During Zoom meetings with colleagues, I usually hold a second, secret meeting with my own face.
The conversations in this meeting-within-a-meeting can get pretty tense. Why are you like that? I ask my chin, which sprouts a bright red pimple. You need a bleach set, I say to my teeth that look sloppy when I smile at a colleague’s joke. Stop looking so tired! I command my circles under the eyes and am worried that my teammates will mistake my drowsiness due to boredom.
When I get off the call, I often feel remarkably discouraged – not because of anything my co-workers said, but because I only spent 30 minutes breaking down the self-critical thoughts that women usually socialize with.
Many other women are in the same technological boat, according to new research from authors at Stanford University and the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. Women are more likely to experience so-called Zoom fatigue than men. The reason boils down to what the researchers call ‘mirroring’ – a sense of self-awareness ’caused by the self-perception in video conferencing that serves as a ubiquitous mirror during social interactions,’ according to the newspaper.
How distracting is it to see yourself during a Zoom call?
The research, which has been published on SSRN and has not yet been peer-reviewed, is based on surveys of nearly 10,600 people about their experiences of Zoom meetings. They found that 1 in 7 women reported being “very” or “extremely” tired after Zoom calls, compared to 1 in 20 men.
Women also had longer meetings and had fewer interruptions between them, but the gender difference remained even after the researchers checked for those factors. The main reason for the gender diversity was the differences between how men and women responded to questions such as: “How worried do you feel during a video conference to see yourself?” and “How distracting is it during a video conference to see yourself?”
Women were more likely to be negatively affected by seeing themselves on screen, in line with other research showing that women are more prone to ‘self-directed attention’ than men – a habit linked to depression and anxiety. The researchers also found that women used more pronouns such as ‘I’, ‘I’ and ‘my’ in the open answers of the survey, another sign of self-directed attention linked to depression.
The study had several limitations, including the fact that participants chose themselves (and therefore were not representative of the general population) and it relied on people to report for themselves how much they used Zoom and how they felt afterwards. Memory can deceive.
How to be less self-aware during video calls
So why is it for some of us to see such a big emotional turnaround when we watch ourselves in video cameras? First, as Barnard’s psychologist Tara Well told Quartz earlier: ‘We are all wired to find problems and mistakes and mistakes and mistakes. When we look at ourselves for more than a few minutes, we see things that are wrong with us. ‘
To combat these tendencies, Well recommends mirror meditation, in which people spend time non-judgmentally looking at their own reflections. Try to sit in front of a mirror for 10 minutes a day and follow Well’s instructions:
‘Bring your attention with you to the present moment. Then keep an open consciousness, where you are open to seeing yourself in a new way, you are open to not knowing what you are necessarily going to see. [And then] have a kind intention towards yourself. ‘
Another great option is to simply turn off self-image in Zoom.
Other disadvantages of video conferencing
The Stanford article describes a number of other psychological disadvantages of Zoom that cannot be easily corrected:
- You feel physically trapped (since you can not stretch or move as you can during personal interactions)
- Dealing with hyper gaze (with 17 pairs of eyes on you, whether you are talking or not, you can be self-conscious)
- Experiencing cognitive overload (as we have to put extra effort into communicating non-verbally on Zoom and interpreting others’ gestures, leading to situations in which we analyze too much or the boss’s slight nod means she considers our idea or actually hates it) , but also polite to say so)
Despite these problems, Zoom is not going anywhere – especially since more companies are planning to switch to hybrid or go completely remote. But knowing that video conferencing has an excessive negative impact on women can be another reason to try to reduce it, or to exchange a Zoom chat to pick up the phone.