Is the audience gender-blind? Smaller attendance in female talks highlights imbalanced visibility in academia

Júlia Rodrigues Barreto, Isabella Romitelli, Pamela Cristina Santana , Ana Paula Aprígio Assis, Renata Pardini, Melina de Souza Leite 

Although diverse perspectives are fundamental for fostering and advancing science, power relations have limited the development, propagation of ideas, and recognition of political minority groups in academia. Gender bias is one of the most well-documented processes leading women to drop out of their academic careers due to fewer opportunities and lower recognition. Using decadal-scale data on talks (n=344, 2008-2019) from a seminar series in Ecology, Evolution, and Conservation Biology, we questioned whether affirmative actions focused on increasing women's representation affected their visibility and recognition, measured by audience size, as an indirect outcome. Specifically, we first evaluated (i) the representation of females as speakers along academic levels and the effect of affirmative actions on this representation; second, (ii) whether the audience size of the talk depends on the speaker’s gender, academic position, and if it changed with affirmative action. As audience size can be influenced by speaker’s attributes other than gender, we additionally (iii) analyzed the audience accounting for the speaker’s career length and productivity (only for professors), and (iv) if there were gender differences in the topics of the talks, as certain topics may be more or less valued by the academic community and influence audience size. The results indicate that women gave fewer talks than men, and this difference was greater for seminars given by professors. However, as expected, affirmative action increased the representativeness of women throughout their career positions. Female speakers had smaller audiences, especially among professors, indicating higher visibility for male professors even with comparable productivity metrics. We found no gender effect in the research topics presented, indicating that lower audience sizes for women are unlikely to be explained by differences in the topics of their talks. We raise the discussion that gender bias in the academic community in attending talks may decrease the visibility of research carried out by women, potentially impacting professional development and restricting the spread of ideas. Moreover, although encouraged, affirmative action increasing representativeness may not be enough against more subtle gender-stereotype biases. Our research contributes to the discussion of how gender inequity can influence visibility and reinforce the stigmatization of science.