During the years of Julia Gillard’s prime ministership of Australia and beyond, extensive public debate arose around negative public and media attitudes toward female politicians in the form of disrespectful verbal attacks on the prime minister and female cabinet members. While some commenters on social media complained that female politicians received more severe criticism and had their careers cut short unfairly, another frequent claim was that this was not related to gender but poor performance by the female politician. Meanwhile, research around how the media constructs female politicians has focused on traditional gender stereotyping in the form of attention to appearance, dress, and their personal lives, which are explicit and recognisable biases. Instead, this study identified that female politicians were denunciated for less clearly gender related issues, notably their relationship to money, and that this occurred at statistically higher frequencies than for male politicians. Linguistic analysis of texts can reveal more implicit gender-based biases, particularly by quantifying negativity, linguistic intensification/exaggeration and rhetorical devices which reinforce a claim or in fact undermine it. This chapter reports on the analysis of 20,000 reader comments to two national newspapers, comparing construction of female politicians to male and using both quantitative and qualitative analyses. The texts were therefore unprompted, expressed in natural language and drawn from a wide range of commenters. In focusing on commenters’ views, the chapter incorporates t a more authentic assessment of representation by gender than that of the mainstream media, which may follow institutional guidelines and requirements.