Extended Virtual Reality: Analyzing Gender

The Challenge

Technologies under the umbrella term Extended Reality (XR)—including Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR) and Mixed reality (MR)—combine elements of real and virtual worlds in computer environments, human-machine interaction and electronic wearables. These techniques have applications in many areas, such as medical training (Hamza-Lup et al., 2018), construction and engineering (Sun et al., 2018), education (Weng et al., 2018) and pedagogy (Makransky et al., 2018).

How can these technologies be deployed to promote gender equality?

Gendered Innovation 1: Developing Empathy through XR

Bias in general, and gender bias in particular, fuels social inequalities. Bias feeds on the tendency to favor one’s own group at the expense of others. According to social psychologists, bias can be sorted into emotional bias (prejudice), cognitive bias (stereotypes), and behavioral bias (discrimination—Dovidio & Gaertner, 2010). More specifically, gender bias refers to the (conscious or unconscious) preference for or prejudice against one gender over another and has been extensively studied (FitzGerald & Hurst, 2017). Gender bias exists not solely on an individual level but also on a structural societal level (LERU paper, 2018).

One way to reduce biases is to enhance empathy with people that are different from us. Empathy is the ability to put yourself in someone else’s shoes, both emotionally and intellectually. It is the capacity to share someone else’s emotional state as well as to understand that person’s thoughts and feelings (Iacoboni, 2009).

VR and AR may help us develop higher levels of empathy in specific contexts, which can, in turn, reduce implicit bias. Recent studies, for example, suggest that VR can narrow the gap between “ingroups” and “outgroups” (Maister et al., 2015). By mirroring and illuminating aspects of other people’s experiences, VR provides powerful opportunities to experience the world from the perspective of someone different from ourselves.

There may, however, also be risks: VR aimed at generating empathy (as opposed to mere sympathy) may give users a false sense of having lived someone else’s experience (Bailenson, 2018), leading them to underestimate the true extent of a problem or to trivialize tragic events and painful experiences (Ramirez, 2018; Hassan, 2019). A particularly troubling example was provided by the virtual reality experience of the Puerto Rico hurricane damage delivered by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Many criticized the virtual ‘tour’ as inappropriately light-hearted in tone and for taking advantage of Puerto Rico’s devastation to promote Facebook’s new VR technology (Solon, 2017).

VR has been employed successfully to generate empathy in a number of studies. One reported the use of VR to combat gender-based violence. Seinfeld et al. (2018) used immersive VR to put the perpetrators of domestic violence into the body of a victim. The experiment showed that, compared to a control group, perpetrators tended to misinterpret fearful faces as happy. After the virtual encounter, they showed an improved ability to recognize fearful faces. VR may be used to help modify socio-perceptual processes, such as emotion recognition.

A second study reported the use of XR to overcome homophobia. VeeR VR, a large VR/360 company in Beijing, conducted a social experiment to enhance empathy for LGBTQ people. Because of the 360° feature, it was possible for people to experience the experiment from both the point of view of the LGBTQ person and the point of view of other participants. A blindfolded young woman wearing a shirt that read “I am a homosexual” in Chinese held out her arms, inviting passers-by to hug her. The video can be viewed from her perspective, where people either hugged her or walked on, or from the perspective of the passers-by. This social experiment is part of a global partnership project aimed at changing people’s attitudes to LGBTQ people (Khosravi, 2018).

VR provides a technology for humans to create imaginary worlds—in this case, virtual worlds where gender equality exists with the hope that these experiences will modify behaviors in the real world. Studies show a persistent gender gap in attitudes towards gender equality, with men showing less support for equality than women (Shu & Meagher, 2018). There is, however, variation across countries and between particular groups of men, with young men, for example, tending to support gender equality more than older men. Other factors, such as race and ethnicity, education and geographic location also play a role.

A new study conducted by global market research firm Ipsos and the Global Institute for Women’s Leadership, King’s College, London, found that men tend to believe they are expected to do too much to support women’s equality, because men consider gender equality to be a “women’s issue” (Majority of men, 2019). Interestingly, an experiment showed that people were more likely to feel personal responsibility to solve gender inequality when exposed to inequalities in a split-sphere 360° cinematic virtual reality experience (Aitarmuto et al., 2018).

Other applications of VR also seek to enhance gender equality through imagined scenarios. The marketing firm Y&R New York recently launched a new app that creates virtual statues of significant women throughout the city (Yurieff, 2017). The project is a call to action to support the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals to achieve gender equality: it encourages developers around the world to erect statues of pioneering women in their own cities. Similarly, an AR app adds notable women to US banknotes (see below). Of 238 countries reviewed, 83, including the United States, feature only men. By contrast, Sweden, Japan, and Australia had an equal mix of women and men. A few countries, including Belize, feature only women (Dead men on dollar bills, 2017).

Gendered Innovation 3: Improving Healthcare with XR

XR technologies are increasingly used in healthcare to diagnose and manage patients with pain, disability, obesity, neurologic dysfunction, anxiety and depression. MAMMOCARE, a study funded under Horizon 2020, has developed a 3D visualization tool that makes it possible to detect small lesions in the breast that are difficult to find using conventional technologies, contributing to earlier diagnosis of breast cancer (MAMMOCARE, 2016). Another Horizon 2020 project, WorkingAge, uses AR and VR to measure older women’s and men’s mental and cognitive health in order to promote healthy habits in their home and work environments (WorkingAge, 2019).

Hospitals have started experiments with 360° VR headsets to relax women in the early stages of labor by immersing them in peaceful environments in order to reduce pain. Evaluations found that 77% of the patients experienced pain relief with the VR technique (Cowles et al., 2019).

Companies are also developing registered medical XR applications. XRHealth, a certified Virtual Reality medical company, has designed a product to help breast cancer patients manage hot flashes that may occur as a side effect of their treatment (XRHealth). An AI trainer called Luna appears when the patient puts on the VR headset. Luna guides users through cognitive behavioral therapy and other coping mechanisms. A pilot study found that patients with breast cancer who experience hot flashes reported 50 percent fewer hot flashes and night sweats after training.

Compared to women, men are less likely to engage in preventive health care—behavior that can result in poorer outcomes and increased burden on healthcare systems. Virtual reality has proven effective in triggering men’s engagement in preventive health care, for example, by prompting them to seek screening for testicular disorders (Saab et al., 2018).

Conclusions

Extended reality mixes elements of the virtual world into our perceptions of the real world, thus enhancing the things we see, hear and feel. This case study has suggested how these technologies might prove fruitful in promoting gender equality by reducing implicit bias and enhancing empathy, in visualizing what an equal would could look like, and in promoting new modes of healthcare.

Next Steps

Felnhofer et al. (2012) have suggested that women and men may differ in the way they experience virtual environments. Men reported a higher sense of spatial presence, more perceived realism, and higher levels of the sense of actually being in the environment than women. Further, on social VR platforms, women experience harassment and intimidation, resulting in a low interest in engaging with social VR platforms. Studies have also found that virtual settings tend to lack activities that women report to be of interest (Outlaw & Deckles, 2017).

Methods: Analyzing Sex; Analyzing Gender

Extended Virtual Reality refers to technologies such as Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR) and Mixed Reality (MR), which incorporate elements of the virtual world into our real world, thus enhancing the things we see, hear and feel. These technologies may prove fruitful in promoting gender equality; however, they also come with risks. Research shows that women, men and gender-diverse people may differ in how they experience virtual environments. These potential sex and gender differences need to be taken into account in the development and testing of prototypes.

Women are more than twice as likely as men to feel unwell from using Virtual Reality, with symptoms such as pallor, sweating, increased heartrate, drowsiness, disorientation and general discomfort (Al Zayer et al, 2019; Munafo et al., 2017). These symptoms may be due to conflict between the body’s visual and vestibular (inner ear) systems, resulting in greater sensitivity in women.

Reducing field-of-view in navigation is a common strategy to reduce VR sickness, as it has been found to mitigate the visual/vestibular conflict (Al Zayer et al., 2019). Studies suggest, however, that reducing field-of-view can impede spatial navigation performance, which may be problematic since women tend to use landmarks to navigate to a higher degree than men. Thus, restricting the field-of-view may impede women’s spatial navigation performance.

To sum up, it is important to develop virtual settings in a sex-sensitive and gender-sensitive way, applying sex and gender analyses that include both women and men in the development and testing of prototypes.