People draw on gender stereotypes to judge question-askers, but there is no such thing as a gender-stereotypic question

During the question time after seminar and conference talks, men ask proportionally more questions than women. Assuming women have as many questions as men, this is a problem that limits both diversity in discourse and the visibility of women as role models in academia. Why don’t women speak up? Previous work has examined contextual factors (e.g., who asks the first question, how many questions are asked), but there are also self-selection issues: women are choosing not to ask questions. One possibility, consistent with the literature on fear of backlash, is that women worry about being negatively judged by the audience. To assess this, in Study 1, we surveyed 651 academics from around the world. The survey showed that women indeed fear that they will be judged as less likable for asking a male- vs. a female-stereotypic question. In reality, however, there was no evidence for backlash, as both women and men were judged as less likable for asking a male- vs. a female-stereotypic question. Across two kinds of judgments, survey respondents demonstrated a belief that men and women exhibit different behaviors when asking questions at academic talks. We investigated whether there actually are any systematic gender differences in question-asking behavior in Study 2, by transcribing and coding 912 questions from 160 publicly-available recordings of live talks with question periods. We found little evidence for any gender differences in word use or behaviors that are often thought to be male- or female-stereotypic. Taken together, academics expect gender to influence question-asking behavior despite evidence to the contrary.