Are female economists treated differently than males 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% in economics seminars.
Those interruptions are more likely to:
- Cut women off mid-sentence
- Come from men
- Be adversarial rather than clarifying in nature
Feb 3, 2026 20:55These gender gaps in interruptions of female economists 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.
