In cybersecurity, danger isn’t distributed equally. It’s a sad fact that women experience higher rates of online harassment, threats, and discrimination than men. This year’s International Women’s Day has the theme of Accelerate Action to address gender inequality, so, we’re going to look at how this subject plays out online.

There’s a lot of evidence about the extent of the problem, from many reliable sources. A 2021 Pew Research Center study showed that women are more likely than men to experience severe forms of online harassment, including stalking and sustained harassment campaigns.

“Gender plays a role in the types of harassment people are likely to encounter online,” Pew found. Young women are disproportionately targeted, with 33 per cent under the age of 35 saying they were sexually harassed online compared to 11 per cent of men the same age.

Research by the UK Victims’ Commissioner office found that for 12 out of 21 categories of online abuse, women were more likely to have been victims than men. Women were considerably more likely to experience abuses such as intimate image abuse, cyberstalking and cyberflashing. More troubling still, 91 per cent of victims said the abuse impacted them in some way.

An investigation for BBC’s Panorama programme found a spike in known misogynistic and abusive accounts on Twitter near key dates around Elon Musk’s takeover of the platform in 2023.

Even common internet frauds like romance scams, also have different outcomes based on gender. These types of scams involve someone pretending to be interested in a romantic relationship, gaining their victim’s trust before manipulating them into sending money or sharing personal data. So the harm isn’t just emotional but financial too. Data from Barclays found that men are more likely to be victims – but women lose 2.5 times more money on average.

Steps to reduce online abuse

Organisations ranging from Amnesty International, the UN, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), and the National Cyber Security Alliance (NCSA) have the following advice which we’ve distilled into four steps:

1. Strengthen privacy and security settings

• Review social media privacy settings to control who can see your posts, friend/follow you, or message you
• Limit location sharing and avoid sharing real-time locations publicly
• Use strong, unique passwords and enable two-factor authentication (2FA) on all important accounts.

2. Be cautious with personal information

• Avoid posting sensitive details (full name, address, workplace, family members)
• Check what information about you is publicly available via a Google search and request takedowns where possible

3. Protect against doxxing (publishing of private details like a home address) and harassment

• Use a separate email and phone number for public-facing activities (work, social media, etc.)
• Consider a VPN or privacy-focused browser (like Brave or Firefox) to limit tracking
• Set up alerts with your name to monitor if personal information appears online

4. Deal with online harassment effectively

• Document everything: take screenshots of harassment or threats
• Report and block abusers on platforms
• If the harassment is extreme (doxxing, threats), report to law enforcement and use appropriate support services.

How the law tackles harassment

Since 2021, it has been a criminal offence in Ireland to share, or threaten to share, intimate images without a person’s consent. It’s also against the law to distribute, publish, or send a threatening or grossly offensive communication to another person. A 2024 Department of Justice review of the legislation’s effectiveness described the early indications as “positive”, measured by increased public awareness, the number of reports made to Hotline.ie, and the prosecutions initiated.

Since the act came into effect, the number of charges issued by An Garda Síochána has risen each year. There were 1,791 reports to Hotline.ie, a confidential portal and service for reporting intimate image abuse (IIA) that was set up in September 2021. Under the legislation, nearly 1,500 of the reported images were determined to be cases of IIA and in 929 cases, the offending material was successfully removed. There have been 99 prosecutions, with 23 prosecuted on indictment in the Circuit Court and one case prosecuted on indictment in the Central Criminal Court. since the act came into force.

The law is known as “Coco’s Law”, acknowledging those who lost their lives after online abuse, particularly Nicole ‘Coco’ Fox, whose mother Jackie has bravely campaigned to raise awareness about the harmful effects of online abuse.

How cybersecurity can learn from women’s experiences

At an individual level, we’ve covered the practical and research-backed advice for women to improve their safety online. At an organisational level, one way to accelerate action is to make sure leadership listens to women’s voices and learns from their experiences.

The Australia-based entrepreneur Kim Chandler McDonald believes the skills and instincts that women develop throughout their lives mirror essential cybersecurity practices and can inform the fight against online threats. Her excellent recent post on LinkedIn argues that women’s heightened awareness of safety offers valuable lessons. She wrote that the parallels between women’s real-world safety habits and cybersecurity best practices are striking.

“In cybersecurity, vigilance is everything. Awareness of potential risks, quick recognition of suspicious behaviour, and the ability to take proactive steps are hallmarks of good digital hygiene. Women’s lived experiences, often rooted in navigating unsafe environments, align closely with these principles, offering unique insights and instincts that can strengthen our approach to online safety.”

Women’s online safety strategies, like using pseudonyms, limiting data exposure, and blocking abusive users, align with core cybersecurity principles like managing privacy settings and mitigating risks, Chandler McDonald said.

Despite women’s natural aptitude for detecting and preventing threats, they remain underrepresented in cybersecurity, making up only 24 per cent of the global workforce. “This gender imbalance represents a missed opportunity to incorporate valuable perspectives into digital security frameworks,” she wrote.

Amid the litany of troubling statistics and lived experiences, there might be some hope. For International Women’s Day and beyond, let’s all of us accelerate action to make the internet safer for everyone.