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Women Still Have No Voice
In the age of Zoom, males dominate the shared spaces
Recently, I took an online course which was conducted via Zoom. There were 20 participants, evenly split between men and women.
Whenever there was down time, often at the end of the day, men would dominate the conversation by talking about topics of interest to them. The topics ranged from sports to gaming, and occasionally it wandered into the vast wasteland of 90s goth music. Don’t ask.
The same six guys lorded over this shared free time, seemingly unconcerned that they had been monopolizing the discussion. They never invited anyone to join in, nor was there an acknowledgement that others were excluded by the choice of subject matter.
In other words, there wasn’t even a pretense to include anyone outside the heterosexual male perspective.
I picked up on a very strong vibe that we were not welcome to speak. Although I wondered what would happen if I jumped in and changed the subject — I am pretty pushy — I didn’t want to be rude. I was also curious if they would develop any sort of awareness, but I realized they probably wouldn’t as the process repeated almost every class day for weeks.
I didn’t care to participate in their bull session, but I was surprised by their unwillingness to…
