R/Feminism

Last updated
R/Feminism
Feminism symbol.svg
The feminism symbol is used as the logo for the subreddit
Type of site
Subreddit
URL https://www.reddit.com/r/Feminism/
Commercialyes
Users ~321,000 As of August 2025
LaunchedJanuary 10, 2009;16 years ago (2009-01-10)

r/Feminism is a feminist political subreddit discussing women's issues. [1] The subreddit discusses issues that impact women and minorities, including workplace abuse and harassment, rape, domestic abuse, pink tax, cultural appropriation, and representation. Users of r/feminism are similar to the users of r/MensLib, a men's liberation subreddit; and r/againstmensrights, a subreddit against r/MensRights. [1] The subreddit sends people wanting to talk about men's issues to r/Masculism, which has been described as a "a comparably essentialist approach to feminism". [2] About 54% of posts on r/Feminism are predominantly negative. [3]

Research

In a survey of non–feminists in the subreddit in 2018, non–feminists said that they wanted to disrupt the community. Feminists in the subreddit have noted a level of anti–feminists in the comments. In the first quarter of 2020, about a thousand members were banned from the subreddit per month. Due to disruption, it can be difficult to differentiate good-faith and bad-faith, and feminists within the subreddit may feel uncomfortable voicing their opinions due to negative reactions by other feminists.. [4]

A study of news reports of the People v. Turner on Reddit, comparing r/News, r/Feminism, and r/MensRights found that r/Feminism was the only subreddit to call Turner an "offender". r/Feminism was the only subreddit that linked to external webpages using the words "crime" or "rapist", indicating that r/feminism had a much stronger view on Turner than the other subreddits. 30% of the posts in r/feminism would reword news articles about the case, and 62.5% in r/MensRights. When comparing r/Feminism and r/MensRights, the feminist subreddit was likely to link to progressive websites, and r/MensRights were likely to link to conservative websites, meaning that both of the subreddits preferred sources which agreed with their beliefs. [5]

Users on r/Feminism have an average of 5 posts, and 0.86% of members have made over 100 posts. A 2023 study in the Discourse & Society journal looking at 496 thousand posts on r/Feminism found that 54.31% of posts on r/Feminism are predominantly negative. [3]

A 2020 study suggested that users of r/Feminism are similar to r/MensLib. [1] A November 2023 study in the Behavior Research Methods journal concluded that this is not due to random chance. The study also looked at r/MensRights, and wrote that "our results show that there is some evidence that r/MensLib shares more information in common with r/Feminism (and vice versa) than either do with r/MensRights. This provides good evidence that content from r/MensRights is conceptually more similar, and thus more closely converges with, rhetoric espoused by other feminist groups than rhetoric espoused by other groups within the manosphere." [6]

References

  1. 1 2 3 Khan, Abeer; Golab, Lukasz (2020). "Reddit Mining to Understand Gendered Movements". uwaterloo.ca. Archived from the original on 2023-09-29. Retrieved 2023-09-20.
  2. En, Boka; En, Michael; Griffiths, David (2013-08-08). "Gay Stuff and Guy Stuff: The Construction of Sexual Identities in Sidebars on Reddit". Networking Knowledge: Journal of the MeCCSA Postgraduate Network. 6 (1). doi: 10.31165/nk.2013.61.293 . ISSN   1755-9944.
  3. 1 2 Dilkes, Jane (2023-08-14). "Rule 1: Remember the human. A socio-cognitive discourse study of a Reddit forum banned for promoting hate based on identity" . Discourse & Society. 35: 48–65. doi:10.1177/09579265231190344. ISSN   0957-9265. S2CID   260910477.
  4. Nathan Matias, J.; Simko, Tyler; Reddan, Marianne (2020-06-25). "Study Results: Reducing the Silencing Role of Harassment in Online Feminism Discussions". Citizens and Technology Lab. Retrieved 2023-09-20.
  5. Brattland, K. (2017). Information Preferences of Reddit Communities Surrounding the Brock Turner Case. Progressive Librarian, 46(46), 86.
  6. Rosen, Zachary P; Dale, Rick (2023-11-29). "BERTs of a feather: Studying inter- and intra-group communication via information theory and language models" . Behavior Research Methods. 56 (4): 3140–3160. doi:10.3758/s13428-023-02267-2. ISSN   1554-3528. PMID   38030924. S2CID   265504144.