights: Experiencing targeted hate online (audio & writing by iVoices Media Lab Student, Spring 2021)
Respond to this case study: The author shared how online activism requires a balance between privacy and exposure, as well as some of the consequences of being visible as a marginalized group online. Drawing from our course discussions, the readings, and your experiences, how might the affordances and culture of a social media platform encourage or discourage activism?
Section 5: The #MeToo Movement in the U.S.
After this book was released, the #MeToo movement ensued, in late 2017. As I write this update, the #MeToo movement is sweeping the US and other nations, as charges and evidence of long histories of sexual harassment and abuse circulate in the media and online. The movement has pervaded the academic and political spheres in the US and other nations as well.
Critiques of the #MeToo movement are also circulating. One example is the response #whataboutus by working-class women that draws attention to the limits of #MeToo in telling their stories. Another critique elevates discomfort among feminists with #MeToo’s simplistic image of women as victims, and of the collapsing of such a vast range of behaviors into the concept of “harassment.”
The creative online activism explored in these chapters is remarkable for its inclusiveness and complexity in the face of these critiques. Branding is hard. Oversimplification is a threat faced by any spreading movement; in this phenomenon, complex causes can be reduced to a simplistic phrase or meaning as the movement spreads. Oversimplification of a message seems inevitable for it to gain national or global traction, as critiques of the #MeToo movement charge. Yet the Black Lives Matter movement has remained complex, so why not #MeToo?
As of this writing, I do not include the US-based #MeToo among the movements I label creative online activism – yet. Although the Hollywood actresses whose accounts received the most attention are very visible, the movement’s strategies are not highly visual, or performative; rather, the movement has gained traction through the voices of people who already have access to significant public attention and national platforms. Imagine if they used their performance and visibility skills to redirect their audiences’ attention to working-class women and women in nations with oppressive regimes. I hope #MeToo advocates where the movement is most visible will turn attention to the women who need help most, rather than celebrating #MeToo as a simple success.
Social and activist movements take time. Decades may pass before the effects of a movement are in full view.
In the next chapter – as we explore cultural branding – keep activist movements in mind. But also remember that whereas the goal of cultural branding is immediate influence, the goal of social and activist movements is long-term cultural change.
Girl Meets Chud — Social Media and Ourselves podcast
Girl Meets Chud
Release date: December 1st 2021
When Kiersten made a gamer friend during a Siege Grind, it seemed like a solution to lockdown loneliness. Then she got to know him better. Contains offensive language. Edited by Gabe Stultz. Produced by iVoices Student Media Lab, which is supported in part by the Center for University Education and Scholarship.
Respond to this podcast episode…How did the podcast episode “Girl Meets Chud” use interviews, student voices, or sounds to demonstrate a current or past social trend phenomenon? If you were making a sequel to this episode, what voices or sounds would you include to help listeners understand more about this trend, and why?
the goal of support through first considering the different circumstances that may lead to varying support needs, and then adjusting support based on need
the system in Saudi Arabia whereby every woman must get the approval of a male guardian for decisions about her body and life including passport applications, travel, and marriage
translated from Spanish as “not one less”, this is a hemispheric movement expressing outrage over violence against women in the Americas, this movement began in Argentina and led to an August 2016 demonstration in Lima that was characterized as the largest demonstration ever seen in Peru
the affordance of social media allows people who will be gathering in person also to get a sense of what others are thinking before they meet face-to-face and continue sharing their ideas after they leave the meeting
Core Questions
A. Questions for qualitative thought:
Start looking at hashtags online used alongside #MeToo and also look at stories posted in #MeToo over the last several years. In your groups, choose one or two posts to discuss. What do the stories using like hashtags have in common, and what are some ways that they differ?
What are some of the smaller impacts you have noticed in the years since #MeToo and companion hashtags and practices have come about? In your own experiences or those you know about.
If you were aware of the women’s movements discussed in this chapter before, what had you heard about them? Do these movements influence you to think differently about women’s roles in the cultures from which these movements came? Explain.
B. Review: Which is the best answer?
C. Game on!
Related Content
Read It: Black Lives Matter protests are shaping how people understand racial inequality
Considered to be the largest social justice movement since the civil rights era of the 1960s, Black Lives Matter is more than the scores of street protests organized by the social justice group that attracted hundreds of thousands of demonstrators across the world.
As sociologists who study how protests lay the groundwork for social change, we understand their necessity as a tactic to draw attention toward a movement’s broader agenda.
In our study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, we found that the Black Lives Matter was able to shift attention away from its protests and toward its agenda of building an anti-racist society.
Social change, such as the anti-slavery movement in the 19th century, is not represented only by new legislation or Supreme Court decisions. It is also found in the public’s ideas and conversations: what you and I think and talk about.
When people engage with a movement, such as joining a protest, they are more likely to learn about the movement’s aspirations and plans to achieve their goals. In this way, protest opens the door for social change.
In this June 2020 photograph, a massive group of protesters is seated on the ground in New York City in a peaceful protest of the killing of George Floyd. Ira L. Black/Corbis via Getty Images
In our digital age, researchers can measure what people are thinking about by analyzing activity on public internet platforms like Google, Wikipedia and Twitter. Social researchers can quantitatively measure social media activity and see how it changes over time and in response to particular events, such as Black Lives Matter protests.
Our study examined how street demonstrations facilitated an important initial step in creating social change: changing the way people think. Based on our research, we found that people began thinking about racism from a broader and deeper perspective.
We conducted a large-scale quantitative analysis of news media, Google searches, Wikipedia page visits and Twitter from 2014 to 2020 to build a picture of the movement’s impact on how Americans and the world understand the conditions of Black life in the U.S. over the past century.
Though Google doesn’t share the actual number of people who search on its platform, the total number is estimated to be in the billions. For our data set of searched words and phrases, that number is likely to be as much as in the hundreds of millions.
Thousands of protesters march on World Anti-Racism Day on March 19, 2022, in London. Guy Smallman/Getty Images
We found that during Black Lives Matter protests, digital search users think and talk about racial ideas, such as systemic racism, Michelle Alexander’s book “The New Jim Crow” and white supremacy, up to 100 times more than they did in the weeks before the protests.
Over the years these spikes grew larger and included more diverse ideas.
In 2014 and 2015, for instance, we saw people using Google to search terms about police shootings and past victims of police homicide.
But in 2020 the search terms were much broader and included ideas like prison abolition and redlining – the discriminatory practice by banks, insurance companies and other financial institutions that resulted in segregated neighborhoods.
Importantly, the ideas that come into the public consciousness during protest don’t simply disappear. They stick around. We found that six months after the 2020 George Floyd protests, social media searches of terms such as systemic racism and white supremacy were considerably higher than before the protests.
After the murder of Floyd, journalists and researchers alike proclaimed that the United States was experiencing a “racial reckoning.”
To understand the full scope of the reckoning and the possibility for change, it is important to know how people make sense of these events.
Large-scale digital data from platforms like Google, Wikipedia and Twitter shows us which ideas are attracting attention and when this attention is sustained.
In a sense, protests help create a “new normal,” in which anti-racism is an increasingly common way to talk about inequalities in American society.
The pathway toward change is not always simple.
Activists such as those in Black Lives Matter want people to rethink social problems, and many contemporary problems are rooted in historical failures to produce a just society.
The participants in the demonstrations of 2020 have an advantage that previous generations of activists did not: They witnessed the shortcomings of past civil rights movements, as well as the limits of modern-day efforts to teach diversity and inclusion in the workplace.
Certainly, increased attention does not always bring positive results.
Protesters demonstrate on Dec. 4, 2014, against the chokehold death of Eric Garner by a white police officer in New York City. Timothy A. Clary/AFP via Getty Images
Our study also investigates the rise in opposition that overlapped with BLM attention.
On Twitter, hashtags such as “#AllLivesMatter” and “#WhiteLivesMatter” increased during BLM protests and periods of reactionary right-wing protest, such as the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
We found that countermovement activity did not decrease attention to the BLM movement and was always dwarfed by BLM-related social media activity. During the peak of the George Floyd protests in May and June 2020, for instance, there were about 750,000 #BlackLivesMatter tweets per day, compared with about 20,000 #AllLivesMatter or #BlueLivesMatter.
The trend continued as time passed. In December 2020, #BlackLivesMatter tweets were posted about 10,000 times per day, compared with fewer than 1,000 for #AllLivesMatter or #BlueLivesMatter.
The data suggests that the Black Lives Matter movement is having a lasting impact – as are the group’s ideas.
the goal of support through first considering the different circumstances that may lead to varying support needs, and then adjusting support based on need
The affordance of social media to draw matters society guards as private into the public sphere
The system in Saudi Arabia whereby every woman must get the approval of a male guardian for decisions about her body and life including passport applications, travel, and marriage.
Use for a different cultural purpose than originally intended
The affordance of social media allows people who will be gathering in person also to get a sense of what others are thinking before they meet face-to-face and continue sharing their ideas after they leave the meeting.
Translated from Spanish as "not one less", this is a hemispheric movement expressing outrage over violence against women in the Americas, this movement began in Argentina and led to an August 2016 demonstration in Lima that was characterized as the largest demonstration ever seen in Peru.
The threat faced by any spreading movement for complex causes to be reduced to a simplistic phrase or meaning as the movement spreads.
Dr. Diana Daly of the University of Arizona is the Director of iVoices, a media lab helping students produce media from their narratives on technologies. Prof Daly teaches about qualitative research, social media, and information quality at the University of Arizona.
definition
the goal of support through first considering the different circumstances that may lead to varying support needs, and then adjusting support based on need
The affordance of social media to draw matters society guards as private into the public sphere
The system in Saudi Arabia whereby every woman must get the approval of a male guardian for decisions about her body and life including passport applications, travel, and marriage.
Use for a different cultural purpose than originally intended
The affordance of social media allows people who will be gathering in person also to get a sense of what others are thinking before they meet face-to-face and continue sharing their ideas after they leave the meeting.
Translated from Spanish as "not one less", this is a hemispheric movement expressing outrage over violence against women in the Americas, this movement began in Argentina and led to an August 2016 demonstration in Lima that was characterized as the largest demonstration ever seen in Peru.
The threat faced by any spreading movement for complex causes to be reduced to a simplistic phrase or meaning as the movement spreads.
