“Self description for inclusive meetings” What fresh hell is this?

[BlueOrangeRed]

AIBU to not understand this at all? I’ve just attended an online event with around 20 people, from a mix of organisations.

The three organisers of the event introduced themselves by name then followed up with descriptions of themselves along the lines of “My pronouns are she/her. I’m a white woman in my mid thirties. I have blonde hair and am wearing a blue top”

A quick google afterwards came up with the following: “For inclusive meetings, a self-description offers context for visually impaired attendees, focusing on key identifiers like Name, Role, Pronouns, and brief visual cues (gender, skin tone, hair, clothing/accessories, background), keeping it concise (1-2 sentences) and optional, to help everyone feel seen and reduce assumptions. Start with your name and role, then add pronouns (she/her, he/him, they/them) and a quick visual detail like "brown skin, bald head, black hoodie," ensuring it's about access, not performance

It will be a cold day in hell before I start introducing myself like this. Leaving aside the foregrounding of pronouns issue, I can see zero benefits, but lots of pitfalls, about reminding everyone in a meeting that I’m a woman in my early fifties. I would also hate it if I was the youngest colleague there, for example. Or the only non white participant.

I’ve never experienced this before. Is this the latest thing to tick some inclusivity box, and for people to perform some virtue signalling? Because the cynic in me really can’t see how it will help anyone. Do visually impaired people find these kind of descriptions helpful?

Or am I just hopelessly out of touch? I don’t go to many events so maybe I am and this kind of thing is now the norm.

I've not ever come across that thank god. 🥴
If anything it lends itself to unconscious bias/ discrimination and perception.

I can cope personally well without it personally. A listener then has to focus on what's being said not on how someone looks.

Is there any evidence that this is helpful for people with visual impairment? It's pretty irrelevant to tell someone who is blind from birth what colour you are wearing.
Sounds like an effective way to reinforce sexism, ageism and racism.

Now funnily, I do object to cameras off. If you were in a physical meeting you'd not be invisible so it's only courtesy that you show your face.

Not in those bloody enormous meetings but in meetings where you're contributing.

And what if someone has an anxiety disorder for instance and finds that cameras on triggers their anxiety?

That's where being inclusive gets complicated.

How would that person cope in a physical meeting? Anxiety or not, if you're contributing you should turn your camera on to speak to someone. And especially in a 121.

This is the way to go. If you see yourself as tall, slim and glamorous then who's going to say otherwise?

You don't have any transwomen/transmen in your workplace? You can't imagine a workplace that does; where someone's name and voice may not tally with your preconceptions?

A) they may not attend in person meetings specifically because of anxiety.

B) in an in-person meeting with lots of people, someone with social anxiety can look into the middle distance when not being spoken to directly so they're not looking at a sea of faces and examining them for signs that the person with anxiety has just said something stupid, or inappropriate or that they just disagree with, which amplifies the anxiety. They're also not seeing their own face and so can relax and not be anxious about their own facial expressions.

I know a couple of trans people who are quite anxious about their appearance and would absolutely HATE to have to describe their physical selves in a meeting.

Oh god. We have staff that do the image description thing when they post (personal) images on Slack, it feels so try hard (pronouns after their name too of course), we’re a small organisation we’d know if there was someone with visual problems.

Maybe I can start introducing myself as 5ft10, aged 28 and a size 6 - maybe if I say it, people will have to believe it?

I object to 'cameras on'. I worked throughout covid running a successful multi million £ project across the UK and never turned my camera on, we focused on the work not on judging people by their blouses.

Indeed when we had large conferences online, many institutions used to run a 'cameras on' policy and I'd request they turned them off because it clagged up the bandwidth and most people were relieved when they could turn the damn things off.

Your mistake was mentioning pronouns, OP, it makes otherwise-almost-sensible MNers start frothing to be the funniest, edgiest person in the room 🙄

Most workplaces in my experience have cameras-on rules for Teams etc, so everyone else in the meeting can already see what you look like. 99% of people in the meeting can see that you're female and grey-haired so introducing yourself as "Hi, I'm Sarah and I have grey hair and I'm wearing a green jumper" won't single you out or make you a target or open you up to sex discrimination or anything like that; it levels the playing field so that the VI person in your Teams call (or playing it afterwards, if it is a recorded thing) has the same point of reference for each speaker that all of the non-VI people do.

It levels the playing field. Mumsnet is so adamant that every disabled person needs to be in work but heaven forbid they have access requirements or adjustments are made to level the field for them 🙄

It shouldn't be mandatory in a cameras off meeting (serves no purpose) or if no people with VIs will be attending the meeting or watching a recording.

I just don't see the problem. For everyone who can see I'm "revealed" as who I am. So adding a descriptor for people who can't see me really doesn't seem a big ask.
It's not asking to list your physical flaws but just to describe yourself. Maybe think how you'd describe someone else on the call and show sane kindness to your self
White middle aged lady with a short brown bob and a black top.
It might actually be quite useful for Mumsnet!

That isn't any different for people who aren't visually impaired.

And we can tell from their voices whether they are actually make or female.

Wtf does it help a visually impaired person if I say I have grey hair and and a blue jumper? What does that add to the meeting for them? Nothing at all.

I have really bad body dysmorphia and find it very hard to see my face on camera, looking like a fat Quasimodo.

Similarly if asked to describe myself, I'd probably say 'Im the old fat ugly one; and then people get all uncomfortable.

It's fine if it's relevant to the topic eg if you're going to be talking about race and lived experience it's helpful to state your ethnicity. Or if you're discussing age bias then your age might be relevant.
But as a standard introduction I'd far rather people introduce themselves by saying, for example, something interesting/funny/weird about themselves that others will remember. Like 'I'm Wordsmithery. In my spare time I'm a trapeze artist/snake charmer/metal detectorist'.
More inclusive than putting everyone into a little box.

They want you to give information to enable people to stereotype you from the off ?

If your non-VI colleagues can go away from the meeting and think "ok, so Sarah suggested X changes... Which one was Sarah again? Oh yeah, grey hair, blue jumper, I remember her talking about this", why shouldn't VI colleagues have the same point of reference?

Also, you absolutely can't tell if everyone is male or female from their voice. Ask anyone who's spent any length of time working in a call centre.

It is 'ice breaking' gone mad.

Nobody needs to know whether someone has a spotted blouse on or a new haricut to look at the next 18 months accounts. What they need to know is how those accounts were put together and if any risks are not being taken into consideration.

People just need to get on with their jobs and stop poncing on about clothes, haircuts, identity and other random bullshit.

If you've got your camera on, 99% of people can do that just from looking at you. Why do you imagine only the 1% that are VI would have a particular interest in stereotyping you?

Blind people tend to have their own way of processing the world that doesn’t rely on jumper colours - they see much more detail on voices than I do so will remember Sarah in a different way ( the lilt of voice for example )

the exception might be the recently blind but I have never met one of them aged under 70

Well to be honest I would avoid physical or camera meetings until I have set up a working relationship with people by email if I possibly could because it really is amazing the way that reduces the “female penalty “. even if it does lead to a few funny facial expressions when you finally see people

but it is well known that emphasising someone’s sex makes stereotypes worse

get girls and boys to line up separate for an exam and the girls do worse than if the queue is mixed sex

and it’s the girls performance that suffers not boys doing better

getting a female to emphasise her sex makes her more likely to conform to the gender expectations and fail. And yes that is the gender expectation that is seen across British society even though no one here will see themselves in that way

God I went to an event where they did this - it was organised by a group of "differently-abled activists" (their label, not mine).

The whole event was sheer hell. I was a keynote speaker and they despised me because I refused to pour metaphorical petrol on their agenda of "everyone's out to get disabled people". Instead I offered solutions and practical advice. That was definitely not what they wanted from me.

I also refused to describe myself in my introduction which probably didn't land well.