"All of the White People Went First": How Video Conferencing Consolidates Control and Exacerbates Workplace Bias

Mo Houtti, Moyan Zhou, Loren Terveen, Stevie Chancellor

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

3 Scopus citations

Abstract

Workplace bias creates negative psychological outcomes for employees, permeating the larger organization. Workplace meetings are frequent, making them a key context where bias may occur. Video conferencing (VC) is an increasingly common medium for workplace meetings; we therefore investigated how VC tools contribute to increasing or reducing bias in meetings. Through a semi-structured interview study with 22 professionals, we found that VC features push meeting leaders to exercise control over various meeting parameters, giving leaders an outsized role in affecting bias. We demonstrate this with respect to four core VC features - -user tiles, raise hand, text-based chat, and meeting recording - -and recommend employing at least one of two mechanisms for mitigating bias in VC meetings - -1) transferring control from meeting leaders to technical systems or other attendees and 2) helping meeting leaders better exercise the control they do wield.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Article number121
JournalProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction
Volume7
Issue numberCSCW1
DOIs
StatePublished - Apr 16 2023

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
The work reported in this paper was supported by Cisco Research. We would also like to acknowledge and thank our participants for helping to make this work possible.

Publisher Copyright:
© 2023 ACM.

Keywords

  • bias
  • equity
  • meetings
  • organizations
  • video conferencing
  • workplace

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