Abstract

We assess whether men and women are treated differently when presenting their research in economics seminars. We collected data on every interaction between presenters and audience members across thousands of seminars, job market talks and conference presentations, leveraging both human judgment and audio processing algorithms to measure the number, tenor, tone and type of interruptions. Within a seminar series, women are interrupted more than men, and this finding holds when controlling for characteristics of the presenter and their paper topic and for audience size. Interruptions that may not be favorable to the presenter, such as those that are negative in tenor or tone, or cutoff the presenter mid-sentence, are common occurrences in economics seminars, and increase for women presenters. We also find greater engagement with female presenters in the form of larger, more diverse audiences, suggesting a potential role model effect.