Most sessions, whether keynote or panel-based, at a conference have opportunities for the audience to ask questions of the speaker/s.  A new study from Stanford University explores data to try and understand just who is most likely to ask such questions, and finds a decidedly uneven picture in terms of the gender of questioners.  What’s more, this disparity continues, even when women make up the majority of the audience.

“When women are 70% of a room, they still asked only about 40% of the questions,” the authors say. “At that rate an audience would need to be 80% or 90% women before question asking would be split evenly between men and women.”

The researchers gathered data from seven conferences attended over a few years, recording both the number of questions asked and the gender of the people asking them.  Despite the relatively low number of conferences analyzed, and the relatively ad hoc method of gathering the data, the researchers have already seen some changes as a result of their work.

Some event organizers have attempted to redress the balance and implement policies to ensure that the first question after any session is asked by under-represented groups, whilst the findings have also prompted minority individuals to speak up for themselves too.

They also hope that their work provides a framework for future discussions on the representativeness of the scientific community.

“Making a choice and then evaluating its contribution to change is a critical part of experiment design. I hope that this is the start of a longer trend of us asking questions about the genetics community we want to create and how we create it,” the authors conclude.