Iggy Azalea showed that she knows how to handle herself when she made a passionate defence of her place in hip-hop just before Christmas.

And now the Aussie-born rapper has taken another swipe at her critics - suggesting that there's a bit of woman-hating going on.

Asked by Vanity Fair if she considered the criticism she'd taken as a white MC to be at least in part misogynistic, she strongly agreed.

"Well, they don't say that stuff about Macklemore," she answered. "So, yes, I think it has 100,000 percent to do with the fact that I have a vagina."

And her comment follows a recent interview with Macklemore on the currently hot topic of white artists in hip-hop.

"Just because there's been more white rappers, just because there's been more successful white rappers, you cannot disregard where this culture came from and our place in it as white people," he told Hot 97.

"I'm not gonna comment on Iggy in that regard, but what I will say is I saw a tweet — it was something along the lines of, 'Hip-hop was birthed out of the civil rights movement'.

"This is a culture that came from oppression that came from white oppression, it was the by-product of that. We can say that we've evolved and that we've come a long way since the late '70s and early '80s, but (evidence suggests) that we haven't. So, you can't disregard that."

The US has seen race riots following the controversial acquittal of a police officer who shot a black teenager six times in Ferguson, Missouri.