3.2  Inclusion and participation in meetings

Besides being a human rights issue, inclusion benefits organisations. Inclusive practices at work and within meetings ensure maximum participation of all employees. This leads to the expression of a range of diverse points of view and thinking, which in turn leads to new insights and ultimately, helps organisations make better decisions. This corresponds with a participative style of leadership.

However, despite most organisations having EDI policies, research indicates participation and barriers to participation within meetings can still be problematic for certain groups:

What the research shows:

  • Men speak for longer periods of time than women in meetings (Wang and Roubidoux, 2020).
  • Women experience numerous negative interruptions (Krivkovich et al., 2024).
  • In some professional contexts, women are more likely to be introduced by first name than by professional titles compared with their male counterparts. This reinforces gender hierarchy and may impact negatively on performance (Dhawan et al., 2021).
  • Younger women find it difficult to be heard in meetings and use the chat function more for participating (Sarkar et al., 2021).
  • In science and medical contexts, even in gender-balanced rooms, men ask up to 80% more questions than women (Howe et al., 2023).
  • At medical conferences, when men ask the first question, women ask proportionately fewer subsequent questions. Barriers to asking questions include ‘not being able to work up the nerve’ (Howe et al., 2023, p. 4).
  • Across 20 UK-based medical conferences, only 10% had an equal balance of speakers from white ethnic groups versus those from any other ethnic groups (Howe et al., 2023).
  • Having more diversity on panels at conferences might lead to increased participation from females and ethnic minorities in the audience (Howe et al., 2023).
  • Disabled people within the workplace experience barriers to participation due to inaccessible technologies, e.g. technologies not compatible with assistive technologies (Alharbi, Tang and Henderson, 2023).
  • The responsibility of sorting out accessibility falls on disabled people rather than organisations (Alharbi, Tang and Henderson, 2023).
  • A barrier to disabled people’s participation in online meetings is the extra work required to be able to participate (e.g. processing parallel sources in multiple modalities can be challenging for people with a sensory disability) (Sarkar et al., 2021).

3.1  What is meant by inclusion?

4  The importance of inclusive language