Claudia Maldonado retweetledi
Are female economists treated differently than male economists in academic seminars?
These authors wanted to know whether gender shapes how scholars are treated when presenting research.
So they built a massive dataset of 2,000+ economics seminars, job talks, and conference presentations from 2019–2023.
They didn’t rely on surveys or self-reports.
Instead, what they did was really cool:
They had humans and LLMs code audio recordings of talks to measure:
-Who interrupts
-How often they interrupt
-When interruptions occur
-Whether interruptions are neutral or adversarial
Here’s what they found:
Women are interrupted more often than men—by about 10–20%.
Those interruptions are more likely to:
- Cut women off mid-sentence
- Come from men
- Be adversarial rather than clarifying in nature
These gaps persist even after controlling for:
-Field
-Topic
-Presenter seniority
-Audience size
Importantly, talks by women often draw larger and more diverse audiences. So pattern this isn’t about lower engagement.
Bottom line: Economics seminar culture isn’t gender-neutral.
In elite research settings, women face systematically different treatment that could affect their evaluation, visibility, and career trajectories.
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