"Men get mean comments, too, but I think the context of it is quite different for women."

"It’s not just, like, 'You’re an idiot, and I’m mad at you for your opinion.' It’s: 'I hate you because you are in a space that I don’t want you in. I come to sports to get away from women. Why don’t you take your top off and just make me lunch?'"

From a NYT article "Female Journalists Fight Venom by Facing It on Camera," which features a video by radio sports commentators Julie DiCaro and Sarah Spain, who sit and listen as mean comments are read to them. The readers of the comments are men, and something that's oddly unspoken is the assumption that the mean comments come from men.

The quote above is from Spain, and the writer of the article — Juliet Macur, herself a sports journalist — says something similar: "Men got mean notes, too, I was told. But as far as I can tell, none of the notes my male colleagues have ever received are laced with sexual connotations."

Could you be a little scientific about this?! Count something systematically, perhaps? I cannot believe that the hate comments sent to men are free of sexual material. (And I also don't believe the hate comes only from men.)

The writer considers the possibility of ignoring the ugliness that arrives through social media but says that's difficult because part of the sportswriter job now is to do social media and do it well and Twitter can be "a hostile place" where cruel assholes "can hide in anonymity and strike in a millisecond."

That seems to be a foundation for a legal argument, that when the employer makes social media — establishing a presence on Twitter, etc. — part of the job, there's a disparate impact on female employees and the employer should be held responsible for the sex discrimination.