Will the metaverse be an inclusive workspace?

During the pandemic, I picked up an Oculus headset, determined to keep up with whatever’s next in technology and thinking it could help me “travel.” It did. Mostly I floated inside immersive art shows, but I sampled a dizzying trip to the space station and a couple of city tours, too. 

As a reporter, I’ve also been watching developments in the metaverse workplace, a subject I covered for Fortune @ Work, a just-published workplace playbook on how companies should handle the return to office. As my Fortune colleagues explain in that series, today’s employees want to work remotely and see their work friends. That’s why Dropbox, after going fully remote, found that offering in-person retreats helped to turbocharge its lackluster retention rates. The metaverse is supposed to be an even more practical compromise, allowing people to feel the presence of others without schlepping into the office.  

Metaverse technology is still nascent, but having sampled today’s VR meeting spaces, I’m ready to accept that one day, when headsets become lighter and VR software easier to navigate, we’ll be brainstorming in an immersive or mixed reality about as often as we do in Zoom today. But this looming change means that now is the time for companies that are building their metaverse offices to get serious about inclusion. 

On one hand, the metaverse promises to improve diversity and inclusion in a few ways. VR and AR applications could enable employees who are at-home caregivers (mostly women) to be as “present” in the office as those who toil in a company’s physical headquarters. For the same reason, using VR might help chip away at proximity bias and level the playing field for people with disabilities and other marginalized groups. 

However, I’m less convinced by the argument that tomorrow’s VR-native employees might adopt new identities at work—building avatars that resemble animals or imaginary figures—and that this could minimize workplace sexism or racism. 

Today, women playing virtual multiplayer games face bias or harassment even when they don’t present as a woman on-screen, says Phoebe Gavin, a career coach, executive director of talent development at Vox, and a gamer. Players have a way of determining who is who, she says, adding, “Do you think people aren’t going to find out that the lizard at the office is actually a Black woman?”  

Let’s not forget who is building the metaverse, she adds. Black, Latino, and other marginalized groups are underrepresented in tech, which means metaverse spaces are already not being designed for them.  

Finally, a recent study from McKinsey found that today’s metaverse leadership roles are dominated by men, despite evidence that women are spending more time in the “protometaverse” than men and are more likely to take charge of metaverse projects.

The virtual workplace is several years away, but companies should be discussing these red flags now, lest we end up with a future of work that looks a lot like the past. 

Read my full story on the metaverse at work here and see the full Fortune @ Work playbook here.

Lila MacLellan
lila.maclellan@fortune.com
@lilamaclellan

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