"All of the White People Went First": How Video Conferencing Consolidates Control and Exacerbates Workplace Bias

Meetings are frequent, making them a key context where workplace bias occurs. Dysfunctional and biased meetings create negative psychological outcomes for employees, permeating the larger organization. Given widespread adoption of video conferencing (VC) software as a site for workplace meetings, we ask \textit{how do existing VC tools contribute to increasing or reducing workplace bias in meetings?} We conducted a semi-structured interview study with 22 professionals to ask about bias and barriers to participation in their VC-mediated workplace meetings. We found that VC features push meeting leaders to exercise control over various meeting parameters, affecting both whether and how others participate and giving meeting leaders excess responsibility in mitigating or exacerbating bias in meetings. We demonstrate this with regards to four core VC features---user video tiles, raise hand, text-based chat, and meeting recording---and present recommendations for VC technology to democratize meeting control and reduce bias.