Tag Archive for: gender bias

How To Disrupt Gender Bias in the Virtual Workplace

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Gender BiasWhat can leaders, managers, allies and women themselves do to minimize and challenge gender bias in the virtual workplace?

Last week, theglasshammer.com explored the impact of the virtual office in either neutralizing or amplifying pre-existing dynamics of gender bias.

Ultimately, the gender bias present in our cultural paradigm is also present in our offices, and this week we explore how to address it.

How Leaders Can Diffuse Gender Bias in the Virtual Office

An article in the World Economic Forum asserts that when it comes to bias in virtual meetings as in any context, “changing the environment in the room – rather than changing women’s behavior – should be the goal.“

“If we build a world in which women’s voices are valued and listened to,” says Jessica Preece, associate professor in political science at Brigham Young University, “they will speak up without having to be told to.”

“Smart companies create inclusive work cultures so that all employees actively support each other, particularly marginalized groups. Allyship and curiosity should be at the heart of a manager’s leadership, regardless of gender, to create a more inclusive, welcoming workplace,” says Serena Fong, Vice President, Strategic Engagement for Catalyst.

As leaders, meeting chairs can set the tone and expectations upfront, including implementing ground rules for discussions that mitigate some of the communication challenges and gender imbalances, such as a no interruption rule in Zoom calls.

As written in Forbes, reducing interruption requires the self-reflection of questions such as “Is this person making a point I need to add onto?” and “Am I listening equally to everyone in the room?”

Calling out when gender imbalances occur is another approach to being an ally on Zoom, as exemplified by an associate professor who let the men dominating the virtual conversation know that she was happy to hear their input, but also wanted to hear from the women.

Introducing positive interjections, such as “that’s a really valuable point” to validate, amplify and give pause of consideration to women’s voices is another strategy for leveling the field.

Putting workflow systems in place that ensure communication flow, project tracking and clear administrative responsibilities will also help reduce the amount of extra work picked up by women.

According to Fong at Catalyst, leaders should embrace these five key strategies to disrupt gender imbalances and build a more flexible, equitable and inclusive workplace for all:

  • Lead inclusively through crisis: keep inclusion front and center as you navigate the shifts in how we’re working currently and how we’ll be working in the future.
  • Tackle inequities, large and small: face biases and stereotypes head on through workplace policies and opportunities such as re-skilling your workforce, examining talent management, recruiting, and advancement practices for biases, and setting DEI targets and goals.
  • Connect with empathy: put yourself in your colleagues’ shoes and imagine what they might be experiencing vs. your experiences.
  • Trust your team: don’t micromanage projects and processes, and be transparent about when, how and who is involved when decisions are made.
  • Work remotely and flexibly: the pandemic dispelled many myths and assumptions about working remotely and flexibly. Take the lessons learned and incorporate it into the “new normal”.
How Women Can Ally Together in the Virtual Office

While not responsible for correcting gender imbalance, women can still be allies to one another in subverting gender imbalances of the virtual workplace.

“If you see a colleague being ignored or is trying to speak, say something. If you learn about an act of bias, think about how you can address it,” says Fong. “It may not seem like much, but it is infinitely better than ignoring it.”

Carol Vernon, founder and principal of Communication Matters, recommends for women to set the stage early for speaking up in a virtual meeting rather than waiting to have the perfect compelling thing to say, and to take the lead in introducing non-verbal expression to the meeting.

Another way of subverting bias is by actively reinforcing ideas that another woman has brought to the table and then re-accrediting the idea as hers, as While House staffers did during the Obama administration.

Women leaders have also told theglasshammer.com about actively inviting female colleagues who hold valuable insight on a topic to share their viewpoint, as well as instant messaging with coworkers during meetings to enhance solidarity and encourage each other to speak.

Nicki Gilmour, Leadership Coach, Organizational development specialist and founder of theglasshammer.com adds, “Creating psychological safety as the leader in the virtual room matters also, as who you authorize to not only speak but to demonstrate expertise matters. People will take their cues from you in person or otherwise about who is truly authorized to speak up. Asking for different people’s viewpoints from their perspective will not only add value but level the playing field for the quieter, more hesitant people on the call.”

Virtual gender bias is really just the same dynamics at play in a new space, but perhaps the playing field also allows for new disruptions.

By Aimee Hansen

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Is Gender Bias Amplified in the Virtual Workplace?

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Virtual workplaceWhile remote working is a key element to creating more gender equality, the coexistence of the virtual workplace alongside virtual schooling has exacerbated the disproportional hours women spend on caregiving and domestic work, driving women to exit the workforce or consider downshifting their careers.

The dissolution of physical boundaries between home and office and classroom very rarely affords a woman with children “a room of her own” in which to conduct her professional life, unlike her male counterparts.

And now the remote workplace itself—the virtual meeting room and Zoom office—is introducing a mixed bag of gender-related impacts, neutralizing some imbalances while magnifying others.

How the Virtual Meeting Room Could Neutralize Gender Bias

As of February, researchers in Forbes reported that sentiments towards moral, motivation and collaboration related to the virtual workplace have been dropping into negative territory since November among executive leaders. Yet women leaders remained more positive than men—especially in relation to impact of the virtual workplace on productivity, decision-making and communication. Women leaders were more positive about the chairing of online meetings and that it sets the space that ‘ensures all team members can contribute to meetings’.

While men are socialized to establish dominance and position in team communications, women are inclined to establish relationships and build trust. Some research has indicated that virtual media, with a lack of non-verbal cues and three-dimensional richness, can led to greater misunderstanding in communication, but also diffuses the ability for men to dominate team interaction.

“With completely remote-meetings, the physical and social dynamics of in-person conversations unhinge the norms of hierarchy,” speculates UX researcher Allison Yu. “In Zoom, everyone is literally on an equal grid.”

Yu points out that when the active speaker is everyone’s primary focus on a Zoom screen, the act of cutting someone else off simply becomes more blunt. The virtual office also mitigates height bias, which favors men.

Whereas access to senior leaders is generally lower for women and women of color especially, Yu argues access becomes more equalized in a virtual workplace where some of the more exclusionary casual networking meet-ups, cultivated through affinity bias, aren’t as frequent or prevalent.

How the Virtual Meeting Room Is Proliferating Gender Bias

On the other hand, the virtual meeting room is also playing out to magnify pre-existing gender dynamics—such as male executives winning competency points for speaking longer while women lose them, passion expressed by women leaders being perceived as overemotional by male counterparts, men being 33% more likely to interrupt their female than male colleagues (manterruption), women speaking up 25% less than men in the meeting environment, and live reverbalizaton and appropriation by men of ideas previously introduced by a female colleague.

According to Catalyst research, 1 in 5 women has felt ignored and overlooked by coworkers using video calls. 45% of women business leaders say it’s difficult for women to speak in virtual meetings and 42% of male business leaders agree. Additionally, 31% of women and queer/non-binary respondents reported “getting talked over, interrupted, or ignored more frequently during virtual meetings than those held in person” in a July 2020 survey by the Society of Women Engineers.

In September, University of Iowa Grad student Claire McDonnell shared a video call recording on TikTok entitled “live footage of being a woman in STEM” that went viral within 48 hours. The clip shows her repeatedly being interrupted by fellow male students when pitching project ideas and having her own ideas appropriated and re-presented by her peers, though she was the only with with actual work experience with the topic.

As written in the New York Times, Georgetown University professor Deborah Tannen asserts that the remote workplace amplifies pre-existing conversational imbalances in who gets heard. Whereas men will tend to be argumentative and speak longer to convey authority, women will often be succinct, self-deprecating or speak in more indirect ways to not take up more space than necessary and be likable.

“Women are systematically seen as less authoritative,” said Jessica Preece, associate professor in political science at Brigham Young University. “And their influence is systematically lower. And they’re speaking less. And when they’re speaking up, they’re not being listened to as much, and they are being interrupted more.”

As put forth in Fast Company, women also have weaker informal relationships at work and office politics are still at play as “the official virtual meeting represents only a fraction of interactions, and real power dynamics will move backstage, excluding women as needed.”

Research also shows more women (46%) are struggling with group work than men (37%), often picking up more of the undefined, collaborative-based tasks and carrying the load of remote office housework. Also, “when faced with poor visibility or communication on what their colleagues are doing, many women compensate by working more,” an impulse which can be amplified by lack of co-presence in the remote working office.

How to Diffuse and Disrupt Virtual Bias?

While the flexibility of the remote workplace is generally supportive to gender equality, and virtual meeting rooms could counter or neutralize aspects of gender bias, the last year has revealed that entrenched cultural gender dynamics will reveal themselves, sometimes more so in altered circumstances. If gender inequality is inherent within our culture, it’s frankly alive and well in our virtual offices.

Next week, we will explore how leaders, managers, allies and women colleagues can play a role in addressing and mitigating the dynamics of virtual bias.

By Aimee Hansen

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