I’ve been in online journalism for nearly 23 years now, and during that time I’ve been called lots of things and had the odd death threat from Irvine Welsh fans. But until very recently I never had men tracking me down so they could send emails patronising me. The difference, of course, is gender. I now get the same sort of unsolicited messages as the other women I know in tech journalism, messages that are infantilising, patronising and sexist.
I’ve known since my first online adventures in the early 1990s that the internet is a very different place for women and LGBT+ people than it is for straight men, but it still saddens me.