Sawyer Seminar Lecture: "Understanding and Responding to Gender Discrimination and Harassment Online" by Nathan Matias

Thursday, January 28, 2016

Digital networks offer powerful opportunities to re-imagine human cooperation outside of traditional institutions. Yet these networks can reproduce inequalities by sharing and amplifying distributed forms of injustice, including discrimination and harassment. The most common methods for monitoring discrimination and inequality come from the mid-20th century, developed by people including women's advocate Betty Friedan and the economist Gary Becker. Online, without clear institutional boundaries, we need new ways to monitor and respond to the problems of sexism, racism, and discrimination online. In this talk, I share new directions for monitoring and responding to gender discrimination and harassment online, with examples from journalism, crowdfunding, the peer economy, and social media platforms.