I heard a radio piece about a research study into the role that gender plays in the willingness of academics to speak up during seminars some weeks ago, and I thought it would make a great post for this blog. The thing that really drew me to this particular example, was the fact that the paper was about staff seminars rather than seminars for students — yes, we also attend seminars in order to learn more about one another’s research. And I think it’s important for all of you to know that the same anxieties and inhibitors are working on us, just as they sometimes do their work on you. I described this to my colleague Kirsten Macleod and she said, ‘oh, you want to write a “Stars! They’re Just Like Us!” piece’.

I have probably already exposed myself as someone who loves a bit of celebrity by showing the David Oyelowo youtube video in my Wednesday lecture, so naturally I jumped on Kirsten’s idea. Lecturers – we’re just like you!

The piece of research that I’ve linked to in this post examines the role that gender plays in individual staff member’s willingness to ask questions, and it finds that men tend to ask more questions than women. This is no great surprise. But it’s interesting to learn that the order in which people ask their questions really makes a difference — so if a women asks the first question, other women are more likely to speak up as a result of this. Also, the longer the questioning lasted, the more likely women were to make a contribution. (I’ve recently discovered that ‘slow to warm up’ is a recognised form of shyness.) Here’s what the research paper has to say:

women audience members asked absolutely and proportionally fewer questions than male audience members. Men and women differed in the importance they attributed to different factors preventing them from asking questions, with women rating internal factors (e.g., not working up the nerve) as more important than men. Furthermore, our observations indicated that the gender of the first person to ask a question predicted the gender imbalance in subsequent questions, with proportionally fewer questions asked by women when a man was the first to ask a question. A longer time for questions was associated with less of an imbalance…

Of course gender is certainly not the only possible inhibiting factor, but it’s useful to remember that barriers to participation are very real and that they are not restricted only to the experience of being a student. We all need to be more aware of making room for one another, and perhaps the way to do that is for all of us to think a little less about ourselves and how we’re feeling in the moment. Maybe instead we can flip that on its head by trying to notice what everyone else in the room is doing and what we could do to support that.