Attacks on Women who Rise Up

When women rise up to positions of power, they are often attacked. This holds worldwide - in the US, Mexico and even in Sweden. Why is this?

Gianmarco Daniele, Gemma Dipoppa, and Massimo Pulejo have a tremendous paper analysing (online and offline) attacks against Italian mayors.

To assess whether there are any sex differences in victimisation, they study victories that are marginal. 5.7% of narrowly-elected male mayors are attacked; 15.7% of marginally elected women.

But maybe women are just overly sensitive, perhaps this is a function of reporting? Actually, the trend holds even when excluding self-reported attacks. Nor is it a function of generalised violence. Eliminating various hypotheses, the authors show that (marginally elected) women are three times more likely to be attacked.

Why might this be?