  We report on a survey of astronomers asking questions at the most recent
National Astronomy Meeting (NAM2014). The gender balance of both speakers and
session chairs at NAM (31% and 29% women respectively) closely matched that of
attendees (28% female). However, we find that women were under-represented
among question askers (just 18% female). Women were especially
under-represented in asking the first question (only 14% of first questions
asked by women), but when the Q&A session reached four or more questions, women
and men were observed to ask roughly equal numbers of questions. We found a
small, but statistically insignificant, increase in the fraction of questions
from women in sessions where the chair was also female. On average $2.2\pm0.1$
questions were asked per talk, with no detectable difference in the number of
questions asked of female and male speakers, but on average female chairs
solicited slightly fewer questions than male chairs. We compare these results
to a similar study by Davenport et al. (2014) for the AAS, who also found
under-representation of women amongst question askers, but saw more pronounced
gender effects when a session chair or speaker were female. We conclude with
suggestions for improving the balance of questions at future astronomy
meetings.
