  To better understand how planets form, it is important to study planet
occurrence rates as a function of stellar mass. However, estimating masses of
field stars is often difficult. Over the past decade, a controversy has arisen
about the inferred occurrence rate of gas-giant planets around evolved
intermediate-mass stars -- the so-called `retired A-stars'. The high masses of
these red-giant planet hosts, derived using spectroscopic information and
stellar evolution models, have been called into question. Here we address the
controversy by determining the masses of eight evolved planet-hosting stars
using asteroseismology. We compare the masses with spectroscopic-based masses
from the Exoplanet Orbit Database that were previously adopted to infer
properties of the exoplanets and their hosts. We find a significant one-sided
offset between the two sets of masses for stars with spectroscopic masses above
roughly 1.6Msun, suggestive of an average 15--20% overestimate of the adopted
spectroscopic-based masses. The only star in our sample well below this mass
limit is also the only one not showing this offset. Finally, we note that the
scatter across literature values of spectroscopic-based masses often exceed
their formal uncertainties, making it comparable to the offset we report here.
