A woman doing her job should be able to finish the working day without having to decide how much abuse she can afford to notice. When the work involves speaking publicly, the possibility of being challenged comes with it. The expectation that she should also become skilled at enduring misogyny deserves rather less acceptance.
TechTimes reports accusations that major technology companies are amplifying online misogyny, putting women journalists at greater risk. The headline alone cannot establish how particular platforms operate or what responsibility attaches to any individual case. It does, however, bring a familiar demand into view: the person exposed to hostility is expected to learn how to live with it.
There is something troubling about how readily resilience can become another item in someone’s job description.
Learning to withstand hostility may be useful. Switching off, blocking an account or declining to engage may be sensible choices. Yet each leaves the person receiving the abuse managing a problem she did not create. Even withdrawal has a cost if it means becoming less available to readers, less visible in a profession, or more cautious about what to investigate. Those are possible consequences worth considering before offering the brisk advice to ignore it.
There is a complication here. Journalism must remain open to fierce criticism. A journalist’s sex cannot place her reporting beyond scrutiny, and disagreement is not automatically abuse. That distinction matters. It also requires us to pay attention to what is actually being said, rather than treating everything beneath a published article as the inevitable roughness of public life.
For the rest of us, this reaches into an ordinary habit: what we choose to pass on. Sharing a hostile post to express disgust may still give it another audience. Joining a pile-on can feel like taking a position while requiring very little thought about the person at its centre.
Platforms have questions to answer about what they help circulate. Our own choices remain ours. Before forwarding something, we can read it closely enough to ask whether it challenges a piece of work or helps make its author a target. That small pause will not settle the argument about technology companies. It is still a responsibility we can exercise without waiting for them.