To think Microsoft Teams is a sexist load of male wankery

[GetUpAgain]

Maybe it's just my experience, I work in STEM, but I fucking detest Teams. And now Zoom has bad press I'm being pressured into more and more Teams wankery.

In a meeting, you only see the faces of the most talkative people. As men tend to dominate meetings this makes women (who are already less-heard) less visible.

The facility to share documents and collaborate in changing them just leads to 50 million wrong versions of the almost same thing. With, ime, men cocking up what is meant to be finished, because they want the last word.

'I will share my screen' = I didn't prepare properly and will now waste your time mansplaining shit you already know.

And then Microsoft sends me this emails telling me how smart I am working. It can get to fuck. That's not how you measure productivity.

Can someone please just hack it, let's have a scandal that means we don't have to use it anymore.

I think the OP has raised a really interesting point here. I haven't experienced this personally, despite being the only woman in my team, and I actually quite enjoy using Teams myself. But I have worked with my colleagues for a long time and we have a very healthy culture.

I can definitely imagine that in less healthy work environment, Teams may well be further-exaggerating certain male-biased behaviours.

I strongly recommend that anyone who thinks this is all in the OPs head reads Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez‎.

it's the people, not the software - particularly the ability of whoever is chairing the meeting.

I'm a female executive in the tech industry - i.e. the most male dominated segment of a male dominated field.

I’ve met a fair few female techs/programmers etc. Surely it’s not as male dominated as say trucking, agriculture, construction, etc. All the dirty heavy jobs.

TBH I think you’d get your arse handed to you on the feminist board
as well.

I use Teams and agree it depends on the chair, some meetings you can’t get a word in and women dominate just as much as men. Other meetings the chair uses chat to bring people in or has people on mute.

There are some people who have not spoken in meetings for weeks and if they don’t speak you don’t see them.

However to the pp who mentioned yawning and playing with hair. I’ve seen up people’s noses, down their tops, gurning like you won’t believe and teeth picking, urgh some people forget it’s a camera and think it’s a mirror.

Oh, and for everyone saying "the software doesn't care if you are female" - try typing "hands" into Google Image search and then come back here and tell me that Google isn't racist (still, after this issue was called out years ago). Software is ABSOLUTELY capable of bias because it reflects the conscious or unconscious bias of the people who designed it, taught it how to learn, and started training it (remember that software like this will be heavily using AI techniques such as machine learning and natural language processing).

I'm not saying that this is necessarily something that is happening here and that Teams is 'hearing' men's voices better, but this sort of behaviour in software definitely possible (and there are countless examples to demonstrate it) and so it is very, very important that we are all aware of it.

Brexpat. Apologies, I misread your post. Thought you were saying it was the most male dominated of all the male industries.

Oh, and for everyone saying "the software doesn't care if you are female" - try typing "hands" into Google Image search and then come back here and tell me that Google isn't racist.

Doesn’t it just search and compile images already uploaded though? In that sense it provides equality of opportunity (in what it will find) rather than equality of outcome - which would presumably require uploading loads of images on non-white hands for google to find so as to output a diverse selection.

RabidChinchilla, no worries. And, no, thank goodness it isn't the most male dominated industry out there. Still heavoly male dominated but a lot better than when I started out as a graduate trainee. Still normal for me to sit in executive level meetings with 19 male peers and no women, mind.

By the way, I also agree that both software and hardware can be sexist. I just doubt that Teams, in particular, is to blame for a problem that women in business have been facing since times immemorial.

What a man-hater!!!! Lollllllll

RabidChinchilla, no worries. And, no, thank goodness it isn't the most male dominated industry out there. Still heavoly male dominated but a lot better than when I started out as a graduate trainee. Still normal for me to sit in executive level meetings with 19 male peers and no women, mind.

By the way, I also agree that both software and hardware can be sexist. I just doubt that Teams, in particular, is to blame for a problem that women in business have been facing since times immemorial.

Interesting fact. My mum did a programming course of some description around 1980 and turned down a £100k job when she got pregnant with me. She and the other top student were both offered jobs (at IBM I think it was).

I just typed in hands and , as well as what PP said, all the hands of the top 20 matches were male.

I thought it was about them all being white?

Yes, 19 of them were that, too. I am just pointing out the further/other bias. The hands were the hands of white males. So, a default image which people would be inclined to put in to, say a presentation ppt would nearly always be that of a white male, unless they consciously corrected it.

I agree with a PP : people need to read Caroline Criado Perez.

When the new “normal” settles down, there will be a lot of people saying “I won’t go to the actual meeting, I will use teams” I.e. no travelling

I use teams, just switch video off and mute the mic. If I want to say something, I do, otherwise I just carry on doing something else but listen in.

Works for me 👍

Yes, 19 of them were that, too. I am just pointing out the further/other bias. The hands were the hands of white males.

But is it just the contents of the internet or is the search engine biased?

For example, if you selected 20 random people from Notting Hill/Kensington and then did the same in Hackney or Lewisham you’d probably get a quite different ethnic representation, despite the methodology/tools being the same.

Oh, and for everyone saying "the software doesn't care if you are female" - try typing "hands" into Google Image search and then come back here and tell me that Google isn't racist (still, after this issue was called out years ago).

Just done that - it is predominantly female hands!!!!!!!!!!!!

@EngTech I did that at one meeting last week and then realised I had actually forgot I was in the meeting. Had to blame a connection problem

Ditto yahoo

I just typed in hands and , as well as what PP said, all the hands of the top 20 matches were male.

Mine were neither all white nor all Male.

And even Bing - the MSFT search engine - doesn’t seem to have this bias

Oh, and this is the google “hands” search results

I am afraid that any software that would put women in the spotlight even when they are not saying anything would actually be more dentrimental to their development and confidence.

Very much so. The perception would be that, when a woman appears on the screen, it's probably just tokenism and/or some eye candy as a side distraction. However, as soon as a man pops up, you know he means business and is to be taken seriously.

It could be like the old gameshows all over again. You've always got to have a pretty smiling woman to look at whilst the men are leading and actually doing things - it empowers the ladies to have their very own important special part to play as well, you see

So Yahoo is misandrist, Google is misogynistic, and Bing is the egalitarian. 😂

Flop has obviously brought him up very well