Fan vs researcher

I was casually browsing through a forum for Doctor Who as I do every couple of days. I usually just see what the most recent threads are, occasionally look at a few filming spoilers and then carry on with the rest of my internet browsing. Yesterday I noticed a thread about a ‘University Study on Sexism in Doctor Who‘ and clicked on it to read the posts and the original article itself. As someone who has studied Doctor Who academically and written essays/a dissertation on the programme, I was interested in reading another young researcher’s work and to see how they approached it. After reading the research project, I read some of the posts on the thread and was appalled by some fans’ responses. Some questioned the topic, others targeted the researcher. I’m not going to specifically address my ideas about whether Doctor Who is sexist or not as a lot of others already have (including The Guardian). This post is more about fan responses to research.