Our studies: Gender disparity in who asks questions
Women ask fewer questions than men after academic seminars
We performed a study on whether there is a gender imbalance in who asks questions after academic seminars. Our paper has now been published on PLoS One; the preprint can still be found on arXiv. To read more about why we started this project and to see our main findings, see our summary on the LSE blog. To read other summaries of our findings in the news, see the Altmetric pages here (for the paper) and here (for the preprint).
Our main finding is that female audience members asked absolutely and proportionally fewer questions than male audience members at the ~250 academic seminars we observed around the world. We noticed that this imbalance was less pronounced when the first question was asked by a woman. We suggest that our results are best explained by internalized gender role stereotypes about assertiveness and propose recommendations for increasing women’s visibility at these events.
In case you are considering effecting change in the academic presentations you attend, you might find this report helpful, which we wrote to share the main ideas with relevant people at universities and other places. We also have the infographic shown below as a flyer for download which you could distribute or hang in relevant places. We'd love to see pictures of it hanging at your institution! Please use the hashtag #diversityinacademia on Twitter. We'd also love to hear about any efforts to effect change that have resulted from exposure to our research; please share your success stories (and cautionary tales!) here, and view others' testimonials here. We'd really appreciate it, and it might even help us get funding for follow-up work.
If you'd like to share question-asking data/observations that you have collected, please use this form to add it to our database. For advice on how to plan such a study and how to analyse these data, see also the efforts of James Davenport with similar observations at conferences.
We welcome any comments and feedback on our findings! Thank you to everyone who has been in touch already: your feedback has helped us improve our manuscript.
Our studies: No gender diffs in how people ask questions
People draw on gender stereotypes to judge question-askers, but there is no such thing as a gender-stereotypic question
We dug into the question of: Why do women not speak up? Our previous work examined contextual factors (e.g., who asks the first question, how many questions are asked), but there are also self-selection issues: women are choosing not to ask questions. One possibility, consistent with the literature on fear of backlash, is that women worry about being negatively judged by the audience. We tested this question by surveying 651 academics from around the world. Our paper is under review; the preprint can be found on PsyArXiv.
Our main findings are:
- Women indeed fear that they will be judged as less likable for asking a male-vs. a female-stereotypic question
- However, there was no evidence for backlash, as both women and men were judged as less likable for asking a male- vs. a female-stereotypic question.
- Although people think that there are gender differences in how questions are asked, we found little evidence (across 912 questions in 160 talks, that we transcribed and coded) for any gender differences in word use or behaviors that are often thought to be male- or female-stereotypic
We welcome any comments and feedback on our findings! Thank you to everyone who has been in touch already: your feedback has helped us improve our manuscript.
