When I give a talk, I like to allow time for questions. It’s not just a matter of politeness to the audience, though that is a factor. I find it helps me gauge how the talk has gone down: what points have people picked up on, are there things they didn’t get, and are there things I didn’t get? Quite often a question coming from left field gives me good ideas. Sometimes I’m challenged and that’s good too, as it helps me either improve my arguments or revise them. But here’s the thing. After virtually every talk I give there’s a small queue of people who want to ask me a private question. Typically they’ll say, “I didn’t like to ask you this in the question period, but…”, or “This probably isn’t a very sensible thing to ask, but…”. And the thing I’ve noticed is that they are almost always women. And very often I find myself saying, “I wish you’d asked that question in public, because I think there are lots of people in the audience who’d have been interested in what you have to say.”
I’m not an expert in gender studies or feminism, and most of my information about research on gender differences comes from Virginia Valian’s scholarly review, Why So Slow. Valian reviews studies confirming that women are less likely than men to speak out in question sessions in seminars. I have to say my experience in the field of psychology is rather different, and I'm pleased to work in a department where women’s voices are as likely to be heard as men’s. But there’s no doubt that this is not the norm for many disciplines, and I've attended conferences, and given talks, where 90% of questions come from men, even when they are a minority of the audience.
So what’s the explanation? Valian recounts personal
experiences as well as research evidence that women are at risk of being
ignored if they attempt to speak out, and so they learn to keep quiet. But,
while I'm sure there is truth in that, I find myself irritated by what I see
as a kind of passivity in my fellow women. It seems too easy to lay the blame
at the feet of nasty men who treat you as if you are invisible. A deeper
problem seems to be that women have been socially conditioned to be nervous of
putting their heads above the parapet. It is really much easier to sit quietly
in an audience and think your private thoughts than to share those thoughts
with the world, because the world may judge you and find you lacking. If you
ask women why they didn’t speak up in a seminar, they’ll often say that they
didn’t think their question was important enough, or that it might have been
wrong-headed. They want to live life safely and not draw attention to
themselves. This affects participation in discussion and debate at all
stages of academic life - see this
description of anxiety about participating in student classes. Of course,
this doesn’t only affect women, nor does it affect all women. But it affects
enough women to create an imbalance in who gets heard.
We do need to change this. Verbal exchanges after lectures
and seminars are an important part of academic life, and women need to
participate fully. There’s no point in encouraging men to listen to women’s
voices if the women never speak up. If you are one of those silent women,
I urge you to make an effort to overcome your bashfulness. You’ll find it less
terrifying than you imagine, and it gets easier with practice. Don’t ask
questions just for the sake of it, but when a speaker sparks off an interesting
thought, a challenging question, or just a need for clarification, speak out.
We need to change the culture here so that the next generation of women feel at
ease in engaging in verbal academic debate.
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