  Including diverse voices in political decision-making strengthens our
democratic institutions. Within the Canadian political system, there is gender
inequality across all levels of elected government. Online abuse, such as
hateful tweets, leveled at women engaged in politics contributes to this
inequity, particularly tweets focusing on their gender. In this paper, we
present ParityBOT: a Twitter bot which counters abusive tweets aimed at women
in politics by sending supportive tweets about influential female leaders and
facts about women in public life. ParityBOT is the first artificial
intelligence-based intervention aimed at affecting online discourse for women
in politics for the better. The goal of this project is to: $1$) raise
awareness of issues relating to gender inequity in politics, and $2$)
positively influence public discourse in politics. The main contribution of
this paper is a scalable model to classify and respond to hateful tweets with
quantitative and qualitative assessments. The ParityBOT abusive classification
system was validated on public online harassment datasets. We conclude with
analysis of the impact of ParityBOT, drawing from data gathered during
interventions in both the $2019$ Alberta provincial and $2019$ Canadian federal
elections.
