Eva Ahn

I cannot have a conversation without being interrupted, patronized or belittled. That’s how it feels, at least.

Believe me, I know how to speak up. I did three years of Public Forum Debate in high school and ranked top 50 at the national Silver Tournament of Champions, which you qualify for by ranking top 16 at a different national tournament. I participated in every classroom discussion in my Advanced Placement Government class. Still, at a high school club meeting, I tried to speak dozens of times and only when a man called on me did everyone quiet down so I could make my point. Women are interrupted more than men, regardless of their speaking companion’s gender.

Obviously, interruption is not exclusive to gender: Aspects of personality, like introversion or neurotypicality, play a role in how much someone is spoken over or how often they speak over others. But it’s only factual to claim gender is a major contributor, as my experiences in high school debate taught me.

At national tournaments, rankings are determined by a combination of win/loss records and speaker points (Speaks), a system where the judge rates how “good” of a debater you are on a scale from 25 to 30. The latter is an extremely subjective metric and rewards those who the judge—probably a confused parent—likes more. Plus, judges will sometimes decide who won the round based on whichever team they liked best or whichever side they felt was “more persuasive” instead of the content of the round itself.

So, debaters are told to project confidence. To do this: Covertly interrupt your opponent to make your point, don’t allow them to speak because they might be able to get another point in, question them and back them into a corner.

As a female debater, you quickly learn that this advice doesn’t work. Interrupting risks seeming “rude” or “aggressive” for adopting the same affect as the boys on your team. But if you don’t speak up, you don’t seem “confident” or “persuasive” enough. It matters: Over an average of 35,000 debate rounds, girls got an average of 1.2 lower Speaks. In a close tournament, that statistic decides if you move on to the next round.

What I learned from being a woman in high school debate is that in a male-dominated world, the system is against you from the start. If you want to excel, you have to push past your self doubt and come across as “confident,” whatever the heck that means.

Sophomore year of high school, in the middle of my debate career, I tried to figure out what it was about men that made them seem more confident. I did a lot of research on the “Confidence Gap,” which seeks to explain gender differences with salary negotiation and competitiveness, among other aspects of career elevation. There’s evidence that women tend to underestimate their performance while men tend to overestimate theirs. The conclusion is that women need to be stronger self-advocates and develop confidence. This made sense to me, and in a way still does, because that was the advice most people were circulating.

It was when I began doing research for this article that the inconsistencies started to show up. For example, the statistic that men apply to a job when they meet 60 percent of the requirements, but women do only when they meet 100 percent continued to pop up. This is cited in so many reputable articles but was arbitrarily made up by a senior executive. Real estimates find that women apply when they meet 56 percent of the requirements, while men apply at 52 percent. Another study corroborates that there’s no significant link between gender and overqualification of applicants. Furthermore, a meta-analysis of over 1100 studies found that while there is a gap between men and women’s self esteem, it is “extremely small,” while another found that despite common understanding, the confidence gap is larger within a gender (between low & high confidence men) than between the genders.

The Confidence Gap is, in the end, a (contested) theory that seeks to explain the persisting gender gap in male-dominated spaces. But the answer to my younger self is, I don’t know why it’s easier for boys. It could have more to do with the link between perceived self-competence and personality dominance rather than genuine self-confidence. Or it could be the result of years of gender stereotypes being pushed on children from a young age.

Nor do I know if it matters. As an article from the Harvard Business Review put it, “No matter the outcome, women’s lack of career progression is blamed on them.” Women are made to shoulder this burden alongside their career goals, whereas men are able to just focus on the latter.

We have to dance on a knife’s edge to survive in professional environments, and that will include being interrupted, insecure and spoken over. Spreading awareness will help in the long run, but I’m sick of worrying about if I’ll come across as aggressive when I speak.

I don’t care if I’m punished. For the love of God, let me speak.

Bella Gulati is a member of the Class of 2029.