In her research, Tannen found that many of the inequities in meetings can be boiled down to gender differences in conversation styles and conventions. That includes speaking time, the length of pauses between speakers, the frequency of questions and the amount of overlapping talk. More often than not, men and women differ on almost every one of those aspects, Tannen said, which leads to clashes and misunderstandings.

“Women often feel that they don’t want to take up more space than necessary so they’ll often be more succinct,” she explained, and they tend to speak in more self-deprecating or indirect ways in order to come across as likable.

Men, on the other hand, tend to speak longer and they can be more argumentative and critical in order to be perceived as authoritative.

Tannen recalled how back in the 1990s, the Marriott company reached out to her for perspective on a new software it was introducing for its employees that would allow them to participate in meetings virtually, more or less anonymously. It was, in a way, one of the first examples of a virtual meeting.

The company was certain the new software would eliminate sexism, Tannen recalled. “I remember feeling very optimistic myself.”

But of course, it didn’t pan out that way.

Women’s ways of speaking — succinct, indirect, self-deprecating — were projected onto this platform. And “it turned out that women’s comments were often ignored online for the same reasons they were often ignored in person and people could guess who was a woman and who was a man,” Tannen said.

Other researchers, like Susan Herring, professor of linguistics at Indiana University Bloomington, have found similar gendered conversation patterns play out in other digital communication tools, even if users are anonymous.