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Women have long encountered many barriers in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Here we investigate one of these barriers that lives on the subtler end of the spectrum: women’s inhibition to communicate in public academic forums.
We became aware of this phenomenon from our own experiences and observations. We are three established women researchers who have been attending international conferences for almost a decade. But we rarely ask questions after presentations. Indeed, one of us has never asked a single question at a major conference in her entire career. Are we an exception, or is this inhibition common among female researchers?
To figure out the answer, we gathered information about women’s participation in academic seminars and hypothesized the potential origin and consequences of this behavior. Based on our results, we proposed a few suggestions to promote women participation in academic environments.
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