Social media is a new public sphere where people can, in principle, communicate with each other regardless of their status. However, social categories like gender may still bias online communication, replicating offline disparities. Examining over 94,000 Twitter users, we investigate the association between perceived gender and measures of online visibility: how often Twitter users are followed, assigned to lists, and retweeted. Our analysis shows that users perceived as female experience a 'glass ceiling,' similar to the barrier women face in attaining higher positions in companies. For users in lower quartiles of visibility, being perceived as female is associated with more visibility; however, this tendency flips among the most visible users where being perceived as male is strongly associated with more visibility. Our results suggest that gender presented in social media profiles likely frame interactions as well as perpetuates old inequalities online.

At a moment when college sexual assault is described as an epidemic, it is important to understand college students’ implicit meanings of consent. Through 83 interviews, we examine students’ interpretations of a vignette in which neither character asked nor gave consent to sex. Gendered expectations significantly shaped whether students interpreted the male or female character as giving consent. When considering how students indicate interest in kissing or having sex, students interpreted acts such as leaving a party as indications of a man’s sexual interest and a woman’s willingness. That is, college students “expected” and employed implicit, gendered readings of actions that inform their understandings of implicit consent.

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The emotional and psychological consequences associated with providing services to traumatized others have been well established with extant scholarship highlighting these workers’ susceptibility to vicarious trauma and secondary traumatic stress. But less is known about the underlying interactional processes by which symptoms of secondary trauma emerge. This research investigates the consequences of taking the role of a person who is victimized and experiencing emotional turmoil by analyzing interviews with workers who serve victims seeking legal services. Role-taking is the process of mentally and affectively placing the self in the position of another, understanding another’s perspective. Workers described listening to victims’ experiences or coworkers’ accounts of difficult cases as being “slimed.” Those engaging in both cognitive and empathic role-taking often struggled to “shake” this content and became susceptible to mirroring the distress of the traumatized clients and coworkers. In response to this exposure, workers often shared troubling intakes or cases with coworkers as a type of interpersonal emotion management. Workers who provided emotional support to colleagues often experienced indirect exposure to trauma on two fronts: in the service of clients who had experienced intimate partner violence and from coworkers. Thus, those best able to role-take with victims or coworkers are most likely to experience greater secondary trauma exposure and its potential toll.

Civil protection orders are one of the most widely used legal interventions for intimate partner violence. Every American state has legislation that allows victims to seek legal remedies through protection orders such as preventing abusers from contacting them, requiring perpetrators to stay away from specific locations, and ordering removal of firearms. However, judges do not grant every petition for a protection order. This study analyzed over 1000 civil protection order cases from Nebraska to identify how factors not prescribed in the legal statute contribute to a determination of whether victims receive protection. The results suggest that victims' gender and the counties in which they file influence victims' chances of obtaining a protection order. Male victims, victims with children with their abuser, and married victims are significantly less likely to receive protection orders, even after controlling for the severity, recency, and type of abuse. Both male and female victims who file their cases in metropolitan counties are more likely to receive protection orders than their nonmetropolitan counterparts.