A few years ago, Michelle Hebl attended the latest in a series of talks hosted by her department at Rice University. The speaker was a man, and Hebl realized that she hadn’t heard any female speakers in that series for a while. “Maybe I’m just not thinking about them,” she thought. “Or maybe it’s something we should look at.”

Colloquium talks, where academics are invited to discuss their research, give speakers a chance to publicize their work, build collaborations with new colleagues, and boost their reputations.

And even after adjusting for the relative numbers of men and women in the various fields or ranks, they found that men are still 20 percent more likely to be invited to give colloquium talks than women.

Nittrouer and her team scanned the websites of the top 50 U.S. universities, as ranked by U.S. News, to build a database of every colloquium speaker from six departments: biology, bioengineering, political science, history, psychology, and sociology. They chose those six to represent a breadth of disciplines, and to exclude departments with either a very low or very high proportion of women. And they found that men gave more than twice as many talks as women: 69 percent versus 31 percent.

Read the full article on women giving talks by Ed Yong at The Atlantic