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.

What?

I don’t want to see randomised pictures - I want to see those speaking

What I actually said was:

The images in video calls could be current speaker plus a randomised selection of the others and change them every few minutes.

Yep - read that.

I want to see the speakers / those speaking / those recently speaking. I don’t want randomised images of passive bystanders. I have an attendance list on Teams for that.

This also doesn't change the default behaviour, which is the fundamental issue here.

Teams shows the person who is speaking by default. There is no problem with that fundamentally.

The fundamental issue is the imbalance of women's and men's voices in meetings. That is not a software issue. That is a people issue.

There is indeed bias in software algorithms but not this particular Teams one.

Spot on, @LemonRedwood! 👏

I want to see the speakers / those speaking / those recently speaking. I don’t want randomised images of passive bystanders

On Teams by default what you see is the people who make the most noise (or even background noise if they fail to mute). Those are rarely the people who say the most. You are less likely to see the people who have the manners to mute when they are not speaking to the meeting.

You could have an option to select to show noisiest rather than top contributors, but making that the default favours people who are simply noisy and whose vocal ranges are best detected by the software.

Personally I'm more interested in hearing people who have something useful to say.

That is not a software issue. That is a people issue

Its both. The software reinforces and strengthens in inherent biases in the behaviour.

They sued the soap dispenser as a plot on Doctors !

used.

The one thing that using Teams has highlighted to me is that I have very little input to make during a lot of meetings so really could just not be there and read the minutes afterwards. So now if I don't think its going to be a productive meeting I dial in with my phone, stick it on mute so they can't hear me typing, and get on with something important while listening to the discussion. It's ace :)

Sadly, scientific reviews of interactions between men and women have shown that women speak less when there are men in the group. I think from experience, the more men, the quieter the women.

You would hope this would be changing by now. Sadly a lot of women are conditioned by society to be agreeable rather than to shout up.

I work with teams but its fairly mixed in my area of work (academia) so I think the women do get a fair say. My boss (man) has small kids and has said to everyone that he gets the problems we have working at home with children around. That is really reassuring and refreshing. Not to be treated like a robot. His senior (woman) has said the same too. I think your team and our patriarchal society sounds dysfunctional, rather than the software. It doesn't seem inherently at fault.

Something being sexist in these instances doesn’t necessarily mean someone has designed it deliberately to be that way. Same way PPE is ‘sexist’ and seatbelts are ‘sexist’ in that they were designed for men and therefore don’t protect women as well. Same way crash test dummies were based on a male figure, not female, so cra safety based on male dimensions. In this example the software possibly does exacerbate existing gender bias, in that statistically speaking men are more likely to speak over women, women are more likely to wait for a gap in conversation before speaking.

I have issues sharing my screen when using PowerPoint and Excel on Teams - it always freezes . The other issue is that it can be tricky finding files... some people upload them to the ‘chat’ and others to the ‘team’ site.
I believe Teams was going to increase its capability to show 11 or so people at a time on 1 screen. This would eliminate the non-talkers not being shown. Not sure what happened with this upgrade tho.
It’s really up to the meeting lead make sure everyone airs their opinion/feels included. Obviously your work are lame at doing this. I’ve worked in a male dominated environment for a long time. If you can’t beat them, join them... Just say what you think/make sure your opinions are aired.

🙄I don't particularly like Teams but I don't see how it's sexist. Women talk just as much as men in meetings. It very much depends on their personality or whether a point or issue is relevant to them. I find I keep interrupting people on Teams.

Our company recently sent out a message telling us that Teams are working on being able to see more attendees at the same time and a hand up action so people aren't interrupting eachother.

So hopefully soon, some of these problems will be no longer.

Our team of 5 only has one man and he speaks the least so is normally just initials on the screen

*You don't have a Teams problem

You have a team problem*

Yes. This

Not my experience at all, men and women feature equally, or at least so close I have never noticed. I don't let people mansplain things to me, if I know more, I stop them, end of. I'm not rude though, that would be just as bad.

You need to speak to the meeting facilitator (usually the person who scheduled the meeting) and get them to run a better meeting, if the meeting goes off track it is their fault.

Absolute biggest load of tripe thus far. And this is MN so there’s a lot
Teams highlights the person talking. If women don’t display time that’s the fact that you’re not grabbing the mic - metaphorically speaking... and I seriously doubt that this didn’t happen when you had your f:f. Unless you and the rest of the women you work with a technophobes and don’t want to learn to use the product properly.
Seriously... 🤦🏻‍♀️

If men are statistically more likely to talk louder, and also more likely to talk OVER women, it’s entirely likely in many situations that women will not do well on Teams. It’s not tripe, it’s an accidental inherent bias in the software.

In this example the software possibly does exacerbate existing gender bias, in that statistically speaking men are more likely to speak over women, women are more likely to wait for a gap in conversation before speaking.

That's probably true. Individual posters who are themselves assertive may dispute the fact but there have been a ton of studies about boys dominating mixed classrooms, men dominating meetings on average.

We still use Skype for business rather than Teams (not sure how much they differ) we don't use video (always something more interesting to look at) so there isn't the same 'loudest person grabs screen' effect. We've been doing online meetings for donkeys' years - our managers know how to manage them.

We find Skype not a particularly stable platform to use when multiple users are WFH - Teams doesn’t seem to fall over In the same way as Skype

You have a "male" problem.....

Seriously? Another one trying to make a sexist issue where there isn’t one! This really doesn’t do women any favours.

It certainly sounds like a load of bollocks to me.

As you were.

Anyone else hate the term 'mansplaining'? Grinds my gears every time I hear/see it. Sorry, totally missed the point of the thread

As our dept is 5 men (only 3 of them permanent) and around 15 women, I'd say I see more female faces on mine. The women talk more too!