Topic Modelling of Everyday Sexism Project Entries

TL;DR

This paper applies topic modeling to analyze 100,000 reports of everyday sexism from the Everyday Sexism Project, revealing interconnected themes and providing a computational perspective that complements qualitative insights.

Contribution

It introduces a computational topic modeling approach to analyze large-scale, multilingual sexism reports, uncovering semantic relations and thematic structures.

Findings

Identified key sexism topics like public space, online harassment, and domestic abuse.

Mapped semantic relations showing interconnectedness of sexism experiences.

Demonstrated the usefulness of topic modeling for analyzing large, unstructured social data.

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.