This is Scientific American's 60 Second Science.

I'm Christopher Intagiyata.

If you attend science conferences, ever pay attention to who in the audience ask questions?

Geneticist Natalie Tellis did, and she noticed something off.

The entire first day of the conference,

I was the only woman to ask a question.

And I thought, wow, that's kind of weird, right?

So being a scientist, she decided to systematically study who asked questions at scientific

conferences, together with colleagues at Stanford University, where she was based at the time, and others at

Emory University in Atlanta, she recorded more than 2,000 questions from hundreds of talks

at eight different scientific conferences.

After assigning either male or female designations to question askers,

which the researchers acknowledge in the paper doesn't fully capture the spectrum of gender identity,

they found that women ask far fewer questions than a representative

result based on their numbers. In fact, you need about 85 to 90 percent of your room to be

women before 50 percent of your questions come from women.

But Telus did identify a possible solution.

Halfway through the Biology of Genomes Conference in 2015 TELUS started tweeting some of her preliminary findings

about how few women had been asking questions compared to their relative numbers at the meeting.

That information sparked a public discussion and a policy change from the conference organizers who instituted a new rule that the first question at every talk had to come from a scientist still working towards a PhD in the hope that that approach would

produce a more diverse set of question askers and it worked.

Before our intervention about 11% of questions came from women which is one third of what you would expect.

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