How can it be so difficult to ask a question? And why are men almost twice as likely to do it than women?

It’s the end of a research talk. You are easily the second most qualified person in the room after the speaker. A question comes readily to mind. And yet… somehow… your arm remains by your side. Before you know it, six men have asked ‘questions’ that demonstrate either that they weren’t listening or want to talk about their own, not necessarily relevant, research. Afterwards you berate yourself for yet again not raising your hand. How can it be this hard?

The fear does not necessarily diminish with age or seniority. In April 2014 I decided to go for it at a climate change meeting. As I raised my hand, my heart pounded. I mumbled my question into the microphone, having to restart at least once. To this day I can remember neither the question I asked nor the answer, only the panic and flight-response to the adrenalin surge. I was not an early career researcher. I had been a climate scientist for 20 years and was a professor of climate physics.

Safely back in my office, I wondered why I continued to feel this way. Was it just me? And was it down to me or was something else going on? I started counting and, at almost every subsequent meeting, the men asked more questions than you would expect given the gender balance of attendees. Whilst there has been much recent attention on diversity of speakers, the gender balance of those asking questions seems to be more persistently skewed. Whilst I have no doubt that in some cases, chairs or indeed speakers may be consciously or subconsciously favouring men, it was obvious in the meetings I looked at that women weren’t even raising their hands. A session chair can’t pick women if none volunteer.

And this issue is widespread. At an astronomy conference in 2014, women were under-represented amongst questioners compared to attendees. At a conservation biology conference male attendees asked 1.8 questions for each one from a female attendee even after counts were adjusted for the gender balance of attendees. The reason why this is happening is however missing from many of these studies.

Possible explanations involve a lack of confidence and links to studies demonstrating girls being less likely to engage in class at school. An age effect has also been considered: senior scientists are more likely to ask questions, but are also more likely to be male. However, the biology study found similar gender-based differences for early career researchers, suggesting that this is not purely an age effect.

In 2014, we surveyed staff and PhD students across our world leading, research intensive, physical science department. Fear of appearing ‘dumb’, ‘stupid’ or of ‘being found out’ was the primary reason people didn’t ask questions. Though this was slightly more important for women and early career researchers, there were a surprising number of senior staff thinking the same thing.

But why does it matter who asks the questions? Asking questions is a good way to raise your profile in the community, although people who blatantly only ask a question to advertise their own work do not end up with a good reputation in the end because everyone can tell the difference. The main intent when asking a question should be to contribute scientifically or to learn, so by not asking questions, both you and the rest of the audience will miss out on that learning. It’s also good practice for the times when you are up on stage – experiencing being the questioner helps you understand how to best answer questions.

So how can you become better at asking questions? Here are my five steps to getting there.

Practice. It might be easier to start in more informal or local environments (though I personally find it harder to ask in my department as my imposter syndrome kicks in when I know that I am going to see these same people every day!). Challenge yourself to raise your hand in at least one Q&A session for each meeting.

Plan. Go to talks where you are already confidence in the subject matter, or where you already know the speaker. Have a draft question ready, but also be flexible in case it is answered sufficiently in the talk and asking it would seem odd. However, don’t spend the whole talk stressing about asking a question as you’ll miss the content of the talk and won’t benefit from it.

Position. Sit somewhere accessible and consider wearing something either colourful or easy to describe – moderators can sometimes struggle to describe who the microphone should go to (in my field, ‘man in the checked shirt’ sometimes describes about 90% of the audience).

Remember. You are not alone – our survey showed that very often other people are wondering about or confused by the same thing you are. If someone else asks the question you have in mind, remember this as evidence that your question was a smart one and give it a go next time.

Be kind to yourself. If it doesn’t happen this time you haven’t ‘failed’ in asking questions. The situation may well be beyond your control (over-running speakers, talks that are so clear or so incomprehensible that forming a question is impossible). Also, asking questions is not the only way to contribute scientifically or enhance your reputation. Approaching a speaker in the coffee session and/or following up with an email are also good options.

Finally, if all else fails try imagining the rest of the audience as watermelons. I don’t know why, but my 11 year old says this works for him.

What works for you?

By Ellie Highwood

Ellie Highwood is a Visiting Professor in the Department of Meteorology at the University of Reading, having been a Professor of Climate Physics there since 2011. She is now a Diversity and Inclusion Consultant and a Leadership, Career and Life Coach.

Impostor syndrome is widespread amongst women and can have a negative effect on their careers. Where does it start, and what can we do about it?

“I don’t belong here. I’m a fraud. I’ve tricked my way into my position, and it’s only a matter of time before someone finds me out.”

Unless by some small chance you happen to be a professional con artist, the above is likely not true. But those kinds of thoughts will strike a chord with around seven out of ten people reading this.

“With every good grade I was afraid that I didn’t deserve it, and had somehow fooled the examiners,” said Daniela, a physics PhD at the University of Sussex, who first experienced anxiety during her bachelor’s degree. It only intensified during her master’s.

“The feeling of not being good enough, not living up to the expectations and having managed to trick my application committee for the PhD into believing I was good enough was overwhelming. I’m a really self-critical person, and with those feelings on top I felt like crying from frustration and doubt after ever single little thing I didn’t understand.”

Daniela’s experience is far from unique: many people feel like they don’t deserve their status or success, that someone is going to find them out. This feeling was termed imposter syndrome, or imposter phenomenon, back in the 1980s by psychologists Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes.

It can affect anyone but seems particularly prevalent in women: a recent survey found that 95% of women in academia have experienced it at some point. And there’s no milestone of success you can reach that grants immunity from these feelings. Indeed, the better you do the worse it can get, as Daniela found as she progressed with her career in science.

“This went so far, even outside work, that I was afraid to fall into depression. This led me to being really closed up and hesitant about asking questions, afraid that an ‘obviously stupid’ question could make everyone realise that I didn’t belong”

Apart from causing significant distress to individuals, imposter syndrome can have dramatic knock-on effects. People with imposter syndrome are less likely to apply for jobs, and it may be the reason women are more hesitant to ask for a pay rise. It has even been suggested a possible cause of the so-called ‘leaky pipeline’, with women being much more likely than men to leave careers in STEM.

Many people experience imposter syndrome for the first time at university, with feelings of inadequacy often increasing over careers. So where does it come from, and why does it seem to affect women more than men? Research is now showing that the seeds are sown much, much earlier than we thought.

A study from the University of Illinois managed to pinpoint the exact age girls start to disassociate being female with being clever. When five-year-olds are told about a ‘really, really smart’ individual, and asked to pick them out from a picture of two men and two women, they overwhelmingly associate intelligence with their own gender. But, by ages six and seven, only the boys remained more likely to pick their own gender. The girls seemed to lose this connection with their own sex and brilliance. The researchers also found older girls were less likely to want to play games that were described as for ‘really, really smart children’.

It’s worth noting that girls persistently outperform boys in their school grades at these ages.

From then on, the two genders continue to diverge. A recent survey found that, while 12-year-old boys and girls tend to have similar levels of confidence, puberty causes female confidence to drop considerably more than their male contemporaries.

It’s less clear what is driving these changes. Are women biologically doomed to be filled with self-doubt, or is society slowly squeezing the confidence out of them? Or could it be that women are just more accurate with self-assessment, while men never lose the unearned confidence of a toddler?

There’s evidence that parents are more likely to think their sons are intellectually gifted than their daughters. One study found that teachers gave higher test scores in maths to students with male names, and others have shown teachers spend more time speaking to male students, and are more likely to interrupt girls.

This, alongside media which, putting it kindly, doesn’t always represent women for their intellect, can slowly leech into children’s ideas of their gender’s abilities. Should we be surprised then, when women who are successful question if they’ve somehow played the system?

And what about our biological differences in the brain? Here, evidence is slippery and contradictory, but so far no strong evidence exists to suggest this is an innate, biological difference.

There is some good news. A number of surveys report that female confidence matches men’s by their 40s, and eventually even surpasses them by their 60s. Unfortunately, that’s still over two decades of someone’s working life being hampered by low confidence. And what’s worse – when women do show the same levels of confidence as men, they’re perceived as less likable and employable in what’s termed the backlash effect. Just examine some of the criticism of the US women’s football team, repeatedly labeled as arrogant during the 2019 World Cup for their confident celebrations after victories.

While this may all seem a bit depressing, for people like Daniela there are ways of managing imposter syndrome.

“What I found worked for me and helped immensely is talking openly about it with people I trust. Usually it turns out that a lot of other people have thoughts like that [but] we often only see the successful and effortless-seeming side of the story, not the hard work, struggle and doubt behind our colleagues”.

Imposter syndrome can be minimised by talking about it with people, making regular checks on your own achievements – strengthening the parts of your brain that recognise your self worth. Cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) can also be employed to help with coping mechanisms.

But what about nipping these internalised thoughts in the bud, seeing as women start to doubt themselves and their gender as young as six? This is harder. No parent would ever admit to underestimating their daughters’ intelligence because of gender. It’s an unconscious bias deeply rooted in our entire society.

But there are things you can do to try and check these biases. Teachers, whether their students are six or 26, can make sure that female students are encouraged to ask and answer questions. Parents, or grownups meeting children, can make sure they compliment girls on things other than their looks. And the more brilliant women children see, in life or in fiction, the more likely they are to think “that could be me”, and less likely, once they reach their dreams, to think “this can’t be right”.

By Georgia Mills. 

Georgia Mills is a freelance science writer and podcast producer. She likes good wine, bad films and ugly dogs. Follow her on Twitter at @georgiamills2.