Meetings are great, aren't they? They always definitely have agendas and a purpose, and hardly ever could they have been an email instead. Actually wait: reverse that. Meetings suck, often. Not least because they never have agendas and could normally have been an email, but because women get interrupted in them. In fact, according to a McKinsey & Company study, women are interrupted 33% more than men in meetings. Thirty-three percent! That’s not a meeting; that’s a sport. Rather than just being a mild irritation, this can have a massive impact on women's confidence and willingness to share ideas, as well as basic things like the pace at which they speak.

Amy Kean... in the first of our 'The Psychology of Being a Woman' video series, outlines the situations in which interrupting a woman in a meeting is completely appropriate and those in which it is not.