Women’s visibility in academic seminars: Women ask fewer questions than men

Abstract

The attrition of women in academic careers is a major concern, particularly in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics subjects. One factor that can contribute to the attrition is the lack of visible role models for women in academia. At early career stages, the behaviour of the local community may play a formative role in identifying ingroup role models, shaping women’s impressions of whether or not they can be successful in academia. One common and formative setting to observe role models is the local departmental academic seminar, talk, or presentation. We thus quantified women’s visibility through the question-asking behaviour of academics at seminars using observations and an online survey. From the survey responses of over 600 academics in 20 countries, we found that women reported asking fewer questions after seminars compared to men. This impression was supported by observational data from almost 250 seminars in 10 countries: women audience members asked absolutely and proportionally fewer questions than male audience members. When asked why they did not ask questions when they wanted to, women, more than men, endorsed internal factors (e.g., not working up the nerve). However, our observations suggest that structural factors might also play a role; when a man was the first to ask a question, or there were fewer questions, women asked proportionally fewer questions. Attempts to counteract the latter effect by manipulating the time for questions (in an effort to provoke more questions) in two departments were unsuccessful. We propose alternative recommendations for creating an environment that makes everyone feel more comfortable to ask questions, thus promoting equal visibility for women and members of other less visible groups.

How the entire scientific community can confront gender bias in the workplace

“…32 . Gender bias appears even in small, seemingly inconsequential patterns of visibility -women ask fewer questions in seminars, especially when the first question is asked by a man, and women are featured in fewer advertisements in Science (8%) and Nature (18%) than are men 33,34 . Another component of faculty promotion is teaching evaluations, where women are rated significantly lower than men, regardless of the gender of the student evaluator 35 .…”

Smaller Classes Promote Equitable Student Participation in STEM

“…Previous research demonstrates a pervasive gender gap in participation in undergraduate STEM courses (Eddy et al 2014), a trend that persists beyond undergraduate lecture halls. In fact, it has been shown that women audience members ask fewer questions than men after academic seminar and conference talks (Pritchard et al 2014, Carter et al 2017, Hinsley et al 2017. These patterns may contribute to a general tendency to undervalue the contributions of women and lead to documented phenomena such as proportionately fewer women awarded prestigious fellowships (Wold and Wenneras 2010) and grants (Ledin et al 2007), fewer female first (primary investigators;O'Dorchai et al 2009) and last authors (research supervisors; Holman et al 2018), fewer women invited as speakers at symposia (Isbell et al 2012), and fewer women occupying high-status positions in STEM (O'Dorchai et al 2009, Beede et al 2011.…”

Evaluating features of scientific conferences: A call for improvements

“…Women and minorities are especially lacking in support, sponsorship and advocacy; hence, they miss out on numerous opportunities. A gender disparity in participation during discussions exists (137) as discussion and Q&A sessions are most often led by professors, i.e. session chairs prefer to pick professors to ask questions over students.…”