Gender Equitable Interactions Online: Supporting Gender Equity in Work-based Videoconferencing, 2022-2025

The GEiO project builds on and extends previous work that has demonstrated the negative consequences of gender inequalities in working life, as well as the growing demand for organisations to operate within socially and legally acceptable frameworks concerning human rights.
The project expands this research base by focusing on the rapid increase in virtual work during the Covid-19 pandemic, a trend that is likely to persist in the future for many organisations. A key objective was to generate new transnational evidence on the, until now, underexplored ways in which digital videoconferencing innovations can serve both to reinforce and to challenge gender inequity at work.

Three studies were conducted across four nations (Germany, Iceland, Spain and UK) to explore how gender is relevant to videoconferencing at work. Three different and complementary methods were used. The first study employed conversational analysis to make sense of video-recordings of online work meetings held in international corporations in each of the participating countries. The second study used Q methodology to explore shared understandings of digital working. Participants were recruited from the international corporations used in study one and other organisations known to use videconferencing. The third study used a Story Completion Task to capture social perceptions of videoconference meetings. Participants for this study were recruited from the personal and professional networks of each of the national research teams.
Broadly, our findings reveal that gender continues to infuence how people speak, listen, lead, and respond in digital spaces. Stereoptypical expectations about how men and women should communicate persist. However, as well as reinforcing traditional power imbalances, online meetings can also become spaces for more equitable collaboration especially if training and awareness building is provided.