Job Market
Paper

This paper focuses on the interactions between peers by building on a widely cited finding in the gender literature that establishes that men interrupt women more than women interrupt men. For that I use audio recordings from economic seminars and I identify all the different speakers that intervene on it and their gender. I find that (i) females are more interrupted than males when presenting and also are interrupted earlier in the seminar; (ii) this is explained to a large extent by interruptions made by women in the audience rather than by men; (iii) men ask less questions and make more comments to female presenters, (iv) men and women in the audience differ in the way in which they interrupt to female speakers and in the content of the interruption; (v) having a female chairing the seminar does not affect the number of interruptions made by women and reduces the overall number of interruptions made by males. These results are robust when I control by affiliation, seniority and ranking of the department to which the presenter belongs as well as topic of the presentation and seminar series.