When Brian Ritchey attends a meeting, he's almost always the one running it. But when the COO and VP of Pennsylvania-based metal supplier Ritchey Metals put on a virtual reality headset, he wasn't at the head of the table.
“I was in the boardroom with a group of diverse women. I was the only male in the room. They would try to interrupt me,” Ritchey remembers. “I was so annoyed at everyone in the meeting—no one would listen to me.”
Then came the next tweak: the makeup of the roomful of executives who exclude the person with the VR headset on. When DDI at first developed the VR experience to resemble the real world—with mostly male executives committing the same slights—the real-life men participating in the training didn’t register that they were being excluded. “We had a few guys going, ‘Hey, what’s up?’ They felt like they were part of the group,” Sipe says. Putting women in those seats flipped the switch to help C-suite men understand that something was wrong.
See the full story here: https://fortune.com/2019/10/29/virtual-reality-diversity-inclusion-training/