Men talk 92 percent of the time on corporate conference calls

Man on phone.
(Image credit: iStock)

Men don't just dominate the vast majority of corporations' top jobs. They also talk a lot more.

On quarterly earnings calls, men's voices make up 92 percent of the conversation, analysis by automated research company Prattle and published by Bloomberg shows. There are far more men than women in these public phone meetings, to start — but when they speak, they also spend a lot more time making their point.

It's an open secret that men hold most, if not all, of top companies' executive spots. Nearly 94 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs are men, and most of them are white. But these public conference calls also include women analysts and employees who fall below the C-level. They just aren't so verbose.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/flexiimages/jacafc5zvs1692883516.jpg

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Prattle looked at more than 155,000 earnings calls from the past 19 years for its analysis and found that the percentage of women on these calls has risen slightly over the past few years. Yet overall, women only made up about 11 percent of earnings calls in 2018, and they only took up 8 percent of talking time.

As Prattle CEO Evan Schnidman put it to Bloomberg: "One could surmise that male executives are more prone to speaking simply to hear themselves speak." Read more about how men unsurprisingly talk a lot at Bloomberg.

Continue reading for free

We hope you're enjoying The Week's refreshingly open-minded journalism.

Subscribed to The Week? Register your account with the same email as your subscription.

Kathryn Krawczyk

Kathryn is a graduate of Syracuse University, with degrees in magazine journalism and information technology, along with hours to earn another degree after working at SU's independent paper The Daily Orange. She's currently recovering from a horse addiction while living in New York City, and likes to share her extremely dry sense of humor on Twitter.