Latest / Women at Work: Career, Leadership & Modern Work / Why Women Get Interrupted More In Virtual Meetings
Transcript
- Lucas: Luna, I want to start with a number that has been sitting with me since I read a study out of UC Santa Barbara earlier this year. Over three thousand hours of recorded Zoom and Teams meetings, women were interrupted roughly one point eight times more often than men. And the gap widened when the woman was the most senior person in the room. Luna: One point eight times. That is not a subtle difference. And honestly, if you have spent any time on video calls, it probably does not surprise you. Lucas: It should not surprise anyone who has been on a call. But what the study did that I find valuable is it coded interruptions into three types: overt interruptions where someone just starts talking over you, the chat box being used to jump in while someone is still speaking, and the 'muted interruption' — someone unmutes and starts speaking before the current speaker finishes. Lucas: And here is the kicker. The chat box interruption was the one that showed the biggest gender gap. Men used the chat to effectively cut off women nearly two and a half times as often as they used it to cut off other men. Luna: That is a really specific finding. The chat becomes a kind of digital interruption tool. And because it is written, it leaves a record — you can actually go back and count it. Lucas: Exactly. This is measurable bias. And we bring it up today because it is one of those areas where awareness alone can actually change behavior, at least when teams adopt a simple protocol. But before we get into the fix, let me say something about why we can dig into this without any ad breaks. Luna: Go ahead. Lucas: We keep this show — and every show on Fexingo — completely free of commercials. No sponsored segments, no promo reads. If you have found these conversations useful for your own career, and you want to help keep it that way, you can support the whole network at buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. It is a small gesture that adds up. Luna: And it genuinely makes a difference. We hear from listeners who say a single episode helped them negotiate a raise or push back on a workload imbalance. Knowing that keeps us going. Lucas: Alright. Back to the data. The UC Santa Barbara study also looked at what happened when meeting hosts enforced a 'no-mute raise hand' rule. Basically, you cannot just unmute and speak. You have to use the raised-hand feature and be called on. Luna: That sounds like a small change. Did it actually shift anything? Lucas: It did. In meetings where that rule was enforced, the interruption gap effectively disappeared. Women and men were interrupted at nearly identical rates. The study followed a mid-size consulting firm — about six hundred people — that adopted the protocol for six months. Self-reported satisfaction with meeting equity went up across all genders. Luna: Six hundred people, six months. That is a decent real-world test. But I imagine the rule only works if the meeting host actually enforces it. If the host ignores people who just jump in, the protocol is dead. Lucas: That is the single point of failure. The study noted that in meetings where the host did not enforce the rule — maybe they forgot or did not want to be 'rude' — the gender gap came right back. So it is not a magic wand. It is a tool that requires the person leading the meeting to be intentional. Luna: I want to zoom out for a second. Pre-pandemic, there was a well-known pattern from in-person meetings: men interrupted women more, and women often had to use strategies like speaking more quickly or repeating themselves. Did the shift to video make this better or worse? Lucas: The evidence suggests it got worse. A separate study from 2023 by researchers at Stanford and the University of Michigan compared meeting transcripts from 2019 and 2021. They found that the interruption gap increased by about twenty percent in the fully remote setting. The theory is that the lack of physical cues — you cannot gently hold up a hand or lean forward — makes it easier for someone to just start talking. Luna: And the chat box adds a whole new dimension. You can interrupt without even making a sound. I have been on calls where someone types a long comment in the chat while a woman is presenting, and the host reads the chat aloud, effectively handing the floor to the interrupter. Lucas: That is a perfect example of what the researchers call 'chat hijacking.' And it is particularly damaging because the person being interrupted often does not even know it happened until the host reads the chat. They are mid-sentence, and suddenly the conversation has moved on. Luna: So what can an individual woman do in the moment? I ask because a listener wrote in after our episode on the likeability trap. She said she gets talked over constantly and does not know how to reclaim the floor without seeming aggressive. Lucas: There is research on that too. The most effective technique, according to a 2022 paper in the Academy of Management Journal, is to use a 'structural restart.' You say something like, 'I would like to finish my thought, and then I am happy to hear your point.' It is direct without being hostile. The study found that women who used that phrasing were rated as more competent than women who either stayed silent or used a more passive approach. Luna: That is good to know. But it puts the burden on the woman being interrupted, which is not fair. Lucas: It is absolutely not fair. And the real fix has to be systemic. That is why the raised-hand protocol is promising — it shifts the responsibility to the meeting host. The host becomes the gatekeeper, not the person who is already at a disadvantage. Luna: Let me ask you this. We have talked about virtual meetings, but what about hybrid meetings where some people are in a room and some are on a screen? I have seen studies showing that remote participants — especially women — get interrupted even more in hybrid settings. Lucas: Yes. That is a growing area of research. A Harvard Business School working paper from late 2024 found that in hybrid meetings, remote female participants were interrupted at a rate nearly three times higher than in-person male participants. The remote people are essentially invisible — they are on a screen that might be small or off to the side, and the people in the room forget they are there. Luna: Three times. That is staggering. And I have been on those calls. You can be speaking and someone in the conference room just starts talking to the person next to them. The facilitator does not even notice. Lucas: The paper recommended a simple structural change: in hybrid meetings, every participant — including those in the room — should be on their own device with their camera on and their audio off unless they are recognized. That way, everyone is on equal footing. One company that adopted this, a tech firm with about four hundred employees, saw a forty percent reduction in interruptions of remote participants within three months. Luna: That is a pretty striking outcome. And it is not about training people to be nicer. It is about changing the architecture of the meeting. Lucas: Exactly. Design over good intentions. And I think that is the through line of this episode. You cannot simply tell people 'stop interrupting women.' You have to build a meeting structure where interruption is physically harder to do. Luna: I want to bring this back to the individual listener for a moment. Say you are a woman who is not the meeting host. You cannot enforce a protocol. What is one thing you can do today? Lucas: One thing: you can use the chat preemptively. Before you speak, type a brief note in the chat: 'I have a point to add after this speaker.' It signals your intent and gives the host a cue to call on you. The UC Santa Barbara paper actually found that this tactic reduced the likelihood of interruption by about thirty percent. Luna: That is clever. You are using the chat as a shield rather than letting it be used as a weapon. Lucas: Right. And if you are a manager listening, the single most impactful thing you can do is enforce a speaking order. Even if you do not use the raised-hand feature, just say, 'Let me hear from Sarah, then David, then Maria.' That simple structure cuts interruptions dramatically. Luna: It is such a low-cost intervention. No budget, no software, no training. Just a sentence at the start of the meeting. Lucas: And yet so few managers do it. I think part of the reason is that many managers do not realize the extent of the problem. They assume their meetings are equitable because nobody complains. But the data says otherwise. Luna: If you are a woman listening and you recognize this pattern, I hope you feel validated. It is not in your head. It is not about your presentation style. It is a documented bias, and there are tools to fight it. Lucas: We will put a link to the UC Santa Barbara study in the show notes. And if you have used any of these tactics — or if you have a different one that works — write to us. We would love to share it in a future episode. Luna: That is our show for this week. Thanks for being with us.