International Women’s Day – Saffron shares her experiences online

The UN theme for International Women’s Day 2023 is DigitALL: Innovation and technology for gender equality. Our Digital Marketing Apprentice, Saffron, has a degree in Game Design and enjoys gaming in her spare time too. For five years she used a male name and avatar when she was online, even amongst friends. More recently, she has been ‘openly’ female, and we explored the contrast in her experience of feeling safe online.

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IWD 2023 will recognise and celebrate the women and girls who are championing the advancement of transformative technology and digital education, explore the impact of the digital gender gap on widening economic and social inequalities, and also spotlight the importance of protecting the rights of women and girls in digital spaces and addressing online and ICT-facilitated gender-based violence.”

– The United Nations, International Womens Day

Saffron, you’ve spent a lot of time in the digital world, both for your degree and because your hobby is gaming. How is it being a female in these predominantly male space?

When I first started on the internet my mum warned me not to tell people my real name, my age or my address. I was just a kid of 11 or 12, I thought why? These people aren’t going to hurt me. I actually pretended to be male when I was online, for quite a few years.

Whe people realised they could speak anonymously and often without consequence, that seems to trigger something in the human psyche – what’s been your experience?

People drop their filters and just become vile. The amount of random death threats I’ve had over the years. – even if you’ve not done anything wrong, someone can get mad at you and tell you to kill yourself.

Have you noticed a difference since being female in that space? In terms of how safe you feel or how safe you judge it to be?

I no longer present as male online but I completely understand why people do. I still don’t ever use my real name. I was taught to be safe online from a young age. I have safe spaces with close friends online, if I’m outside of one of those I’ll hide until I judge it to be a sage space and then I’ll interact.

The attention from males increased ten fold from beforehand when I pretended to be a guy. When someone finds out you’re female the energy changes.

They don’t see you as their ‘homie’ anymore, even though nothing’s changed with conversation style and topic from my end.

Aside from the change in your online relationships change then, what about how people judge your capabilities, do they assume you’re not going to be as good at things?

With most of the stuff I play online, like with any game really, it’s male dominated and the expectation is that a female can’t do it. Especially with competitive games, they’re heavily male dominated. People think females can’t perform – and the main reason they can’t is because they’re scared of the opinions they are going get just for trying. Sometimes on the professional scene they try putting together a pro all-female team and it falls apart because they’ve just thrown a lot of girls together on the basis of gender and not because they work well together.

They were set up to fail.

What advice would you give to younger women entering the online space, whether thats gaming or something IT based for study or work?

I regret pretending to be male. I don’t think it’s a good thing to pretend that you’re someone else. If I could go back in time I wouldn’t do it again. Because you end up in situations where you have to make up a bunch of excuses as to why you can’t video call or phone call, and it breaks down the trust.

What would you have done instead to try and stay safe?

I probably would have said that I was female but I would be very cautious. I wouldn’t have shared my real name or anything and I probably would have kept my head down and not been as interactive with males – because from my experience, once they know you are female the flirty side comes out. Its just natural.

Here’s some more information on Digital Violence

How we can supercharge an equitable digital future

International Women’s Day – Saffron shares her experiences online