A new study published in NPJ Biodiversity by scholars at the University of São Paulo in Brazil has identified a gender gap in audience attendance for academic conference presentations, with women scholars – particularly senior scientists – receiving significantly less attention than their male counterparts.
In an analysis of 327 talks given between 2008 and 2019 at a well-established Brazilian seminar series in ecology and conservation science, the authors found women presented 44 percent of talks over these 12 years. When separated by academic level, women gave fewer presentations than men as their level increased. Women represented 52 percent of students’ talks, 43 percent of postdocs’ talks, and only 24 percent of professors’ talks. Before affirmative action was fully implemented in Brazil in 2018, men were the majority of speakers 7 out of 10 years. However, more recent years had equal gender representation among conference presenters, with women representing 52 percent and 50 percent of speakers in 2018 and 2019, respectively.
Overall, male professors had the largest average audience for their presentations, averaging 1.4 times the audience size of women professors’ talks. Notably, the authors found this could not be explained by presentation content. They found no difference in the words used by men and women presenters, nor the language used in their titles and abstracts. Additionally, there was no distinctive gender differences in presentation topics.
“The fact that female professors attract smaller audiences, even when presenting on similar topics and having comparable productivity to male professors, suggests that there may be underlying biases or cultural factors at play that we can partially attribute to the gender-science stereotype that is pervasive in both academic and non-academic communities,” the authors write.
They conclude, “We, as academics, should be able to ask ourselves the following question: If the same seminar were given by a prestigious male professor, would I attend?”