Who has a voice at scientific conferences?

In August 2023, I attended the European Ornithologists’ Union (EOU) conference, facilitated by the BOU member attendance grant. While I was at the conference, I couldn’t help but reflect on the participation of under-represented groups in scientific conferences, including the active participation of women (or, more broadly speaking, female-presenting people) when asking questions after the talks. In fact, after several discussions with other female colleagues, I became increasingly aware that women ask fewer questions than men in conferences. This phenomenon has been described in a few scientific papers and news articles, across multiple scientific areas (e.g. Telis et al. 2019) and countries (Carter et al. 2018). Worryingly, this trend does not seem to be explained by demographic inertia, as younger male scientists also ask more questions than younger female scientists (Hinsley et al. 2017; Carter et al. 2018). This imbalance in visibility helps increase internalised stereotypes in people from under-represented groups and may impair how younger scientists perceive their possibility of success in academia (Hinsley et al. 2017).

During the EOU conference, together with João Gameiro, Inês Catry, Fábio Marcolin and Teresa Catry, we collected data on the number of questions asked by female- and male-presenting attendees, as well as the presenting gender of the person asking the first question after the talk. We also recorded the presenting gender of the speaker and of the moderator of the session, the approximate number of audience members in the session, and finally the career stage of the presenter (“early-career” if the speaker was between MSc and post-doc stages, and “senior” if the speaker was a senior scientist, lecturer, or professor). Whilst it was not my intention to turn this into an accurate scientific analysis, I couldn’t help myself and ended up running simple univariate generalised linear models to try to explain what influences the number and the proportion of questions asked by female-presenting attendees. The gender variables were recorded in a binary way (female or male-presenting), which I acknowledge increases the visibility problem for non-binary people and for people whose real gender does not correspond to their presenting gender. In future conferences, this error could be minimised by including the pronouns of the speakers in the conference program, which could also potentially facilitate the interactions during the conference.

Overall, both the total number of attendees and the total number of speakers were very close to “female-male” gender equality, but the number of people that described themselves as “non-binary / transgender / other” was still very small (Figure 1). In total, 23 sessions were chaired by female-presenting scientists, 18 by male-presenting, and 10 sessions were chaired by a combination of both genders. There was, however, a bias in the plenary speakers: 5 out of 7 speakers were female-presenting. In total, we recorded the questions of 76 talks (of which 70 had questions asked), and we found a clear bias towards male-presenting attendees: 74% of the questions were asked by male-presenting people, and at about two-thirds of the talks, male-presenting attendees initiated the discussion by asking the first question. At 89% of the talks, male-presenting attendees asked at least one question, while at only 53% of talks female-presenting attendees asked at least one question.

Our statistical analysis shows that female-presenting attendees asked more questions when the speakers were female-presenting as well (Figure 2), highlighting the importance of gender representation when considering the outline of speakers in a conference. Also, female-presenting attendees asked proportionally more questions when there were smaller audiences and in talks presented by early-career researchers. Importantly, both the number and the proportion of questions asked by female-presenting attendees sharply increased when the first question was asked by another female-presenting audience member. This was true independently of the number of questions asked in the session, although sessions with larger number of questions had more questions by female-presenting attendees. However, on all these analyses we did not account for the gender-structure of the attendees in the room, which should be corrected in future studies.

So, what can we do to change these statistics? As conference organisers and attendees, it is our responsibility to reflect on how we can create conferences that are equally safe for all people, regardless of their gender, skin colour, nationality, sexual orientation or physical ability, amongst other sources of discrimination. The first, and easiest, step is for all of us to read the literature on the topic, raising awareness and trying the solutions recommended by the experts. Secondly, we need to ensure that our conferences are as egalitarian as possible, and that people from all under-represented groups and career stages are given equal opportunities to present their work. Thirdly, when selecting the person who asks the questions, moderators of sessions should consider these biases and take steps to ensure that under-represented groups are given equal opportunities to ask questions. In our analysis (as well as in Carter et al. 2018) there was a clear pattern: if female-presenting people asked a question first, other female-presenting attendees were more likely to ask questions afterwards. Therefore, we can try to minimise the biases by giving people from under-represented groups the chance to initiate the discussions.

We also need to create spaces where people from under-represented groups feel safe to ask questions. In conferences, women described feeling intimidated or anxious that their questions were not good enough (Carter et al. 2018; Jarvis et al. 2022), so perhaps making questions anonymous (e.g., through a conference app) could potentially lead to more people from under-represented groups asking questions, increasing their confidence. While our results and other papers show that women ask more questions if there are more questions being asked, increasing the amount of question time at a conference may not necessarily increase the number of questions asked by women (Carter et al. 2018). On a larger scale, building a more egalitarian and kinder society is bound to empower people from under-represented groups, which is likely to increase representation in all fields of society, including in the number of people that get their voices heard during conferences. As for myself, in future conferences I will take advantage of talks with smaller audiences, presented by early-career female-presenting scientists, to gain the courage to raise my hand and ask a question.