Even as video calls have taken over people’s work and personal lives amid the pandemic, a new Stanford University research has found that the feeling of exhaustion that comes from a day of back-to-back online meetings, also known as “Zoom fatigue”, is greater for women than men.
The researchers found that overall, one in seven women — 13.8 per cent — compared with one in 20 men — 5.5 per cent — reported feeling “very” to “extremely” fatigued after Zoom calls.
What contributed most to the feeling of exhaustion among women was an increase in what social psychologists describe as “self-focused attention” triggered by the self-view in video conferencing, according to the study released on the Social Science Research Network.
“Self-focused attention refers to a heightened awareness of how one comes across or how one appears in a conversation,” said co-author of the new study Jeffrey Hancock, Professor of Communication in the School of Humanities and Sciences.
The researchers found that while women have the same number of meetings per day as men, their meetings tend to run longer. (IANS)
