Who Talks to the Prof? Gender Differences in Interaction with Senior Scholars at Four Academic Conferences

The percentage of women in academia is still lower than what would be expected statistically, especially in the sciences and among faculty (tenured professors). Theories on the “glass-ceiling effect” suggest that men form exclusive professional networks among other men, while women remain systematically outside. With this paper, we aim to shed some light on this by exploiting a dataset that tracks sensor-based interaction behavior at four academic conferences in the field of Computational Social Science. We look at the number of minutes junior academics interact with tenured professors during the lunch and coffee breaks of these conferences. If glass-ceiling theory holds, we expect to see that female junior academics show fewer interactions to seniors, especially to male seniors. We also expect to see that junior women interact more often than junior men with lower-level academics. While we indeed find evidence for this last hypothesis, we do not find evidence for the first two expectations. We find that junior women show more interactions then men to senior scholars, especially to male professors, but also to female professors. Overall, we do not find evidence for one important mechanism of the glass-ceiling effect, namely, that male gatekeepers exclusively interact with males only, at least not at a conference setting and with this type of measure.