Online harm does not affect everyone equally. Women and girls experience disproportionate levels of abuse, harassment, and harmful online behaviour, often in ways that reflect and reinforce wider gendered inequalities.
The Free to Lead Long-term Insights Briefing (LTIB) examines how online harm is affecting women in leadership, and the pipeline of future women leaders, in New Zealand.
It brings together research, engagement, lived experience, and future-focused analysis to help New Zealand better understand the long-term risks online harm poses to women’s leadership and to support discussion about what may need to change.
This briefing has been shaped by the voices of young women. Their experiences and perspectives provide important insight into how online harm is influencing both current participation and the future of women’s leadership in New Zealand.
Online harm is an emerging and complex long-term issue, and there is still much to learn about its impacts over time. This briefing helps build that understanding and provides a platform for further work across government, communities, researchers, platforms, and civil society.
Read the full report below:
Q&As
What is this Long-term Insights Briefing (LTIB)?
This LTIB is a future-focused briefing produced under the Public Service Act 2020. It explores the long-term effects of online harm on the pipeline of future women leaders in Aotearoa New Zealand.
Why is the Ministry for Women producing this LTIB?
Because the issue has important implications for women’s safety, participation, and representation in leadership over the long term. Consultation on the proposed topic showed strong support for examining online harm as a growing issue with implications for women’s participation in leadership and public life.
What does the LTIB find?
The briefing finds that online harm is affecting women in public and leadership roles now, and may also discourage girls and young women from seeing leadership as safe, desirable, or attainable in the future.
Why focus specifically on women in leadership?
Women in leadership often have higher public visibility and can experience more personal, threatening, sexualised, and persistent abuse than men. This can affect their safety, participation, wellbeing, and willingness to remain in public life.
Why does the LTIB focus on young women as well as current leaders?
Young women are the future pipeline of leaders. Their own experiences of online harm, and what they observe happening to women leaders today, can shape whether they see leadership as possible or worthwhile. The Ministry worked with Koi Tū Centre for Informed Futures to hear directly from young people, mostly young women and girls aged 16–25 years. Their perspectives are reflected throughout the briefing and help give the report its long-term lens.
Does this LTIB represent government policy?
No. LTIBs are not government policy. They are independent of Ministers and are intended to support longer-term thinking, public discussion, and future decision-making.
Does the LTIB propose specific solutions?
The briefing does not prescribe a single solution. Instead, it provides a strategic, future-focused contribution to understanding an emerging long-term issue and brings together evidence, engagement, and emerging issues to highlight risks, trends, and possible areas for action. It highlights areas raised through research and engagement, such as stronger policy and legal settings, greater platform accountability, Safety by Design approaches, and better support for young people.
Why does the LTIB matter if it does not solve the problem?
Its value is in helping New Zealand better understand a growing long-term issue, why it matters for the future, and what questions decision-makers, communities, platforms, and researchers may need to consider.