Why women are more TIRED of ZOOM meetings.

I don’t want to play the gender card because I am a woman, but truth be told, women are the masters of multi-tasking. Case in study, my mum; she will get up to do something and do a hundred and three other things in between, before she finally does what she set to do in the first place. In some instances, she forgets what she intended to do initially, and only remembers hours or years later.

There is a time she was hosting her chama friends, so in the morning, we were all busy doing different things to meet her standards, cleaning, cooking, cleaning again, you name it. Then she said she was going to wipe the cabinet because no one had remembered to do it, when she got to the living room, she started adjusting the curtains, moving the sofas and just doing a lot of other things that she had no intention of doing, by the time her guests arrived, the TV cabinet was untouched as two days before. This is not something that only my mother suffers from, a lot of women are wired that way. This explains why recent research shows that women tend to be more tired during virtual meetings than men. Their attention is easily diverted.

When the pandemic broke out, the norms were altered. New normals were created among them, virtual meetings especially for employers, employees, students and tutors. More women are complaining of Zoom fatigue compared to men. However, the research showed that the Zoom fatigue impacts different people differently with women being in the lead.

What could possibly make a person tired from having an online meeting? The researchers found that the gender difference in feelings of exhaustion was rooted in men’s and women’s different responses to looking at themselves on the screen. In the default mode on many video-conferencing platforms including Zoom, participants view themselves as well as the other attendees. This makes online meetings quite different from in-person meetings, where participants can’t see themselves during the meeting. A study of over 10,000 people was carried out the results showed that, one in seven women reported feeling “very” to “extremely” fatigued after Zoom meetings. On the other hand, only one in 20 men felt the same way.

Looking at one’s own face leads women, more than men, to think more about how they appear. This phenomenon is often referred to as “self-focused attention.” A researcher put a mirror in a room with study participants and found out that the presence of the mirror impacted women and men differently. Women were more likely than men to be more self-aware and to think about themselves when the mirror was present. The researcher concluded that the greater self-focused attention that women experienced with the mirror was associated with negative emotions and feelings including depression. An analysis of 79 studies on this topic found that the effects were generally stronger for women than men.

The good news is there’s a very simple solution to get rid of the Zoom fatigue, by turning off the self-view button.  Zoom allows you to hide your image without turning off your camera. In other words, others can still see you, but you don’t have to stare at yourself. If you’re in gallery mode, simply hover over your image and click on the ellipses (three dots) that appear in the upper corner, and then choose “Hide Self View.” See, very simple!