Conferences are the bread and butter of scientific discussions. This is where researchers can present and argue their discoveries and ideas in the field. Cooperation and contribution are key elements of these scientific discussions. They ensure the presentation of multiple perspectives, ideas, questions and debates. But some people tend to voice their opinions and ideas louder than others. Our research focuses on whether gender makes a difference in this tendency and how we can possibly level the playing field.

Gender dynamics at scientific conferences significantly impact the participation and visibility of researchers. These gender-related behaviors are relatively underresearched topics. Different studies show that men are more likely to ask the first questions, talk longer, interrupt others more often, and their presentations have higher numbers of participation than women’s. For every female contribution, the male contribution could be anywhere between 1.4 and 1.8, but several factors can influence male and female participation during a Q&A session, including the size of the conference, the gender ratio of the attendance and the gender of the chair (Aufenvenne et al., 2021; Hinsley et al., 2017; Jarvis et al., 2022). Women reported feeling uncomfortable participating in Q&A sessions, fearing backlash and holding back questions because of anxiety, while men reported holding back questions in order to let others participate (Jarvis et al., 2022). While both men and women find conferences beneficial to their academic and professional development, women prefer to attend smaller conferences, which can create a large difference between data collected on larger conferences and data collected on smaller conferences (which can create less anxiety about participating in discussions and where the female attendance might be possibly higher) (Eckhaus & Davidovitch, 2018).

According to our data collected at smaller European conferences, women are more likely to take part in the conversation if the first person to ask a question during a Q&A session is a woman (but on average the percentage of women in the discussion still won’t reach 50%, which means men won't be oppressed in the discussion either). On the other hand, if the first questioner is a man, the participation of women drops more than 15% compared to if the first questioner is a woman. This could be explained by others conforming to the behavior of the first person and based on their gender feeling more or less encouraged to participate in the conversation (meaning if the first person is a woman some men feel less encouraged to participate while women feel more encouraged, and the opposite is true as well). This indicates that the decisions (and biases) of the person who leads the Q&A session have a big influence on the ratio of women and men in the conversation.

Most women (90%) ask questions from the presenter at least once but just over a third (ca. 35%) comment or note on the presentation, while 70% of men ask questions and 50% comment on the presentation. This indicates that women are more cooperative during Q&A sessions and try to keep the focus on the presenter and their work. In this study we considered comments and notes as less cooperative because they usually take the focus away from the presenter’s current work and start a discussion on their own work (the questioner) or possibly bring up other people's work. This is supported by the numerous studies on gender-related cooperation in mixed-sex situations. Women tend to be more cooperative in mixed-sex situations while men are less likely to cooperate in these cases. Men are generally more competitive and can see conferences as a competitive situation because of their relation to their careers as well.

Compared to other studies, our data indicates that women and men talk on average the same amount of time (around 47 seconds), but the data related to the length of questions asked by men is more dispersed and has more outliers compared to the data related to women. So, some men are more likely to talk longer than others do, but on average men and women use an equal amount of time to ask questions or comment on a presentation. Furthermore, women are much more likely to apologize during their turn for any reason than men are, which could be because women are more anxious about speaking up and participating in Q&A sessions.

Overall, the organizers, the chair, the person who leads the conversation and the environment can make a large difference in how men and women act and are represented during the Q&A sessions. These results only represent smaller conferences with mostly European attendants and the results may differ in other parts of the world or during bigger conferences (women are probably more underrepresented at bigger conferences because they are more uncomfortable attending them). But more research and applying these findings to conferences could make big changes in women's participation and increase their overall representation in the discussions.

But what can I do about it?

As I previously mentioned, the chair and the organizers have a lot of power in this situation. As organizers you should strive to create a comfortable space for both men and women to further their career. Asking (almost) the same number of male and female presenters could help; of course it's not necessarily possible at every conference and in every branch of science but it's important to present more women’s work, especially on bigger conferences) because (just as I mentioned in my previous post Gender and affiliation bias in scientific publishing) presenting more diverse works of science will result in more innovative ideas and more progressive scientific discussions. But even if asking more female presenters is not possible for your conference, the chair can still make sure to let men and women be heard according to their participation ratio during the Q&A sessions. Picking the first questioner to be a woman can encourage other women to participate in the discussion as well and, as we saw according to our data, this method does not oppress male voices either. And lastly as a participant of a conference and especially if you are a woman, please don't hold back your questions. There is no way to ask the wrong question and don't doubt your ability to ask the right question!

If you are interested in this topic, want to further a research project, and feel up for some data collecting, please contact Judit Mokos (mokjud (at) gmail.com) as we would appreciate it if you collected data about a conference you have attended. Your name would be mentioned in the acknowledgements of the paper, as you would have helped us a lot to make this project happen.

References

• Aufenvenne, P., Haase, C., Meixner, F., & Steinbrink, M. (2021). Participation and communication behaviour at academic conferences – An empirical gender study at the German Congress of Geography 2019. Geoforum, 126, 192–204. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2021.07.002
• Hinsley, A., Sutherland, W. J., & Johnston, A. (2017). Men ask more questions than women at a scientific conference. PLoS ONE, 12(10), 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0185534
• Jarvis, S. N., Ebersole, C. R., Nguyen, C. Q., Zhu, M., & Kray, L. J. (2022). Stepping Up to the Mic: Gender Gaps in Participation in Live Question-and-Answer Sessions at Academic Conferences. Psychological Science, 33(11), 1882–1893. https://doi.org/10.1177/09567976221094036
• Eckhaus, E., & Davidovitch, N. (2018). Impact of Gender and Conference Size on Conference Preferences – Employing Natural Language Processing. International Journal of Educational Methodology, 4(1), 45–52. https://doi.org/10.12973/ijem.4.1.45

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