Journalists are consistent targets of hate speech, which aims at silencing critical voices; yet female journalists encounter forms of hate speech that are unique to their gender. Hate speech against female journalists can have far-reaching implications on journalism practice and society as a whole. This study investigates the macro and micro dimensions of countering hate speech as a matter of policy and as a matter of personal resistance. Its first part analyses the legal and institutional means to counter hate speech in Austria while the second part juxtaposes the micro level of experiencing hate speech and forms of resistance through in-depth interviews with nine female journalists in Austria. The findings indicate that female journalists received more hate speech when they spoke about stereotypically male-dominated topics. They noted that receiving hate speech could have a severe impact on one's personal life or work. As measures of countering those effects, female journalists responded by making the hate comments public, while others withdrew themselves from public altogether. Deterred from seeking support from the authorities, as they did not feel taken seriously, women turned to other women who showed solidarity. The paper concludes with suggestions of practical action deriving from both sets of information.

Social media, Facebook in particular, is increasingly serving as an alternative platform for discussing politics in Ethiopia. Unfortunately, it has also become a public sphere in which not only political views are shared but also discourses that ridicule women’s increasing role in Ethiopian politics are constructed and disseminated through. By analysing a sample of Facebook texts which tease the wave of women’s appointment to political power in Ethiopia, this paper argues that the discursive meanings of the texts are indicatives of a patriarchal society’s deep-rooted resistance towards women’s engagement in the public sphere as well as its strong desire to maintain the status quo. The theoretical foundation of the analytic framework to be employed in analysing the Facebook messages is the post-structuralist and postmodern approach to discourse, particularly the Habermasian view of the complex relationship between texts, their contexts of productions and interpretations and the broader life world.

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