During the most first US presidential debate in 2016, Donald J. Trump interrupted Hillary Clinton 51 times. Clinton interrupted him only nine times.
The behaviour of men interrupting women, aka manterruption, is widespread in boardroom meetings and across the professional world.
It is one of many forms of soft violence that men inflict on women. And although “violence” is a harsh word, the effects of manterruption are very damaging.
To highlight this fact, BETC Sao Paolo created a campaign led by an online video showing women being interrupted, beginning with a clip from Australia’s The Project.
One of the biggest problems in overcoming manterruption is that men are not aware they are doing it. Or that it’s sexist behaviour. The objective of the campaign is to create awareness and debate around manterrupting among both men and women.
“At first glance, it may seem like a small problem, but it reflects deeper issues of gender inequality at work and in society . The app is a way of sshowing that, in fact, manterrupting is real and alarming,” stated Gal Baradas, founder and co-chief executive officer of BETC Sao Paulo.
Baradas is the only female representative in the ranking of the ten most admired advertising executives by top-executives in Brazil, according to the 2017 Agency Scope study by Scopen Consultancy.
Supporting the video are posters for International Women’s Day on March 8. The Brazilian ad agency asked female artists to rally around the issue and design posters about manterruption. They look like this:
An app has also been created that can help women count how many times they are subjected to manterruption. It is available in four languages –Portugese, English, Spanish and French.
The app analyses sound in real time and turns interruptions into data directly. No conversation is registered in the application, only the number of interruptions, their duration and date.
In the medium term, BETC plans to launch a global dashboard that will present an overview of the data collected around the world in real time. It will be open to anyone who wants to know more about the topic. In the dashboard, users will be able to find information such as the number of interruptions per minute and per country, as well as comparisons between countries.
To identify interruptions more accurately, the platform asks each user to record and calibrate his or her voice first. The app then uses the phone’s microphone to analyse conversations and detect the number of interruptions during the time it is activated. With the user’s voice as a parameter and the difference in the frequency of male and female voices, its technology allows it to identify in which moment the user was interrupted by a man – or in the case of a male user, how many times he interrupted a woman.
Baradas noted, “Manterrupting devalues women’s participation in meetings and presentations. We women, struggle every day to get our space in the workplace and the right to express ourselves. When we get there, manterrupting reduces our participation. We w ant men to ask themselves, ‘Am I doing this without even realising it?’ After all,what’s the point of having more women in a meeting room if nobody hears what they have to say?”
The app is available from the App Store or Google Play.
Last but not least, a website has been developed, that offers stats about manterruption and asks the public to join the cause.
According to BETC, it’s an agency that has gender equality in its DNA. The presidency of the network and of all offices around the world – Paris, London and Sao Paulo – has been shared by both men and woman since its foundation. In the São Paulo office, for example, the executive board is also divided equally between men and women and there is no salary distinction by gender for the same position. This is rarely found in Brazil.
