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Research suggests that women are underrepresented as speakers at conferences, especially in certain fields. But when they are invited to speak, do they take up as much airtime as men? No, suggests a new, preliminary study of speaking times at 11 different scientific conferences from 2016-17. Men went over their allotted share of time in 47 percent of the talks studied, compared to 41 percent of the time for women. The study found that allocated time, career stage and enforcement of timekeeping were the factors most associated with how long speakers talked but that gender and conference time also mattered significantly. Male speakers were most likely to go overtime at large conferences: 73 percent of the time, compared to 49 percent of the time for women at large conference.
Co-author Johanna Hoog, an assistant professor of chemistry and molecular biology at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, said via email that while career step is still a more important determinant than speaker gender, the study still gets at “the ‘glass ceiling’ that keeps women from becoming leaders in academia.” The online reaction to the paper thus far also demonstrates how “much people hate when speakers come unprepared and go over time” in general, she added.
