At a thesis synopsis defence, the tea is going cold and the committee is discussing a candidate’s sample. The youngest woman on the panel says thirty respondents are too few for the claim being made, and suggests doubling the number. A silence follows, the kind that comes after a remark nobody wants to own. Two minutes later a senior colleague says, “Mera khayal hai sample barhana chahiye,” and the chair nods. “Sir ne bilkul sahi point pakra.” The candidate writes it down and thanks Sir.
This is not one room. It is a composite of scenes I have watched or been told about, and the names and departments change while the story stays put.
Look closely and ask what went wrong. Nobody raised a voice. Nobody was interrupted. Nobody was rude. And yet something was stolen: an idea whose owner was sitting right there changed hands in two minutes.
I watch these rooms from the edge, as a research scholar, which is a good seat for noticing and a poor one for objecting. Linguistics taught me one simple thing that I have not managed to unlearn: almost every sentence we speak in company does two jobs. It says something, and it stakes a claim to having said it. Words do the first job. The second depends on who is speaking and what the listeners take them to be. The sentence stays the same; change the speaker and its weight changes.
That weight matters. Academic life runs on credit. It decides whose name comes to mind when a committee is formed, whose idea is cited in the next paper, who is said to have “potential” when promotion files are read. And the candidate in that room walked out with a lesson, learned in two minutes, about whose opinion counts. Ten years on, when that candidate sits on a committee in turn, the lesson will be passed down without a trace of malice. That is how bias is handed on: politely, from one generation to the next.
Is it all in my head? A caution first. It is easy to say that men interrupt women more, but the research is less settled than the slogan. What holds up better concerns listening, not speaking. At one university, students were assigned to teachers by lottery, so that no one could claim the good students had picked the good teachers. When roughly twenty thousand evaluation forms were tallied, students’ grades and study habits had nothing to do with the teacher’s sex, yet women teachers received lower scores. The gap was widest for junior women and came mostly from male students. In another study, of men and women teaching the same courses together, women were eleven percentage points less likely to clear the teaching-evaluation bar for promotion. And records from the American Senate show that power makes men talk more but not women. Follow-up experiments suggest why: a powerful woman who talks a lot is judged less competent and less fit to lead. Women appear to know this, and hold back.
Now to closer home. None of the studies I found concerns Pakistan. I looked, and I would be glad to be proved wrong. But our universities hand out evaluation forms every semester. I have filled in many of them myself, and I know how little thought goes into a tick beside a word like “approachable”. At many universities those scores are consulted when a contract is renewed or a promotion considered. If they carry even part of the bias found elsewhere, we have been measuring our women teachers with a bent ruler. I suspect the problem runs deeper here: a woman from a small town, who speaks English with a Punjabi lilt, may be fined twice. That is only a hypothesis, not a finding. Someone should test it.
The obvious objection is that evaluation forms are unreliable for everyone, men included. True. But that is a reason to give them less weight, not a reason to look away from who pays when they err. A broken scale does not cheat everyone equally. It cheats whoever is always on the lighter side.
So what is to be done? I do not expect a revolution, and perhaps we do not need one. The remedies are mostly dull, which is their virtue. A chair can ask, “Whose point was that?” and write the name in the minutes. Women on the committee can do the same for one another, quietly: “As my colleague said a moment ago.” Quality-assurance offices can stop relying on raw scores for contracts and promotions. They can compare teachers of the same course with each other, replace vague impressions like “approachable” with questions that can be checked, such as whether assignments came back on the promised date, and publish the gap between men’s and women’s averages, department by department. That last task could be done in a single semester, if some MPhil scholar were given anonymised data and permission. I volunteer.
Advice for women, meanwhile, always arrives first: speak up, apologise less, send the idea in writing beforehand. Some of it works. But it puts the repair on the speaker, while the research points its finger at the listener. A woman can spend a whole career tuning her voice and still be heard through the same filter. The fault was never in the voice.
The next time a committee thanks “Sir” for something “Madam” said two minutes earlier, someone should say whose it was. It takes one sentence. I have noticed how few people spend it.