For over twenty-five years I’ve interviewed people all over the world. From talking about candy in Chicago to shampoo in Shanghai my job has been about parking my preconceptions. My work requires me to design questions that create space for answers I haven’t anticipated.
Yet while I’ve been trained to ask open-ended questions without assumptions, the same cannot be said for the questions I get asked.
Last year I got into a taxi at the airport. The conversation started as they usually do, “where are you travelling from?” Then the usual. “How many kids do you have?” Not do you have kids, but how many.
This is quickly followed up by “Where’s your husband, not travelling with you?”
Then comes the silence. It remains for the rest of the journey.
The taxi driver wasn’t rude. He was simply following the script. And it was one he was unconscious of. While the conversation lasted seconds for him, I sat with the judgement for days.
How assumptions hide in grammar
When someone asks, “How many kids do you have?” they’re not asking a question. They’re confirming an assumption. The grammar does the work before you’ve said a word.
How many presupposes the answer is a number greater than zero. It’s structurally identical to asking “How tall are you?” A question that assumes the characteristic exists and only the quantity is in doubt.
If I’d been trained to ask questions that way in my research, I’d have been designing for confirmation bias. I’d be hearing only what I already expected to hear.
“Where’s your husband?” does the same thing. It assumes a husband exists. The question isn’t whether but where. It’s a locational query about a person who has already been brought into existence by the grammar itself.
These aren’t neutral questions that happen to make an incorrect assumption. They’re questions that structurally cannot accommodate an answer that contradicts the assumption. And when you give that answer anyway: “I don’t have children” or “I’m not married”, the line of question breaks down. Hence the silence.
What unbiased questions do
When I’m in a person’s home asking about their lives, I’m there to open the conversation, to listen, to be inspired and to learn. Not to reinforce what I already know or to project a version of the ‘right’ life onto them.
Discussing someone’s life is a privilege. It opens my eyes and shows me alternative paths and perspectives. It’s where I unlock new opportunities and ways of looking at the world.
In qualitative research, an unbiased question has a few simple characteristics. It doesn’t assume. It doesn’t lead. It creates space for an answer you haven’t predicted.
The gold standard is the open question: phrased in a way that allows people to define the territory of the answer, not just fill in a blank you’ve created for them.
“Tell me about your family” is open. “How many kids do you have?” is closed.
“Tell me about the key people in your life?” is open. “Where’s your husband?” is closed. The difference isn’t just politeness. It’s epistemological. Closed questions extract data that confirms what you already think you know. Open questions generate insight.
Good question design also distinguishes between what someone does, what they think, and what they feel. A question like “Do you want children?” conflates all three. It assumes desire is simple, singular, and easily articulated. But desire is often provisional, contradictory, or shaped by constraint.
“What goals and aspirations do you have?” Allows the person to share what is important to them. That question allows for ambivalence, complexity, and change over time.
The discipline is this: if you can’t accommodate an unexpected answer, you’re not asking a question. You’re conducting an audit of conformity.
What would unbiased questions actually sound like?
If we applied the same standards to everyday conversation that we apply to research, the questions women get asked about reproduction would sound very different.
Instead of “When are you having children?” we ask, “What does the future look like for you?”
Instead of “Don’t you want kids?” Try “What does a fulfilling life look like to you?”
Instead of “You’ll change your mind” Nothing. Because that’s not a question, it’s a correction.
These aren’t just softer questions. They’re structurally different. They remove the assumption. They treat the person being asked as the authority on their own life and give permission for it to be different.
The resistance to asking open questions isn’t about awkwardness. It’s about control. Biased questions do more than gather information, they enforce a norm. They remind the person being asked what the expected answer is and they call out their failure to live up to it.
Unbiased questions, by contrast remove control and give agency. They allow the person to define their own life beyond the assumed.
Who gets asked and who doesn’t
But it’s not just what we ask. It’s who we ask.
In research, representative sampling isn’t optional. If I’m trying to understand how people think about family, home, or the future, I need to hear from everyone who has a stake in that question. Men and women. Parents and non-parents. People at different life stages, income levels, and cultural contexts.
If I only interviewed women, my findings would be partial at best and misleading at worst. The insights would be real, but the picture would be incomplete.
Yet in everyday life, questions about children are overwhelmingly directed at women.
“When are you having kids?” is something women hear constantly. Men hear it occasionally, and often in a different register, more logistical than existential, more about timing than identity.
“Where’s your wife?” would sound like an odd thing to ask a man traveling alone. It would assume too much. Yet “Where’s your husband?” is something women hear all the time, and it’s treated as casual conversation.
This isn’t accidental. The questions aren’t evenly distributed because the responsibility isn’t evenly distributed. Reproduction is still treated as something women do and men participate in. Women are expected to have thought about it, planned for it, or at minimum, have an acceptable reason for not doing it.
The bias isn’t just in the grammar of the questions. It’s in who is subject to questioning at all.
In my work, if I consistently excluded half the population from my research, I’d be failing at my job. I’d be reproducing bias rather than revealing insight. I’d be designing for confirmation, not discovery. But that’s exactly what happens in social conversation. Women are interrogated. Men are given the benefit of the assumption that their lives are complete as they are.
If we were serious about asking unbiased questions, we’d start by asking them of everyone.
What happens when the bias flips
All of this assumes that parenthood will remain the statistical norm and non-parenthood the exception requiring explanation. What happens if Generation Zero becomes a reality, what if the scales tip and those without children are the majority.
If we reach a point where most people never have children, then the entire linguistic infrastructure around these questions collapses.
When non-parenthood becomes the majority experience, does the bias simply reverse? Do parents become the ones who have to explain themselves, justify their choices, endure the intrusive questions?
I don’t think so. Because the power dynamic is different.
When parenthood was the default, the questions non-parents received were corrective. They were designed to nudge you back toward the norm, to remind you that you were deviating, to extract a reason for your failure to comply. But if non-parenthood becomes the norm, parenthood will be read as an active choice rather than an expected endpoint. And society tends to be more comfortable with people who make deliberate choices than with people who fail to make expected ones.
The more likely outcome is that we’ll stop asking these questions altogether. Not because we’ve become more polite, but because the normative architecture that made them feel necessary will have weakened.
Or a more optimistic possibility… we’ll finally learn to ask genuinely unbiased questions. Questions that don’t assume, don’t lead, and create space for lives that don’t fit a template.
The better the question, the more interesting the answer. And the less you assume, the more you learn.
If we can extend that discipline from the research room to everyday conversation, we might actually start seeing each other. And not as deviations from an expected norm, but as people living lives that are worth understanding on their own terms.
Twenty-five years of asking questions has taught me this: these questions aren’t inevitable. They’re inherited. And anything inherited can be rewritten.