Is the audience gender-blind? Smaller audience in female talks highlights prestige differences in academia

Although diverse perspectives are fundamental for fostering and advancing science, power relations have limited the development, propagation of ideas, and recognition of 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 prestige. Using long-term data (2008-2019) on talks (n=344) from a seminar series in Ecology, Evolution, and Conservation Biology, we investigated the audience as a measure of women scientists' prestige. We questioned whether affirmative actions focused on increasing women's representation were enough to enhance women’s visibility and recognition in science. Specifically, we evaluated (i) the strength of the leaky pipeline effect on the female representation as speakers and the effect of affirmative actions; (ii) whether the audience of the talk depends on the speaker’s gender, even accounting for the speaker’s career length and productivity (iii), and (iv) if there were gender differences in the topics of the talks. The results indicate that women gave fewer talks than men, and this difference was greater for seminars given by professors. However, affirmative action increased the representativeness of women throughout their career positions. Female speakers had smaller audiences, especially among professors, indicating higher prestige for male professors even with comparable productivity metrics. We found no gender effect in the research topics presented, indicating that the difference in audience may also not be related to the topics of the 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 visibility 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.