So, like, here’s the thing…

Everyone uses filler words. So why are women the ones judged for them?

Story by Madelyn Jones

Illustration by Royce Alton

Published April 7, 2026

Ella Horner awaits cross-examination. She’s not on trial — she’s a freshman debate student at Western Washington University. The topic is nuclear policy, and she’s spent hours over the past few weeks preparing, ready for anything her opponent could throw her way. Still, the eyes of the opposing team keep drifting to her male debate partner each time they ask a question, as if she isn’t even there. 

“It was like they kept directing questions towards him instead of me, even though I was the one speaking,” Horner said, frustration bubbling in her voice. 

Unfortunately, that debate wasn’t the last time she’d feel like an outlier in a male-dominated space. Two years later, Horner is more familiar than ever with the feeling of being the only woman in the room. She described another instance when she was repeatedly interrupted by different men in the debate room. 

Although Western’s debate team is welcoming and inclusive to all students, that’s not the case everywhere. Research shows that women are more heavily criticized for how they speak. One persistent stereotype is that women use filler words more than men do. According to a 2021 UCLA study, some filler words, such as “like” and “so,” are considered more feminine than others, including “yeah” or “um.” The study is among many to suggest that men and women use filler words at similar rates. The only difference is how audiences interpret them. 

In a 2020 UCLA study, researchers found that when women use filler words, they’re more likely to be interrupted than their male counterparts. According to the study, women's use of filler words was more often misinterpreted as a “cue for interruption” by anyone, regardless of gender. 

Horner experienced this double standard firsthand in a similar encounter to the viral moment before the 2020 presidential election, when former Vice President Kamala Harris was interrupted by then-Vice President Mike Pence during a debate. Harris stopped him, saying she was still speaking. The clip blew up across social media platforms and was quickly turned into memes, GIFs and even merchandise. 

“That is literally what I felt like!” Horner exclaimed. “It was a crazy experience.” 

Rosemary Vohs, a senior instructor in the Department of Communication Studies at Western who has taught public speaking classes for decades, provides a different perspective on filler words. To her, excessive filler words can distract any audience, regardless of the speaker’s gender. 

“I say if you’ve got a speech and you have five filler words, no problem,” Vohs said. “When you’ve got 30, 40, 50 of them, it’s become a real distraction, and you lose your credibility as a speaker because it doesn’t sound like you know what you’re talking about.” 

This doesn’t mean everyone should try to speak exclusively without filler words — that would be impossible, Vohs said. In casual speech, it’s normal to get interrupted; filler words can act as a placeholder to communicate that you’re not yet finished speaking, and they can add humor or personality to a conversation.

According to Vohs, people pick up speech patterns by listening to others around them, so when filler-heavy speech is common, it becomes normalized. In some cases, frequent filler words can also stem from a lack of opportunity to speak, leading to lower confidence. 

Vohs encourages her students to reduce the amount of filler words in their speech. Over the past few years, she’s noticed her students have struggled with this more than in the past. She attributes this trend to increased screen time and COVID-19 isolation, leading to fewer opportunities to practice having conversations and being confident in speaking. 

“If children don’t have enough opportunity to speak — when they spend too much time on computers, not having conversation, not being in a situation where they feel comfortable to speak — they won’t learn how to speak fluently,” she said. “They become hesitant because they don’t know whether what they have to say is going to be accepted.” 

Vohs offers her students a variety of tips to help reduce filler-heavy speech, including reading books aloud and restarting a sentence when a filler word is used. Additionally, she requires her students to record their speeches and watch them in a few different ways. Once with sight and sound, once with sound off to pay attention to body language and nonverbal communication and once with just sound to make them more aware of the language they’re using. 

Vohs said most of her students aren’t aware of how their habit of using filler words affects the way that others perceive them. She likened it to getting ready for the day: you might fix your hair, select an outfit or put on makeup to come across as your best self. 

“Just as we pay attention to what we look like most days, but we often don’t spend time examining how we sound or what language we use,” Vohs said.