20 Ways to Bring Feminist Practices Into Online Work Sessions
Every transition invites us to innovate, and the wholesale shift from in-person to virtual meetings forced by this pandemic is no exception.
photo credit: Anna Shvets, via Pexels (cropped)
For women, racialized and minoritized men, and all people, this transition to virtual meetings brings with it an opportunity to transform how we work together in the virtual space. Instead of simply transferring our conventional meeting practices into online spaces like Zoom and bringing their biases, power moves, and participation obstacles along with them, we can experiment with more democratic, more inclusive, less oppressive, and definitively feminist meeting practices.
At Feminists at Work, our goal is to demonstrate ways everyone — leaders, managers, activists, entrepreneurs, software developers, customer service reps, accountants, parents, literally everyone — can build feminism into their work. And just like most of us are adapting to a new virtual workspace, those practices may look a bit different when moved online.
In order to aid this process, and eliminate the excuses that it can’t be done, I have put together 20 concrete and practical suggestions for making small and meaningful changes to your online meetings. The practices in Bringing Feminist Practices into Online Work Sessions are drawn from feminist and anti-oppression meeting facilitation methods, as well as from the experiences of the (online) Feminist Enterprise Commons and Feminists At Work. These practices challenge oppressive power dynamics, establish equality, equity and justice in the experience, and help to create a situation where everyone can flourish.
Please note, the following is an abbreviated version of the piece “Bringing Feminist Practices into Online Work Sessions”, which more fully explains how these actions demonstrate feminist principles. The printable booklet version can be found here.
20 Ways To Bring Feminist Practices Into Online Work Sessions
Your #1 feminist practice is to establish working agreements for the group and session using a democratic, participatory process. Agreements should include your vision for working together, how you will manage participation challenges, and more.
Rotate the roles of host, conversation leader, and facilitator from meeting to meeting. Share opportunities for note-taking, conversation summarizing, reporting out, etc. among participants.
Craft a land acknowledgement that reflects where all participants are coming in from and/or what you are creating in the virtual space together.
Host a check-in where every participant gets to speak and share their name. Let every voice be heard once at the start, to set a practice of inviting all in the gathering to participate.
Create a group gesture — a hand motion, a facial expression, a shout — that members can use together to open and close meetings. This can be surprisingly fun since it creates not only levity but also a physical sense of community across the interweb.
Put together a public Google document that has the agenda, any pre-reading or information, slides, diagrams, reference lists, bio and contact information about participants, previous group agreements, and any other information that might be helpful. Invite everyone to contribute to it. The document can be accessed before and during a meeting to support group conversations. A document can be especially helpful for participants who prefer multiple ways to access information.
Before moving to a break, offer a one-minute meditation and ask people to reflect on what they most need to do on the break in order to care for themselves.
Build in time for interpersonal interaction and process, not just for "getting things done". The collective as a whole and each individual in it needs to be cared for. This care takes time.
Invite everyone to share the same visual image in their view — a banner, a piece of art, a plant, a word. Because virtual backgrounds are available only to those with late model tech, having some participants use these may leave others out. Find something everyone can share.
Decide as a group whether or not to record the meeting. Often, we default to ‘no recording’ if only one person doesn’t want it, but this shouldn’t be automatic. Other participants might find a recording to be really helpful. Work this out together.
Choose the simplest tech for the task at hand. Remember that the simplest tech is often the easiest for everyone to use. Simpler tech reduces the demand for all kinds of resources, and equalizes access for those who have less.
Care for bodies and hearts as well as minds. Put movement breaks, reflection, and emotional sharing on the agenda. Give these real group time.
Open up other channels of communication to run in parallel with the conversation, to expand the possibilities for many kinds of contributions and for many different voices to join in.
Design a closing ritual to pair with an opening acknowledgement. Consider something related to creating a shared future.
Add a gift to the closing page of Zoom or to a follow-up email — not just a link to the meeting's notes but also a little downloadable treat (an image, a handout, a link to a song).
Shortly before ending your meeting, invite the group to consider how well your experience together aligned with the group agreements you set with yourself earlier.
Create a set of gestures that communicate responses that are important to the group. In addition to the “feminist fist bump”, we also have a way of placing our hands on our hearts to indicate depth of feeling, we pump up the volume when we agree, and we also snap like beatniks while someone’s talking to indicate our support. Each of these gestures adds to the feeling that we’re together in this.
Play music as folks join and leave the meeting. Several minutes before the end of a break, start playing some upbeat music to help folks track when it’s time to come back and to welcome them as they regroup. We've even had a musical guest to play us a song at closing!
Help keep the whole community in mind. Take a screenshot of the whole community — a gallery view of everyone participating, with their approval. This can be shared on social media, printed out to hang next to your computer, or sent in a followup email to participants.
Be as fully present as possible and add some spice to your presence. Use props, nicknames, pronouns, accessories, activities — whatever invites you to add a little more "you" to the gathering. Drink some tea together. Wear hats, bows, scarves, happy clothes, fun earrings. Use emoji and GIFs in the group chat. Have your pets drop in for a quick woof.
Much in the same way that GenderAvenger challenges masculine, patriarchal, and white-normative panels and conferences, we also challenge all-male rules about how our work together should be organized. In the spirit of opening up participation to women as well as men and gender nonconforming persons, and to minoritized people as well as to the privileged, let’s open up our online meeting practices to include everyone.
CV Harquail, PhD, is a co-founder of Feminists At Work, a mentor at the Fifth Wave Feminist Business Accelerator, and the author of Feminism: A Key Idea for Business and Society (Routledge, 2020). A printable version of Bring Feminist Practices into Your Online Meetings can be found here.