This story reminds me of an old joke about what the headlines would be in the nation's major newspapers should the world be ending:
Wall Street Journal:
"World to End, Dow Jones plummets."
The New York Times:
"World to End, history of the world, pages D1 through D42."
The Washington Post:
"World to End, women, minorities, hurt most."
The Washington Post, and progressives in general, only ever have two stories about women:
- Women can do anything men can do and probably better so shut up you sexist pig.
- Women are weak and frail and in need of special help and accommodations so shut up you sexist pig.
This article falls squarely in the latter category.
Also, shut up you sexist pig.
The concept of "Zoom fatigue" came into vogue early in the pandemic with the explosion of video conferences and refers to the fact that people hate to be on video conferences all day.
I'm not sure why that needed a special name. It's not as if anyone has conducted a study on "Brian Stelter Fatigue," that brain fog that envelopes you whenever you watch Brian Stelter for more than five minutes.
There, see, I already feel more tired.
The Post article reports on a recent study titled, "Nonverbal Mechanisms Predict Zoom Fatigue and Explain Why Women Experience Higher Levels than Men," written by Christopher Shea, who prior to his gig at The Washington Post worked at Vox, so you know you're getting the unvarnished truth.
The article is a transcription, edited for clarity, of an interview (over Zoom, of course).
Q: How much videoconferencing did you find the people that you surveyed were doing?
A: We looked at the frequency, we looked at average duration, and we also looked at how much time people had between meetings. The mean for frequency was a bit less than four meetings per day. The mean duration was around 45 minutes to an hour. And they had about half an hour between meetings — a measure we call "burstiness."
I don't know about you, but I'm pretty confident that when it comes to exploring gender differences in burstiness, we're leaving China in the dust
I tell you, we are going to OWN the field of video conferencing fatigue technology.
For a little more detail, let's take a quick detour and take a look at the paper itself:
This study empirically tests four theoretical predictions (9) using the Zoom & Exhaustion Fatigue (ZEF) scale (31).
I know it's still early, but I don't think I'm going too far out on a limb here to say that the Zoom & Exhaustion Fatigue scale is going to go down as one of the most important developments of the 21st century, a turning point if you will in video conference call history.
We predict that (a) fatigue is associated with high amounts of video conference usage and (b) nonverbal mechanisms, that (c) women will have more fatigue than men, and that (d) the mirror anxiety mediates the gender difference.
We'll revisit these predictions later, but for now, let's return to the interview.
Q: Women reported roughly the same number of Zoom meetings as men, but women's meetings tended to last longer, and women had less time between meetings. Yet one key finding was that women reported being more tired even after equal amounts of meeting time.
A: Exactly. About 14 percent of the women reported feeling "very" or "extremely" fatigued, while only 5.5 percent of the men reported the same level of fatigue. Overall, women scored 14 percent higher on Zoom fatigue.
While the study was never designed to answer the question, there did not seem to be any curiosity at all over why women would have longer meetings and shorter breaks or how that would even be possible. I'm pretty sure corporate America went co-ed a long time ago and so would assume meetings routinely included both men and women (and the 69 other genders).
So, how did women have longer meetings?
The data gathered was all based on participants' responses to a survey, and so was self-reported. It was an opt-in survey, so they tested their results with a smaller randomized sample, but people were still self-reporting.
I did not see any suggestion in the paper that women could simply be overestimating the length and "burstiness" of their meetings. THAT would have been an interesting question. It would certainly be understandable that if women indeed felt more fatigued from meetings their perception of length and breaks in between meetings would be exaggerated, the way in which a clock seems to tick backwards when you're in a really boring science class or reading a lengthy paper on Zoom fatigue...
Q: Overall, you found that something called "mirror anxiety" accounted for much of the gender difference. Explain that.
A: We know from previous research that people will more likely evaluate themselves when they see a mirror image of themselves. A mirror makes you more susceptible to comparing yourself with others — or with some ideal of how you should look, which can lead to negative effects, such as bad mood, anxiety or depression. We also know from prior research that this tendency for self-awareness in front of a mirror is greater among women. Most of that earlier research involved short-term exposure to a mirror. But now with videoconferences, we're in front of ourselves for hours per day.
This is a Zoom version of, "does this conference call make me look fat?"
And shut up you sexist pig.
There were three other "theoretical nonverbal mechanisms" they studied:
...physically trapped, hyper gaze from a grid of staring faces, and the cognitive load from producing and interpreting nonverbal cues.
While they make a big deal of these in the paper, their own study found these did not come close to the mirror effect.
This being 2021, the researchers felt the need to introduce a racial component to the study, even if there wasn't one.
Q: The study was designed to be about gender — but you were also surprised that race appeared to matter, too.
A: Yeah. We saw that participants of color reported greater Zoom fatigue than White participants. To put it into perspective, the gender effect is 10 times the size of the race effect.
Here's a bar graph from the study.
Nothing useful can be drawn from this graph. Does that matter? Of course not.
Still, it's extremely important to look into that and to study this potential race effect in much more depth.
Important for your next grant, that is. I can see the proposal now:
"Systemic White Supremacy and Zoom Fatigue: The Structural Racism and Whiteness in Video Conference Calls."
Q: Is there something that companies should be doing to alleviate Zoom fatigue — or that individuals can do?
A: One way to reduce fatigue is to shrink the size of the videoconference window, so you don't have these large faces staring at you. As for the mirror effect, you can disable the "self view" so you won't see yourself anymore. Your camera is still on. Everyone sees you, you see everyone, but you don't see yourself. To help with mobility, we suggest trying to increase the distance between yourself and the camera, which gives you a bit more room to move. And standing desks are helpful because they you allow to be more mobile during your videoconferences.
Seems like common sense for the most part, things people could do on their own or even figure out on their own. I've done versions of those things myself.
Q: And I guess companies could spread the word about the value of doing these things.
A: The responsibility for addressing Zoom fatigue should not be placed on individuals, since this could just intensify inequities.
Of course it could.
What about those predictions?
(a) fatigue is associated with high amounts of video conference usage
I suppose they had to add that for completeness, but yeah, that makes sense.
(b) nonverbal mechanisms, that (c) women will have more fatigue than men, and that (d) the mirror anxiety mediates the gender difference.
I don't think they "proved" any of these things. The survey they used asked questions about these specific topics. For example, to measure "mirror anxiety," they asked questions like:
These items were "During a video conference, how concerned do you feel about seeing yourself?", "During a video conference, how concerned do you feel about what people think of your appearance?" and "During a video conference, how distracting is it to see yourself?"
For what they called "Hypergaze" they asked this:
A single-item scale was used to measure the perceived gaze of other participants. Participants were asked to indicate "During a video conference, how often do you feel like people are staring at you?"
These are leading questions. In fact, I feel like people are staring at me right now and I'm sitting in a room by myself.
I believe "mirror anxiety" is a real thing, but this study with its leading questions confined to a handful of topics doesn't prove anything. There is plenty of research on the fatigue that simply staring at a screen all day can cause, regardless of whether you are on a conference call or not.
This study had a goal, and sure enough, it met it.
There's a frivolity to "research" like this. In one sense, it is heartening to know that we live in so rich and prosperous a society that we can conduct largely useless studies like this, much in the way we can devote large amounts of time and money to silly movies, video games, and the rest.
However I do question the potential damage that can be done when academia and "science" become so frivolous and agenda-driven.
