This App Wants To Help Women Track How Often They're 'Manterrupted'

Inspired by the Manterrupter-in-Chief himself.

Tired of men hijacking your words in the middle of a sentence? There’s officially an app for that.

Woman Interrupted was launched on Monday, and tracks “the frequency of male and female voices and voice calibrations to identify interruptions” ― thus tracking the very real issue of women being interrupted, and therefore silenced, by men.

The app, which is totally free and available for both iOS and Android, was inspired in part by the first presidential debate between President Donald Trump and former presidential nominee Hillary Clinton in September of last year ― by the end of which Trump had interrupted Clinton a grand total of 51 times.

When a user wants to use the app, they just have to open it and hit the record button. The app will then track the conversation until the user ends the recording. Woman Interrupted uses the phone’s microphone to record interactions, but does not store any conversations ― it automatically turns the voice recordings into voice data.

Woman Interrupted
Woman Interrupted

Gal Barradas, the businesswoman from Brazil who created the app, emphasized that the first step in stopping manterrupting is acknowledging that it actually exists ― and by using the app itself, users are also contributing their data so that the creators can continue to do more research about the issue’s prevalence. Barradas acknowledges that many men might not even realize that they’re doing it, and that collecting data about women’s experiences is essential for getting men to understand the problem.

“We want men to ask themselves: am I doing it without even realizing it?” Barradas said.

There’s also no setting for men to track the amount of times they’re interrupted by women ― because it simply just isn’t as much of a problem. “The app was designed specifically to identify and fight manterrupting,” according to Woman Interrupted’s website. “When the app is used by a man, it will count the number of times he interrupts women.”

In a statement about the app’s release, Barradas nailed why tackling the issue is so imperative: “We, women, struggle every day to get our space in the workplace and the right to express ourselves. When we get there, Manterrupting reduces our participation...what’s the point of having more women in a meeting room if nobody hears what they have to say?”

Read more about Woman Interrupted here.

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