In 2021, a different and long-standing community virus caused another sports blackout. In April of this year, athletes, fans, commentators and organizations around the world united for a weekend to boycott social media in response to an ongoing failure of social media platforms to respond to abuse hurled at athletes, commentators and officials.
The aftermath of this blackout was quite different from the “no sports” COVID-19 blackout.

Key takeaways from the Canadian Women Leaders’ Digital Defence Initiative on March 25th. Co-founder Lana Cuthbertson spoke alongside MP Heather McPherson, Tamara Taggart, and Lucina Di Meco about the lived experiences and impacts of online abuse towards women leaders, as well as solutions for fighting back.

The data we collected through our @ParityBOT_NZ product showed a 10x increase in toxic tweets during election night in New Zealand. We were surprised to find such a large increase, and decided to dig into the data to find out more. Here’s what we found.

“It was a toxic work environment.”

Either we’ve heard it from a friend, or we’ve experienced it ourselves — the fact is, toxic places to work exist. How do we know they’re toxic? And why does it matter?

In 2017, I founded ParityYEG, a nonprofit organization dedicated to getting more women to run for public office, alongside some amazing women, after more than a decade of volunteering and advocating for gender equality in politics. While we all came from vastly different backgrounds and political ideologies, we had one thing in common — we wanted more women to run for office.