While journalists, especially broadcast journalists, have been trained to keep going no matter what and to not make themselves the story, a new study finds that women journalists also see attacks — deliberate or otherwise — as part of the job. The study, based on in-depth interviews with 32 print and broadcast journalists in the U.S., was published recently in the Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly.

The theme of women saying that harassment and attacks were part of the price they pay for being female journalists was something that kept coming up during the course of interviews, said Kaitlin Miller, assistant professor of journalism and media at the University of Alabama and the author of the new study.

When men described their experiences with harassment or other attacks, they really seemed to wear it as a badge of honor and a sign of having done good work, Miller found. “Wow, they’re really looking at these experiences quite differently,” Miller realized — and decided to explore these themes further as part of her doctoral dissertation.

The first question the study investigated was whether journalists tended to face different types of harassment based on their gender. Perhaps unsurprisingly, women were more likely to face most of the 16 types of harassment the study examined, including having their appearances be made fun of and getting repeated requests for dates. Male journalists were more likely to be threatened with physical harm or actually hit (slapped, pushed, or spit on).

That journalists — especially women journalists — face harassment isn’t new. But Miller says much of the research and discourse about harassment experienced by journalists focuses either on sexual harassment or harassment on social media. “We have not seen a lot of exploration of emotions in journalism, because for years there was the stigma that journalists are objective, third-party flies on the wall,” Miller said. “We’re finally seeing research showing that emotion does play a large part in the journalistic process. Here, we’re seeing that it even comes down to how journalists are assessing the experiences that they personally have.”

Read the full article about female journalists by Shraddha Chakradhar at NiemanLab.