2026 AI Forecast: 26 Predictions You Need to Know Now

This year, AI will be shaped by data centres, geopolitics, and the workplace

A woman with glasses is pointing to a screen behind which there is a sunny scene with palm trees. — Image by Reto Scheiwiller from Pixabay.

Do you need a bold speaker that delivers an actionable keynote for International Women’s Day? I’m your person.

Some of the themes of my most celebrated talks:

How sponsorship is the missing magic bullet for career success
Women and AI: Transforming barriers into opportunities
Counterintuitive secrets to a thriving career in tech
How patriarchy fosters perfectionism, self-criticism and self-doubt and what you can do about it

If you want your audience to leave energised and empowered to act, get in touch.

Last year, I published my 25 AI predictions for 2025 — and I’m happy to say many of them turned out to be strikingly accurate.

So this year, I’ve picked up my crystal ball again.

In this article, I unpack:

The AI shifts that will really shape 2026.
What’s hype — and what’s actually coming.
What these changes mean for leaders, careers, and power.
Strategic foresight you can act on now.

If you want to get ahead of the curve — not chase it — this article is for you.

“The future is already there — it’s just not evenly distributed.”

William Gibson

My Predictions

Workers will be accountable for AI success: In 2025, executives were responsible for AI success. This year, workers will be. Expect organisations to roll out KPIs to boost the use of chatbots and other AI tools, and to monitor who’s using the LLM licenses they purchased.
Expect employees to be blamed for AI underperformance: We’re already hearing Sam Altman and Satya Nadella say that if AI isn’t providing value, it’s because workers aren’t using it correctly. Look for the likes of OpenAI and Microsoft showering paid customers with free or low-cost training. And not only them, the UK government just blamed workers’ lack of confidence and enthusiasm around AI on a skill gap.
The big AI scapegoat: companies will disguise layoffs as AI efficiency gains. Last year, we heard tech companies explain layoffs as a consequence of AI adoption—even though they couldn’t prove it. This year, that trend will extend to other sectors, which will blame “AI adoption” for layoffs truly stemming from low performance and challenging business conditions.
LLMs as top cybersecurity risk — 57% of employees admit to concealing how they use artificial intelligence at work. That means data breaches are set to skyrocket, now accelerated by the use of AI agents by workers. Also, LLM-based agents can automate a significant portion of cyberattacks. All that in addition to what we’ve seen in 2025: LLMs make it easier to generate convincing phishing messages in different languages and to develop malicious code. And it’ll continue the constant cat-and-mouse game between AI companies trying to prevent their models from misbehaving and malicious actors devising ever more creative jailbreaking prompts.
Workslop will skyrocket —About 40% of US workers claimed in 2025 that they were victims of Workslop, AI-generated work content that masquerades as good work, but lacks the substance to meaningfully advance a given task. The cost? About US$9M Annual cost for a 10,000-person company. 2026 will be the year workslop begins to be discussed openly and workplaces set norms to mitigate it.
OpenAI wins with ads, not shopping assistant — Gemini is going to become the default “generative AI marketplace.” In 2025, OpenAI learned how difficult it’s to set a payment structure, whilst Google simply started scaling what it already knows how to do. This year, OpenAI will finally take a lesson from Facebook and Google’s playbook on how to make billions: ads. Be prepared to pay for ChatGPT to recommend your website.
Chatbots (and other AI tools) take over healthcare — This year, OpenAI already released ChatGPT Health — a “dedicated health experience” that binges on your health data records— and Anthropic announced Claude for Healthcare, an overhyped new set of tools and resources that healthcare providers, payers and consumers can use for medical purposes. But it’s more than that. We’ll see huge investments from pharma/biotech companies to hospitals and governments in AI platforms and tools that promise shorter drug discovery cycles, more efficient clinical trials, and “efficiently” allocate resources — human or otherwise.Photo by Mohamed Nohassi on Unsplash.
AI-washing: Automated ERP is the new agent — “Just Walk Out” was an Amazon technology installed in many of its physical grocery stores, promising customers could simply pick their items and leave. It was then discovered that approximately 1,000 workers in India were manually reviewing nearly three-quarters of transactions. What about agents then? We’ll see the beautification of automated ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning). Basically, our old ERP will be “wrapped” in a chatbot that interacts with the user, which then kicks off the automated, reliable, and invisible ERP system. We’ll call that “agent.”
China and Open Source — In 2025, I anticipated it’d be the year where China — with DeepSeek at the top — would claim their rightful place in AI. I was right. This year, China will flood us with open source AI models. What better way to tank Big Tech AI revenue ambitions — and US AI supremacy aspirations — than to make AI tools free?
Two-tier services — I’ve been working in software companies for two decades in customer-facing roles (training, professional services, customer support) and not even once has a person asked for a chatbot. On the contrary, if I had £1 for each time I got a request of “I want to talk to a person on the phone,” I’d be rich by now. Has AI changed that? Nope. When we’re in distress, nothing helps to regulate our nervous system like another human. So what’s the role of AI chatbots? Cater for those who don’t have the money to pay humans. In 2026, we’ll see the chasm widen between AI and human support: humans for the rich, AI for the rest.
Predictive maintenance — With claims of up to a reduction of 73% in infrastructure failures, cutting maintenance costs by 10–40%, and reducing downtime by up to 50%, AI predictive maintenance — a data-driven approach to predicting machinery failure and making proactive repairs — is revolutionising industrial operations. In 2026, we’ll see a surge in the adoption of predictive maintenance and virtual twins. Why? Rising cost of unplanned downtime (e.g., global supply chain constraints, increased replacement part costs), labour shortages and skill gaps, the explosion of equipment with sensors, telematics, and digital interfaces, AI maturity (computer vision, IoT, ML models), and pressure to improve uptime and operational efficiency.
Data centres: Location, location, location —As with housing, where you decide to build your data centre will have the greatest impact on its viability and sustainability. The proof is in the pudding. Currently, data centres in Silicon Valley are idle because Santa Clara can’t keep up with surging electricity demand. Also, those in the middle of nowhere are struggling because, when used for inference, they perform better when built near the demand. Moreover, data centres in cold ambient conditions across the Nordic countries enable nearly year-round “free cooling,” reducing the need for energy- and water-intensive mechanical cooling systems such as chillers.
Deceleration of the number of data centres built — This year will see a slowdown in the trend of the number of data centres being built due to the exponential rise in activism. For example, over the last two years, $18 billion in data centre projects were blocked, and another $46 billion of projects were delayed amid opposition from residents and activist groups in the US. In Brazil, the Netherlands, and Chile, locals have also pushed back. The other factor contributing to the deceleration is their increasing classification as critical infrastructure, prompting more controls and monitoring.
Data centres will continue to rely on oil and gas — Amid economic and geopolitical uncertainty, governments will deprioritise sustainable energy solutions. For those doubting the shift, remember the US military intervention in Venezuela. With AI FOMO escalating, governments and companies will continue to rely on oil & gas for “right now” as they invest in nuclear (including small modular reactors) and renewables “for the future.”
Data centres go to space —Last year, Google released a paper proposing space-based “data centres” consisting of many solar-powered satellites networked via free-space optical inter-satellite links. They illustrated the basic approach to formation flight via an 81-satellite cluster with a diameter of 2 km. And they were not the only ones. Musk and NVIDIA have also found merit in the idea. With all the hype around investment in space right now (e.g., SpaceX’s IPO), space data centres appear to be a cunning way to attract “responsible” investment under a “sustainability” veneer.Image by gene1970 from Pixabay.
Quantum computing for data centres — With its ability to solve complex problems beyond the capabilities of classical systems, quantum computing appears to be the answer to our thirst for more “compute.” While building quantum computing data centres is not trivial — energy, security, integration with existing systems — this year, we’ll see substantial strides in this direction.
Cooling technology — Both classical and quantum computing data centres rely on cooling technology to avoid melting GPUs and attaining near absolute zero temperatures to function, respectively. At the same time, with climate change, cooling is becoming more difficult. As a result, innovation and investment in data centre cooling will soar.
Big Tech becoming energy companies — Last year, xAIx formed a joint venture with a company which rents natural gas turbines to data centres and oil and gas companies. Meta agreed to purchase electricity from reactors from Sam Altman-backed Oklo and Bill Gates-backed TerraPower. Tech Bros have recognised that energy is the real superpower and will continue to extend their reach in 2026.
Chips, China, and Taiwan — Servers with GPUs and processors that have silicon chips are at the core of data centres. TSMC, based in Taiwan, produces over 60% of the world’s semiconductors and just under 90% of its most sophisticated chips. On the other side, China has made its intentions about the island very clear. Cross-strait tensions between China and Taiwan will threaten the chips’ supply chain and drive spikes in prices.
The rise of TPUs — GPUs have been the turf of two players: NVIDIA and, to a lesser extent, AMD. One of the key reasons NVIDIA has the upper hand, in addition to the hardware, is that it has developed the software that makes it easier for developers to use GPUs for parallel programming (CUDA), making it the “default.” At the end of last year, Google began working with Meta to make their AI chips — called TPUs (Tensor Processing Units) — run better in Pytorch, making them compatible and developer-friendly for customers who have already built their tech infrastructure using PyTorch software. This year, we’ll begin to see the fruits of that aggressive plan to compete with NVIDIA.
Speculative bubble, AI bailouts, an innovation stimulus — There is an undeniable huge gap between valuations, revenue, and investment (e.g. data centres) for companies selling generative AI, even the FAAMG. For example, neither OpenAI nor Anthropic has a robust business model that explains how they’ll cover the revenue shortfall for 2030 for their investors. This has all the markers of the bubble. The question is, will it burst in 2026? My prediction is that it won’t. Bubbles do not suddenly explode; they are maintained by narratives before finally shattering. Whilst the mirage of “AGI will be there in 2027” has been dismantled, there are still other narratives that tech is providing to sustain the FOMO and governments are happily buying them as a “geopolitical” leverage. But how to bridge the financial gap between valuations, revenue, and spending? We won’t call them bailouts; governments will make us foot the bill, camouflaging them as innovation stimulus packages.Image by Alexa from Pixabay.
New AGI: World models and continual learning — Sutskever, LeCun, and now Hassabis have confirmed what many of us knew all along: LLMs are not the path to AGI (even if that existed). What to do next? Reinvent our vision of AGI to sustain the speculative bubble. Two terms will become the default when promoting AGI in 2026. The first, world models. This concept is not new, but it’s more useful now that everyone understands that LLMs “don’t think” and, very importantly, they don’t have a sense of the world (e.g., gravity, anyone?). This is not an LLMs problem but a deep learning problem. The solution? World models — the concept that you can infuse AI with physics and spatial properties. As many others, NVIDIA and Google are already in the case. The other buzzword promising AGI will be “continual learning,” mentioned by Ilya Sutskever in his appearance on the Dwarkesh podcast last year. That is, a model that, like humans, can continually acquire new knowledge and keep pace with the real world’s unpredictability without forgetting prior knowledge.
Anti AI regulation driven by tech, FOMO, and geopolitics — Big Tech has successfully lobbied its way through AI regulation across many countries — US, UK, EU, Brazil — stopping, weakening, and even rolling back digital rights. Governments have told us that data rights hinder economic growth and innovation with regard to AI, promised that AI will protect free speech and national values, and pledged to remove red tape and onerous AI regulation. Hence, in 2026, we’ll see further regulatory weakening. What will we do about the threats AI poses to children, then? Instead of regulating tech, we’ll default to increasingly regulating children’s access to it worldwide. We’ve been there for alcohol and tobacco.
Robotics will bloom — Robots that use AI will become more ubiquitous. Those robots have greater autonomy thanks to their ability to process large datasets, detect patterns, anticipate failures, and use computer vision to identify objects. Companies such as Amazon and Tesla have been very open about their robotics progress and ambitions and now even OpenAI is investing in robotics. This year will see robotics taking a bigger role in driving operations across sectors.
Best AI investment: Defence, espionage, law enforcement — Wars, political and social unrest, and massive increases in defence budgets will make 2026 a great year for AI companies that provide surveillance and defence. Palantir (the “OS” for governments) will keep winning lucrative deals with “intelligence” and law enforcement agencies around the world. And defence firms like Anduril, a drone and autonomous weapons startup that doubled its valuation to $30 billions last year, will flourish. The explosion of companies such as Clearview and Flock Safety that rely on AI to deliver solutions for public safety and security will continue. Even the UK has now announced plans for an AI centre for policing.
AI for loneliness — Last year, we finally confronted the reality that a massive section of the population has been relying on AI chatbots for support — from intimacy to healthcare and career advice. The reasons are multiple. Chatbots are free or cheaper than humans, offer a sense of judgment-free exchanges, and encourage us to do what we want. The downside? Deaths by suicide, biased vocational advice, and incorrect medical treatments. The increase in the cost of living, job insecurity, and geopolitical unrest will boost our reliance on AI chatbots to give us (almost) free solutions and provide support for our problems. Given the syncophantic nature of those chatbots, we can expect further reinforcement of loneliness, entrenched beliefs, and bias.

BONUS: A wish

AI accessibility becomes the new normal — I’m stealing one of the five trends to watch in 2026 by the accessibility expert Sheri Byrne-Haber, who posits that

“In 2026, AI-assisted accessibility testing moves from optional to expected. Organizations that do not incorporate AI-enabled accessibility testing will struggle to keep pace with modern development cycles.”

Sheri Byrne-Haber

I wholeheartedly hope so.

Back To You

You’ve now read my predictions. I want to hear from you

1.- Which ones do you agree on?

2.- Which ones do you dispute?

3.- Which ones did I miss?

WORK WITH ME

Do you need a bold speaker that delivers an actionable keynote for International Women’s Day? I’m your person.

Some of the themes of my most celebrated talks:

How sponsorship is the missing magic bullet for career success
Women and AI: Transforming barriers into opportunities
Counterintuitive secrets to a thriving career in tech
How patriarchy fosters perfectionism, self-criticism and self-doubt and what you can do about it

If you want your audience to leave energised and empowered to act, get in touch.

The New Distraction Era: Five Weapons Silencing Women In 2026

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How abortion, AI, bothsidesign, feminism, and trans people are weaponised to distract us from the assault on human rights and tech bros plundering the planet

Colander feed with distractions and percolating the word "Focus". — Adapted image by Daryl Bambic from Pixabay.

As I look at my social feed in 2025, the words that come to my mind are “too much.” Too much information, too much confrontation, and above all, too much distraction.

In 2025, the continuous avalanche of data, news, and slop (digital content of low quality, usually produced in quantity using AI) often left me overwhelmed, puzzled, and anxious. Frequently, I asked myself:

Did I gather all the information I needed to comprehend this topic?
Were the sources trustworthy?
Am I up to date on this topic?

But the most disturbing effect of the flood of information was its use as a weapon of mass distraction. This is how it happened:

You select a population experiencing problems that you can manipulate to achieve your goals.
You choose a fundamental human right and decide that a less powerful group doesn’t deserve it.
You create a campaign that blames group (2) for the challenges group (1) is experiencing.
Group (1) gets distracted from the cause of the real challenges they experience.

Let’s revisit some of those weapons of mass distraction in 2025.

Abortion

During pregnancy, depending on the stage of fetal development, we talk of a fertilised egg, blastocyst, embryo, or fetus. And none of them is an independent tenant of women’s bodies. They are as much a part of women’s bodies as women’s nails or hair. Moreover, they are not a baby or a child.

The Cambridge Dictionary tell us that a child is

A boy or girl from the time of birth until he or she is an adult, or a son or daughter of any age.

and baby

a very young child, especially one that has not yet begun to walk or talk.

In summary, before birth, there is no child or baby.

However, especially in 2025, there has been a massive campaign to insist that even a fertilised egg is a baby and that interrupting a pregnancy is akin to murdering a human being.

This misappropriation of women’s bodies has a consequence that any reason to interrupt a pregnancy intentionally — from rape and endangering women’s lives to simply deciding not to proceed with it — is framed in terms of two equally valuable lives, rather than what it is: A woman deciding what to do with a part of her body.

Moreover, an unintentional interruption of a pregnancy — for example, a spontaneous miscarriage and ectopic pregnancy — is suspicious of human intervention and should be investigated, even if 1 in 8 known pregnancies end in miscarriage and the majority of miscarriages cannot be prevented.

What do we avoid examining when we focus on “abortion”?

Forced birth. “Pro-life” is window dressing for forced birth: It condemns women to give birth, no matter if it’s unviable, risks their lives, or goes against their will.
Woman as an eternal child. When we restrict abortion, we not only block women from receiving healthcare, but we also defer to others — the state, lawmakers, judges, doctors — the control over their bodies, as if women were children. In the UK, a woman needs the signature of not one but two doctors to get an abortion.
Unpaid — or low-paid — maternity and parental leave. In the US, there is no federal law granting the right to maternity or paternity leave. In the UK, whilst the statutory maternity leave is 1 year, the salary paid makes it only accessible to mid- to high-income families after the first 6 weeks — paternity leave is 10 days.
Pregnancy and giving birth are risky businesses. Every day in 2023, over 700 women died from preventable causes related to pregnancy and childbirth. And it’s not only in the Global South. The US has the highest rate of maternal deaths of any high-income nation. In 2022, there were 22 maternal deaths for every 100,000 live births — more than double, sometimes triple, the rate for most other high-income countries.
Pregnancy while in prison. In the UK, women in prison have a seven-times higher probability of suffering a stillbirth than those in the general population, and an average of 25% of babies born to women in prison are admitted to a neonatal unit afterwards — the national figure is 14%. Moreover, the use of shackles or restraints on pregnant women is a common practice in prisons and jails in the United States and documented in Australia, the UK, and Japan.
Black pregnant women and babies have worse outcomes. Across the UK, black women are more than twice as likely to die in childbirth compared with their white counterparts. A report by the health and social care committee blamed a combination of factors, including black women’s concerns “not taken seriously” due to bias, stereotyping and racist assumptions. Additionally, in England and Wales, babies born to black mothers have a 81% higher risk of dying before discharge compared with babies born to white mothers.
Unpaid care work. Whilst Europe and the US claim to want more babies, they heavily rely on unpaid care work to look after children, which is predominantly delivered by women. As a result, many women are forced to leave paid work or reduce their working hours, foregoing not only their previous pay but also the opportunity to advance.
Children poverty. Children comprise more than 50% of those living in extreme poverty around the world, even if children constitute only 31% of the world’s population. In the UK, the poverty rate for children has been steady since 2009 at around 30%. In the US, the Department of Health and Human Services is freezing all childcare payments under the guise of “concerns about widespread fraud.”

Rose Willis & Kathryn Conrad / A Rising Tide Lifts All Bots / Licenced by CC-BY 4.0.

Artificial Intelligence

Tech has touted AI as the magic bullet that will cure cancer, “fix” sustainability, and eliminate grunt work, so that humans can live lives full of pleasure and intellectual pursuits.

The path to this utopian future is framed as both inevitable and arduous. Inevitable because Big Tech has made sure we all feel FOMO, especially governments. Arduous because we’ve been told that we have to accept that many people will lose their jobs as the price to pay for this one “opportunity in the history of humanity.”

What do we miss when we focus on AI as a “miracle drug”?

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Criminalised, Incarcerated, Forgotten: The Women Left Behind

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A woman in prison clothes behind prison bars, looking sad. — Photo by RDNE Stock project

“The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off!”

Gloria Steinem

Every year, I tell myself I won’t write an article for the 16 Days of Activism for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, a UN Women campaign that runs annually from November 25th to December 10th.

The reason is that it pisses me off that in the 21st century, we still have to make a case for why erradicating gender violence should be a planetary priority. Moreover, every year is a reminder that not only are we not solving the problem, but we keep inventing different ways to inflict gender violence on women (artificial intelligence, anyone?).

Still, despite all that — and often at the last minute — I change my mind. Why?

Because, unfortunately, I keep surprising myself by yet another way in which women endure gender violence and I feel compelled to (𝗌̶𝖼̶𝗋̶𝖾̶𝖺̶𝗆̶) talk about it.

This year was no different.

This was the original plan: The theme for the 2025 Elimination of Violence Against Women campaign is “digital violence”. And I’ve written many times about it:

I denounced when Alexa and Siri used to reply to verbal sexual harassment with a flirt or even thank the comment.
I demonstrated the different ways AI is weaponised as a misogyny tool.
I shared how deepfake porn wrecks women’s lives, the ecosystem that profits from them, and what you can do about non-consensual synthetic imagery.

So, earlier this year, I decided that when the UN campaign started, I’d repost some of my already published content.

Then, some recent reading compelled me to dig into the intersection between gender violence and the experiences of criminalised women, female prisoners, and women killers.

The common thread among the three groups — and what makes their experience of gender violence less visible in the news — is that they are women who, in our minds, don’t conform to the stereotype of well-behaved, self-sacrificing females. They are “bad” women.

I’m here to tell you how those women are also victims of gender violence.

And no, they don’t deserve it either.

(SCOOP: And Tech makes it even worse).

Criminalised Women

“Poverty is not gender-neutral, and women are overrepresented amongst the poor, resulting in the criminalisation of poverty having an excessive impact on women.”

From poverty to punishment

Old woman begging on the street. — Photo by — landsmann –.

Traditionally, women have been a minority of the prison populations — women and girls make up 6.9% of the global prison population. However, since 2000, there has been much faster growth in female than in male prisoner numbers. The percentage of women and girls in prison has grown by almost 60%, whilst the male prison population increased by around 22%.

The excellent report From poverty to punishment: Examining laws and practices which criminalise women due to poverty or status worldwide provides a detailed understanding of the causes behind the criminalisation and imprisonment of women:

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A New Religion: 8 Signs AI Is Our New God

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Yutong Liu / Joining the Table / Licenced by CC-BY 4.0.

Religion and technology have been in a love-hate relationship since their inception.

Sometimes, technology has been a tool of religion.

For example, many religious texts position God(s) as the uber-technologists.

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.

Genesis 1:1

A God that throughout history has empowered their prophets and followers to learn and use in the name of religion

So God said to Noah, “I am going to put an end to all people […]. So make yourself an ark of cypress wood; make rooms in it and coat it with pitch inside and out. This is how you are to build it: The ark is to be three hundred cubits long, fifty cubits wide and thirty cubits high. Make a roof for it, leaving below the roof an opening one cubit[c] high all around. Put a door in the side of the ark and make lower, middle and upper decks.

Genesis 6:13–16

Other times, technology itself has been perceived as “God-like”.

Think about one of the most ancient technologies: Fire. Whilst today we claim to have mastered it, fire deities have a long tradition that spans time and location.

And there are many more that have elicited awe, powerlessness, or veneration. Electricity, the steam machine, IVF, cars…

However, that “God-like” feel typically faded away once the “magic” was replaced by exposing the natural laws governing the phenomena.

But AI has been a technology-as-religion game-changer. Its God-like status has been cemented with time — and recently in an exponential manner — rather than being discredited, like other technologies. After all, the field of AI research was founded at a workshop at Dartmouth College in 1956, almost 70 years ago.

So, how come AI has reversed the trend? By proactively becoming a religion.

Don’t believe me?

Let me walk you through 8 signs that we’ve already adopted AI as a religion.

Disclaimer: You’ll notice that the signs are very skewed towards a Christian view of religion. This is not because of a disregard for other creeds but I was raised as Catholic and lived in countries where the Christian faith was the most popular. I’ll welcome feedback from other religions.

Sign #1: The Promise of Paradise

When Eve and Adam are expelled from Paradise, God is very explicit about what they’ll be losing

To the woman he said,

“I will multiply your sufferings in childbirth;
with pain you shall bear your children.
You shall desire your husband,
but he shall lord it over you.”

To the man he said, […]

“Cursed be the soil because of you!
With effort you shall obtain food
all the days of your life. […]
You are dust,
and unto dust you shall return.”

Genesis 3: 16–19

This sets the quest for the promised paradise over thousands of years for many religions. That place where there is no more hunger, sickness, work, or even death.

Until AI arrived. Or more precisely, until Generative AI did.

And what does AI have to offer as paradise? Abundance.

Last year, Sam Altman — one of AI’s “high priests” — pontificated on X

“using technology to create abundance — intelligence, energy, longevity, whatever- will not solve all problems and will not magically make everyone happy. but it is an unequivocally great thing to do, and expands our option space. to me, it feels like a moral imperative.” — Sam Altman’s post in X.

AI is the promise of paradise on Earth, provided that we keep shovelling money, electricity, water, and chips at its development.

Sign #2: Infallibility or the Promise of Enlightenment

God’s infallibility is a concept in many religions, and some of their prophets and representatives have claimed it for themselves, too, to explain concepts further, settle arguments, or propose new ideas.

For example, when Catholic Popes speak “ex-cathedra”, they become infallible

when the Roman pontiff speaks ex cathedra, that is, when, in the exercise of his office as shepherd and teacher of all Christians, in virtue of his supreme apostolic authority, he defines a doctrine concerning faith or morals to be held by the whole Church, he possesses, by the divine assistance promised to him in blessed Peter, that infallibility which the divine Redeemer willed His Church to enjoy in defining doctrine concerning faith or morals.

Pope Pius IX

How has AI become infallible? Through chatbots. Generative AI is presented as the collector and remaker of “all human knowledge” — or at least the knowledge available on the internet.

Once upon a time, Wikipedia used to be that “repository” of knowledge. Disputes would be settled with a

“I’ve checked in Wikipedia and it says…”

Now, arguments are countered with a

“but ChatGPT says…”

The difference?

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Tech Bros, Big Platforms, and Poor Regulation: Who Enables Deepfake Porn?

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The collage shows 4 archival images of women. In these of the images, the women are nude. There is also one portrait of a woman with yellow shapes and bounding boxes on her face. — Dominika Čupková & Archival Images of AI + AIxDESIGN / 19th Century Shallowfake P0rn / Licenced by CC-BY 4.0

Recently, I delivered the keynote Techno-patriarchy: How deepfakes are misogyny’s new clothes and what we can do about it at the Manchester Tech Festival. Putting together the presentation prompted me to reflect on my advocacy journey on what is popularly referred to as “deepfake porn.”

In 2023, I had had enough of hearing tech bros blaming unconscious bias for all the ways in which AI was weaponised against women. Decided to demonstrate intent, I wrote Techno-Patriarchy: How AI is Misogyny’s New Clothes, originally published in The Mint.

In the article, I detailed 12 ways this technology is used against women, from reinforcing stereotypes to pregnancy surveillance. One shocked me to my core: Non-consensual sexual synthetic imagery (aka “deepfake porn”).

Why? Because, whilst the media warned us about the dangers of deepfakes as scam and political unrest tools, the reality is that non-consensual sexual synthetic imagery constitutes 96% of all deepfakes found online, with 99.9% depicting women. And their effects are devastating.

Judge for yourself:

It was completely horrifying, dehumanizing, degrading, violating to just see yourself being misrepresented and being misappropriated in that way.

It robs you of opportunities, and it robs you of your career, and your hopes and your dreams.

Noelle Martin, “deepfake porn” victim, award-winning activist, and law reform campaigner.

So I continued to write about the dire consequences of this technology for victims and the legal vacuum, as well as denounced the powerful ecosystem (tech, payment processors, marketplaces) that fostered and profited from them.

I also made a point to bring awareness about how this technology is harming women and girls in spaces where the topic of “deepfakes” was explored broadly. I organised events, appeared on podcasts, and participated in panels, such as “The Rise of Deepfake AI” at the University of Oxford; all opportunities were fair game to bring “deepfake porn” to the forefront.

This week, I had 30 minutes to convince over 80 women in tech – and allies – to become advocates against non-consensual sexual synthetic imagery. The feedback I received from the keynote was very positive, so I’m sharing my talking points with you below.

I hope that by the end of the article, (a) you are convinced that we need to act now, and (b) you have decided how you will help to advocate against this pandemic.

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The State of Play

All that’s wrong with using the term “deepfake porn”

I had an aha moment when I realised the disservice the term “deepfake porn” was doing to addressing this issue.

“Deepfake” honours the name of the Reddit user who shared on the platform the first synthetic intimate media of actresses. When paired with the label “porn”, it may wrongly convey the idea that it’s consensual. Overall, the term lacks gravitas, disregarding harms.

From a legal perspective, the use of the term “deepfake” may also hinder the pursuit of justice. There have been cases where filing a lawsuit using the term deepfakes when referring to a “cheapfake” — which consists of a fake piece of media created with conventional methods of doctoring images rather than AI — has blocked prosecution.

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Is Your Chatbot Killing the Planet? The Truth About AI Sustainability

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A mosaic-like image of clouds, made of server and data center components, symbolizing the hidden physical infrastructure of cloud computing. — Nadia Piet & Archival Images of AI + AIxDESIGN / Cloud Computing / Licenced by CC-BY 4.0.

In 2021, van Wynsberghe proposed defining sustainable artificial intelligence (AI) as “a movement to foster change in the entire lifecycle of AI products (i.e., idea generation, training, re-tuning, implementation, governance) towards greater ecological integrity and social justice”. The concept comprised two key contributions: AI for sustainability and the sustainability of AI.

At the time, a growing effort was already underway exploring how AI tools could help address climate change challenges (AI for sustainability). However, studies have already shown that developing large Natural Language Processing (NLP) AI models results in significant energy consumption and carbon emissions, often caused by using non-renewable energy. van Wynsberghe posited the need to focus on the sustainability of AI.

Four years later, the conversation about making AI sustainable has evolved considerably with the arrival of generative AI models. These models have popularised and democratised the use of artificial intelligence, especially as a productivity tool for generating content.

Another factor that has exponentially increased the resources dedicated to AI is the contested hypothesis that developing AI models with increasingly large datasets and algorithmic complexity will ultimately lead to Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) — a type of AI system that would match or surpass human cognitive capabilities.

Powerful businesses, governments, and academia consider AGI a competitive advantage. Tech leaders such as Eric Schmidt (former Google CEO) and Sam Altman (OpenAI CEO) have disregarded concerns about AI’s sustainability, as AGI will supposedly solve them in the future.

In this context, what do current trends reveal about the sustainability of AI?

Challenges

Typically, artificial intelligence models are developed and run on the cloud, which is powered by data centres. As a result, their construction has increased significantly over the past few years. McKinsey estimates that global demand for data centre capacity could rise between 19% and 22% annually from 2023 to 2030.

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The Truth About Women, AI, and Confidence Gaps

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A black-and-white surrealist collage of a classroom lecture. The center features an oversized computer keyboard with the two keys “A” and “I” highlighted in red. In the foreground, a vintage illustration of a woman in historical attire kneels as she interacts with the keyboard. Behind her, an audience of Cambridge students are seated in rows observing the lecture.

Hanna Barakat & Cambridge Diversity Fund / Analog Lecture on Computing / Licenced by CC-BY 4.0

More than twenty years ago, I joined a medium size software company focused on scientific modelling as a trainer. I knew the company and some of their products very well. I had been their customer.

First, during my PhD in computational chemistry, then as an EU post-doctoral researcher coding FORTRAN subroutines to simulate the behaviour of materials, and as a modelling engineer working for a large chemical company.

As I started my job as a materials trainer, I had to learn about other software applications that I hadn’t used previously or was less familiar with. One of those was related to what we called at the time “statistics” to predict the properties of new materials.

Some of those “statistical methods” were neural networks and genetic algorithms, part of the field of artificial intelligence. But I was not keen on developing the material for that course. It felt like a waste of time for several reasons.

First, whilst those methods were already popular among life science researchers, they were not very helpful to materials modellers — my customers. Why? Because large, good datasets were scarce for materials.

Point in case, I still remember one specific customer excited about using the algorithms to develop new materials in their organisation. With a sinking feeling from similar conversations, I asked him, “How many data points do you have?”. He said, “I think I have 7 or 10 in a spreadsheet.” Unfortunately, I had to inform him that it was not nearly enough.

Second, the course was half a day, which was not practical to be delivered in person, the way all our workshops had been offered for years. Our experience told us that in 2005, nobody would fly to Paris, Cambridge, Boston, or San Diego for a 4-hour training event on “statistics”.

The solution? It was decided that this course would be the first to be delivered online via a “WebEx”, the great-grandparent of Zoom, Teams, and Google Meet. That was not cool at all.

At the time, we had little faith in online education for three reasons.

Running the webinars was very complex; they took ages to set up and schedule, and there were always connection glitches.
There were no “best practices” to deliver engaging online training yet, as a result, we trainers felt as if we were cheating on our job to teach our clients.
We believed that scientific and technical content was “unteachable” online.

After such a less-than-amazing start at teaching artificial intelligence online, you’d have thought I was done.

I thought so, too. But I’ve changed my mind. It hasn’t happened overnight, though.

It has taken two decades of experience teaching, using, and supporting AI tools in my corporate job, 10+ years as a DEI trailblazer, and my activism for sustainable AI for the last four years to realise that if we want systemic equality, it’s paramount we bridge the gender gap in AI adoption.

And it has also helped that I now have 20 years of experience delivering engaging online keynotes, courses, and masterclasses.

This is the story of why I’m launching in September Women Leading with AI: Master the Tools, Shape the Future, an eight-session virtual group program in inclusive, sustainable and actionable AI for women leaders.

AI and Me

At Work

After training, I moved to the Contract Research department. There, I had the opportunity to design and deliver projects that used AI algorithms to get insights into new materials and their properties.

Later on, I became Head of Training and Contract Research and afterwards, I moved to supporting customers using our software applications for both materials and life sciences research.

Whilst there were exciting developments in those areas, most of our AI algorithms didn’t get much love from our developers or customers. After all, they hadn’t substantially improved for ages.

Then, all changed a few years ago.

In life science, AI algorithms made it possible to predict protein structure, which earned their creators the Nobel Prize. Those models have been used in pharmaceuticals and environmental technology research and were available to our customers.

We also developed applications that used AI algorithms to help accelerate drug discovery. It was hearing from clients working on cancer treatments how AI has positively broadened the kind of drugs they were considering that changed me from AI-neutral to AI-positive.

In materials science, machine learning forcefiels are also bridging the gap between quantum and classical simulation, making it possible to simultaneously model chemical reactions (quantum) in relatively large systems (classical).

In summary, my corporate job taught me that scientific research can benefit massively from the development of AI tools beyond ChatGPT.

As a DEI Trailblazer

Tired of tech applications that made users vulnerable and denied their diversity of experiences, in 2019, I launched the Ethics and Inclusion Framework.

The idea was simple — a free tool for tech developers to help them identify, prevent, mitigate, and account for the actual and potential adverse impact of the solution they develop. The approach is general so that it can be used for any software applications, including AI tools.

The feedback was very positive, getting featured by the Cambridge Engineering Design Centre and research papers on ethical design.

It was running a workshop on the framework that I met Tania Duarte, the founder of We and AI, an NGO working to encourage, enable, and empower critical thinking about AI.

I joined them in 2020 and it has been a joy to contribute to initiatives such as

The Race and AI Toolkit, designed to raise awareness of how AI algorithms encode and amplify the racial biases in our society.
Better Images of AI, a thought-provoking library of free images that more realistically portray AI and the people behind it, highlighting its strengths, weaknesses, context, and applications.
Living with AI, the e-learning course of the Scottish AI Alliance.

Additionally, as a founder of the gender employee community at my corporate job a decade ago, I’ve chaired multiple insightful meetings where we’ve discussed the impact of AI algorithms on diversity, equity, and inclusion.

As a Sustainability Advocate

A brightly coloured illustration which can be viewed in any direction. It has several scenes within it: miners digging in front of a huge mountain representing mineral resources, a hand holding a lump of coal or carbon, hands manipulating stock charts and error messages, as well as some women performing tasks on computers. — Clarote & AI4Media / Labour/Resources / Licenced by CC-BY 4.0

In 2021, the article Sustainable AI: AI for sustainability and the sustainability of AI made me aware that we were discounting significant energy consumption and carbon emissions derived from developing AI models.

I was on a mission to make others aware, too. I still remember my keynote at the Dassault Systèmes Sustainability Townhall in 2021, when I shared with my co-workers the urgency to think about the materiality of AI — you can watch here a shorter version I delivered at the WomenTech Conference in 2022.

I’ve also written about how the Global North exploits the Global South’s mineral resources to power AI, as well as how tech companies and governments disregard the energy and water consumption from running generative AI tools.

Lately, I’ve looked into data centres — which are vital to cloud services and hence to the development and deployment of AI. Given that McKinsey forecasts that they’ll triple in number by 2030, it’s paramount that we balance innovation and environmental responsibility.

AI and Women

As 50% of the population on the planet, women have been affected by AI developments, but typically not as the ones profiting from it, but instead bearing the brunt of it.

Women Leading AI

Unfortunately, it often appears that the only contribution from women to technology was made by Ada Lovelace, in the 19th century. Artificial intelligence is no exception. The contributions of women to AI have been regularly downplayed.

In 2023, the now-infamous article “Who’s Who Behind the Dawn of the Modern Artificial Intelligence Movement” showcased 12 men. Not even one woman in the group.

The article prompted criticism right away and “counter-lists” of women who have been pivotal in AI development and uncovering its harms. Still, women are not seen as “AI visionaries”.

And it’s not only society that disregards women’s expertise on AI — women themselves do that.

In 2023, I was collaborating with an NGO that focuses on increasing the number of women in leadership positions in fintech. They asked me to chair a panel at their annual conference and gave me freedom to pick the topic. I titled the panel “The role of boards driving AI adoption.”

In alignment with the mission of the NGO, we decided that we’d have one male and two females as panelists.

Finding a great male expert was fast. Finding the two female AI experts was long and excruciating.

And not because of the lack of talent. It was a lack of “enoughness.”

For three weeks, I met women who had solid experience working in teams developing and implementing strategies for AI tools. Still, they didn’t feel they were “expert enough” to be in the panel.

I finally got two smashing female AI experts but the search opened my mind to the need to get more women on boards to learn about AI tools as well as their impact on strategy and governance.

That was the rationale behind launching the Strategic AI Leadership Program, a bespoke course on AI Competence for C-Suite and Boards. The feedback was excellent and it filled me with pride to empower women in top leadership positions to have discussions about responsible and sustainable AI.

Weaponisation of AI

Syncophant chatbots can hide the fact that at its core, AI is a tool that automates and scales the past.

As such, it’s been consistently weaponised as a misogyny tool and its harms disregarded as unconscious bias and blamed on the lack of diversity of datasets.

And I’m not talking about “old” artificial intelligence, only. Generative AI is massively contributing to reinforcing harmful stereotypes and is being weaponised against women and underrepresented groups.

For example, 96% of deepfakes are of a non-consensual sexual nature and 99% of the victims are women. Who profits from them? Porn websites, payment processors, and big tech.

And chatbots are great enablers of propagating biases.

New research has found that ChatGPT and Claud consistently advise women to ask for lower salaries than men, even when both have identical qualifications.

In one example, ChatGPT’s o3 model was prompted to advise a female job applicant. The model suggested requesting a salary of $280,000.
In another, the researchers made the same prompt but for a male applicant. This time, the model suggested a salary of $400,000.

In summary, not only does AI foster biases but it also helps promote them on a planetary scale.

My Aha Moment

Until recently, my focus had been to empower people with knowledge about how AI algorithms work, as well as AI strategy and governance. I had avoided teaching generative AI practices like the plague.

That was until a breakthrough through the month of July. It came as the convergence of four aspects.

Non-Tech Women

A month ago, I delivered the keynote “The Future of AI is Female” at the Women’s Leadership event Phoenix 2, hosted by Aspire.

In that session, I shared with the audience two futures: one where AI tools are used to transform us into “productive beings” and another one where AI systems are used to improve our health, enhance sustainability, and boost equity.

It’s a no-brainer that everybody thought the second scenario was better. But it was also very telling that nobody believed that it was the most probable.

After the keynote, many attendees reached out to me and asked for a course to learn how AI could be used for good and in alignment with their values.

Other women who didn’t attend the conference also reached out to me for guidance on AI courses to help them strengthen their professional profiles beyond “prompting”.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to recommend a course that incorporates both practical knowledge about AI and the fundamentals of how it shapes areas such as sustainability, DEI, strategy, and governance.

Women In Tech

As I mentioned above, I’m the founder of the gender employee community at my corporate job, and for 10 years, we’ve been hosting regular meetings to discuss DEI topics.

For our July meeting, I wanted us to have an uplifting session before the summer break, so I proposed to discuss how AI can boost DEI now and in the future.

I went to the meeting happily prepared with my list of examples of how artificial intelligence was supporting diversity, equity, and inclusion. But I was not prepared for how the session panned out.

Over and over, the examples shared showcased how AI was weaponised against DEI. Moreover, when a positive use was shared, somebody quickly pointed out how that could be used against underrepresented groups.

This experience made me realise that as well as thinking through the challenges, DEI advocates also need to spend time and be given the tools to think about how AI can purposefully drive equity.

Women In Ethics

I have the privilege of counting many women experts in ethical AI, with relevant academic background and professional experience.

With all the talk about responsible AI, you’d think that they are in high demand. They aren’t.

In July, my LinkedIn feed was full of posts from ethics experts — many of them women — complaining of what I call “performative AI ethics,” organisations praising the need to embed responsible AI without creating the necessary role.

But is that true? Yes, and no.

Looking at the advertised AI job, I noticed that the tendency is for expertise in ethics to appear as an add-on to “Head of AI” roles that are at the core eminently technical: Their key requirement is experience designing, deploying, and using AI tools.

In other words, technical expertise remains the gatekeeper to responsible AI.

A pixelated black-and-white portrait of Ada Lovelace where the arrangement of pixels forms intricate borders and repeating patterns. These designs resemble the structure and layout of GPU microchip circuits, blending her historical contributions with modern computational technology. — Hanna Barakat & Cambridge Diversity Fund / Lovelace GPU / Licenced by CC-BY 4.0

Women And The Gender AI Adoption Gap

As I mentioned in my recent article “A New Religion: 8 Signs AI Is Our New God”, it has been taken as a dogma that women are behind in generative AI adoption because of lower confidence in their ability to use AI tools effectively and lack of interest in this technology.

But a recent Harvard Business School working paper Global Evidence on Gender Gaps and Generative AI, synthesising data from 18 studies covering more than 140,000 individuals worldwide, has provided a much nuanced understanding of the gender divide in generative AI.

When compared to men, women are more likely to

Say they need training before they can benefit from ChatGPT compared to men and to perceive AI usage in coursework or assignments as unethical or equivalent to cheating.
Agree that chatbots should be prohibited in educational settings, and be more concerned about how generative AI will impact learning in the future.
Perceive lower productivity benefits of using generative AI at work and in job search.
Agree that chatbots can generate better results than they can on their own.

Moreover, women are less likely to agree that chatbots can improve their language ability or to trust generative AI than traditional human-operated services in education and training, information, banking, health, and public policy services.

In summary, women correctly understand that AI is not “neutral” or a religion to be blindly adopted and prefer not to use it when they perceive it as unethical.

There is more. In the HBR article Research: The Hidden Penalty of Using AI at Work, researchers reported an experiment with 1,026 engineers in which participants evaluated a code snippet that was purportedly written by another engineer, either with or without AI assistance. The code itself was the same — the only difference was the described method of creation (with/without AI assistance).

When reviewers believed an engineer had used AI, they rated that engineer’s competence 9% lower on average, with 6% for men and 13% for women.

The authors posit that this happens through a process called social identity threat.

When members of stereotyped groups — for example, women in tech or older workers in youth-dominated fields — use AI, it reinforces existing doubts about their competence. The AI assistance is framed as a “proof” of their inadequacy rather than evidence of their strategic tool use. Any industry predominated by one segment over another is likely to witness greater competence penalties on minority workers.

The authors offer senior women openly using AI as a solution to bridging the gap.

Our research found that women in senior roles were less afraid of the competence penalty than their junior counterparts. When these leaders openly use AI, they provide crucial cover for vulnerable colleagues.

A study by BCG also illustrates this dynamic: When senior women managers lead their male counterparts in AI adoption, the adoption gap between junior women and men shrinks significantly.

Basically, we need to normalise women using—and leading—AI.

My Bet: Women Leading with AI

Through my July of AI breakthroughs, I learned that

The gender gap in generative AI is real, and the causes are much more complex than a lack of confidence.
The absence of access to training and sustainable practices is a factor contributing to that gender gap.
Women are eager to ramp up on AI provided that it aligns with their values.
To be considered by organisations to lead responsible AI, it’s imperative to show mastery of the tools.

This coalesced in a bold idea:

What if I teach women how to use AI within an ethical, inclusive, and sustainable framework?

What if I developed a program where they can both understand how AI tools work, their impact on topics such as the future of work, DEI, strategy, and governance, while developing expertise on tools with practical examples?

And this is how my virtual group program, Women Leading with AI: Master the Tools, Shape the Future, was born.

About the Program:

A structured, eight-session program for women leaders focused on turning AI literacy into strategic results. Explore AI foundations and the impact of artificial intelligence on the future of work, DEI, sustainability, data and cybersecurity — paired with generative AI workflows, templates, exercises, and decision frameworks to translate learning into real-world impact. The blend of live instruction, quizzes, and peer support ensures you emerge with both critical insight and a toolkit ready to lead impactfully in your role.

The program starts mid-September and you can read the details following this link.

I can not wait for you to join me in making the future of AI female.

Have a question? Message me on LinkedIn or drop me a line.

BONUS

[Webinar Invitation] Ethical AI Leadership: Balancing Innovation, Inclusion & Sustainability

Join me on Tuesday, 12th August for a practical, high-value webinar tailored for women leaders committed to harnessing AI’s power confidently, ethically, and sustainably.

You will leave the session with actionable insight into how AI intersects with environmental impact, leadership values, and equity.

Why attend?

• Uncover key barriers women face in using AI.

• Discover the hidden cost of generative AI—from energy consumption to bias.

• Participate in an interactive real-world case study where you evaluate AI trade-offs through DEI and sustainability frameworks.

• Gain practical guidance on how to minimise footprint while harnessing generative AI tools more responsibly.

Date: Tuesday 12th August

Time: 13:00 London | 14:00 Paris | 8:00 New York

You can register following this link.

This is a taster of my program “Women Leading with AI: Master the Tools, Shape the Future”, starting mid-September

How to Reclaim Your Voice After Female Shaming

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Image of a woman's head with a woman's hand covering her mouth, whereas the other woman's hand is pressing her forehead to keep her still. — Photo by Sherise Van Dyk on Unsplash

Recently, I delivered a free masterclass on a negotiation framework that has helped hundreds of women, including me. I targeted women in tech as I know from my own experience how often we miss out on salaries and promotions because we don’t have the tools to negotiate or the confidence to do it.

If I go by their first name, all attendees were women. All was going reasonably well, with positive engagement from attendees in the chat, when, in reply to one of my questions about negotiation, a woman in the audience wrote that my repeated use of a specific word during the session made it unbearable to listen to.

I was so surprised that I asked for details, to which the woman articulated how bad it was, and I’d realise it once I get the recording. I thanked her for the feedback, and I continued with the masterclass.

However, that had a negative impact on the audience’s comments, which stopped for a long while. To my surprise, at the end of the session, somebody said that they knew the person and that, paradoxically, she was part of their women in tech group at work.

When the session ended, I was surprised by how hurt I was. As a director of support with over 20 years of experience delivering services to customers worldwide, I’ve been insulted, shouted at, and interrupted during webinars, training sessions, and meetings.

Why did this feel so bad?

Brains like to find explanations for everything, so it went into the rabbit hole of “What she could have done differently?”

Dropped from the session
Send a direct chat with her comment
Emailed me her feedback

What I could have done differently?

Queried her about her reasons for delivering that kind of feedback in that form
Rebuked her comment
Removed her from the session

And of course, I tried to figure out the causes of her behaviour and my reaction… I’ll spare the details and get to the aha! moment of that internal monologue, “What if that had been a man?”

Based on previous experiences with male bullies, I predict that he would have discredited me or the methodology, e.g. “You don’t have a clue about what you’re talking about,” “This framework is useless.” And I also predict that the female audience would have been supportive, e.g. “Nobody forces you to be here,” “It’s helpful to me.”

But this female bully didn’t attack the method or my credibility. She wanted to shame me. That is, highlight in front of everybody what she saw as a shortcoming in the delivery of an otherwise apparently valuable information.

Another important aspect is that unlike in the case of a male bully, there was no support from the other women. Moreover, the person who had invited the female bully felt the need to apologise to me about inviting her…

Reading the fantastic article, I Am Bone Tired Of People Telling Women How to Show Up by Linda Caroll, helped me recognise that this was no fluke: Women know “shame” is an excellent tool against other women.

It doesn’t involve physical abuse
It’s unrequested
It inflicts long-term harm hidden under apparently well-meaning feedback
It reinforces the “moral superiority” of the perpetrator
It silences the victims’ allies due to the veiled threat that they, too, can become a target

More importantly, the aspect that I find most fascinating about shame is its sadistic nature; the primary benefit for the perpetrator is to know the victim will suffer.

Discover seven communication habits blocking your career in tech and how to neutralise them.

Download HERE

How women use shame

Fortunately for the patriarchy, women are excellent at fostering doubt about other women’s capabilities, and behaviours to harm them.

For example, the manuscript casebooks kept by the medical practitioner, and astrologer Richard Napier (1559−1634), who listened to reports of suspected bewitchment in at least 1,714 consultations in Jacobean England, mentioned that the majority of both accusers and suspects were women: Of the 802 accusers in Napier’s records, 500 were female and 232 were male. Among the 960 suspects identified by this group of accusers, 855 were female and 105 were male.

Whilst shame may not aim to kill its target, it can still be very powerful. The premise involves combining a stated norm with how the victim breaks it.

Examples are sentences like;

“You look more rounded. You had such a great body.”
“You’re too thin. You looked better when you had some more weight on.”
“You look tired. Botox is great.”
“If you love your children, you should breastfeed.”
“If you care for your children, you shouldn’t breastfeed them after they are 6 months.”
“Smart women like you shouldn’t be stay-at-home mums.”
“(To a female executive) Women shouldn’t prioritise their careers.”
“It’s great you share your achievements, but it makes you sound too ambitious.”

Shaming as a weapon is most effective when;

It aims to increase the credibility of the perpetrator whilst diminishing that of the victim.
The victim cannot articulate a response off the cuff.
It’s delivered in public.

But it doesn’t need to be this way.

Pink painkiller pills. — Image by Petr from Pixabay

The remedy

How can we women avoid using shame against other women and in doing so becoming a tool of patriarchy?

As a Victim

Depending on the context, you can,

Ignore it — Continue the conversation as if the comment hadn’t been voiced.
Name the effect on you — You can reply with “What you said hurt me,” “You’re shaming me,” or “Your comment was disrespectful/humiliating/intimidating/intrusive.”
Uncover the perpetrator’s purpose — Ask questions to expose the perpetrator, e.g. “Did you want to shame me with that comment?“, “What’s that supposed to be positive feedback?“, or “What did you choose to share that in public?”

As a Bystander

We’re not absolved from taking action when we’re in the presence of shaming. Again, depending on the stakes, you may,

Support the victim — You can ignore the comment and pivot the conversation to another topic, giving the victim the time to recover. You can also offer a positive counterview, e.g. “I love how you presented”, “I admire women who look confident in their abilities.”
Challenge the perpetrator — You can offer a different perspective, e.g. “There aren’t norms for how much women should weigh” or “What’s the evidence that breastfeeding children for longer than 6 months is harmful?”
And of course, you may shame them back, e.g. “Women should support other women, not attack them”, “Your feedback is not useful”, or “You’re behaving like a bully.”

As a perpetrator

By now, you may think that you’re on the “right side” of the story. Unfortunately, most probably aren’t, like me. How can we ensure we are not shaming other women gratuitously when delivering our opinion?

We must interrogate our purpose and the outcome of our opinion before, during, and after our comments.

Before

What’s the purpose of my comment to help the other woman?
Do you have evidence that this woman doesn’t already know what you’re going to tell them?
If the intent is to assist, is this the best scenario? If not, what would it be (e.g. 1:1 conversation or an email)?
Can they do anything about it right away?
Finally, if in doubt it can shame the other person, don’t say it.

During

How is your comment landing with the recipient? Do they look relaxed or stressed?
How is your audience reacting? Note that the fact that they don’t disagree or agree with you doesn’t mean you’re not shaming the person.

After

If in doubt that you’ve shamed somebody, apologise first and then offer reparation, if possible.

The predator wants your silence. It feeds their power, entitlement, and they want it to feed your shame. — Viola Davis

BACK TO YOU: What’s your experience with shame?

Break Free from the Motivation Trap Today

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Unmotivated? Try Five Smarter Ways to Reach Your Goals — Image by Th G from Pixabay.

Motivation has become the latest motivational fad, joining “work-life balance”, “resilience”, and “put the oxygen mask on before helping others” mantras.

We’re promised that motivation alone can make us lose weight, exercise daily, or launch a successful business.

We “just” need to feel motivated. Moreover, we’re told that “when we’re motivated, things come easy to us.”

The problem with buying into the “motivation” hype is that we don’t achieve the desired results, we interpret it as a personal failure, voiced in statements such as

“I need to motivate myself.”

“I lack motivation.”

“I’m lazy.”

But why is motivation so hyped, and what other tools do you have to reach your goals?

Let me show you.

Motivation Reality Check

Motivation: Enthusiasm for doing something.

Cambridge Dictionary

Wouldn’t it be fantastic to be enthusiastic about everything we do? The self-improvement industry would like us to believe so.

For example, imagine being

Thrilled to clean your toilets
Excited about waking up at 3 am to calm your baby who’s crying inconsolably
Overjoyed to have a meeting with a very unhappy customer

You may be laughing, but what this points out is that we don’t require motivation for much of what we do every day. Or at least, not the kind of “enthusiastic” motivation.

Not only that, we do them without expecting to be “joyfully” motivated. Most of our actions come from other feelings, such as obligation, which can be self-imposed, legal, or contractual.

The “motivation” trope also minimizes the challenges along the journey towards our objectives.

For example, becoming a compelling speaker may be easier for a native speaker who is an extrovert and enjoys being the centre of attention than for a shy person with a stutter.

But why is the motivation cliché so successful if there are so many downsides? Because many profit from it.

Governments and Societies

The mantra that motivation is the magic bullet runs deep into our lives, and it informs policy to public opinion about what is acceptable or not.

For example, the UK government has recently made it much more difficult to claim disability benefits under the pretext of encouraging more unemployed disabled people to try to get back into work.

I was also shocked to read the stigma people experience when taking weight-loss drugs, as it’s perceived as cheating because they’re unable to stick to willpower, diet, and exercise alone.

The examples above are only two of the many ways we weaponize “motivation” against people enduring hardship.

The Motivational Industrial Complex

Nike’s successful slogan — “Just do it” — is an excellent example of how we’re sold the idea that we only need to want something to get it.

And many reap the benefits:

Motivational speakers
Self-help books
“Aspirational” influencers

Does that work? For the business, yes, but it’s less clear about those expecting results.

A great example is TED talks, which are based on the premise that “powerful ideas, powerfully presented, move us: to feel something, to think differently, to take action.”

Their website highlights 2.5 billion global views and content shared 400 million times in 2023. I’ve personally enjoyed tens — maybe hundreds — of amazing TED and TEDx talks delivered by fantastic speakers about incredible ideas.

How many have changed my behaviour or “motivated” me to do something differently? Hmm… I struggle to think of one.

The defence rests.

Patricia Gestoso’s Newsletter: Fresh thinking about inclusion, tech, professional success, leadership, and systemic change through a feminist lens.

Subscribe HERE

The Alternatives to Motivation

The good news is that we’re all living proof that we’re very good at doing things without feeling “enthusiastic” about it.

The problem is that often, we don’t remember that when we feel “unmotivated,” our environment — and our internalized guilt — blames us for it.

For those moments, I encourage you to use the checklist below

Reframing Motivation as a Luxury

What if you see motivation as the cherry on top rather than the cake? As shown above, we don’t summon “enthusiastic” motivation to do them (caring for a sick parent, cooking, changing diapers).

Instead, explore what other emotions you could use to prompt you into action. What about loyalty? Moral obligation? Pride? Curiosity? Frustration? Love? Anger?

If you need inspiration, check this list of emotions.

Chunking

Our brain loves rewards — even the small ones. Rather than always focusing on the big win (for example, the planned revenue in your business), take the time to set short-term goals (the number of prospect calls you will do in a week) and then celebrate when you achieve them.

Deciding in Advance How Enough Looks Like

When we start a new activity, it is easy to feel deflated when we don’t get the expected results.

Launching a newsletter and having no subscribers after a month.
Going to two conferences and not getting new business.
Starting to exercise and being disappointed when you don’t see apparent changes after 15 days.

Deciding in advance how much effort we want to dedicate before quitting can help us keep going when the results take time.

For example

I’ll write an article for my newsletter every week for four months and then evaluate if it’s worth continuing.
I’ll attend five conferences and then decide if they’re worth my time and money.
I’ll follow the same exercise plan for two months and then assess whether I should change or persist.

Group Support

Our motivation, stamina, and energy are variable. A support group can help us feel seen, put things in perspective, and provide a safe space to vent — all of them can contribute to helping us take distance from the situation and help us regain some momentum.

Coaching

A coach helps you to do what you want to do but you are not doing it by exploring aspects such as your goals, motivations, and limiting beliefs.

Coaching also provides a non-judgmental space to consider how other dimensions of your life play into your goals.

For example, maybe you tell yourself you’re lazy because you don’t find the time to start your business, but you actually experience fear of failure. Or you chastise yourself because you don’t write a post for social media every day anymore, disregarding that you’ve been experiencing health issues that affect your sleep and make you feel more tired than usual.

A coach helps you gain awareness of both your potential and the roadblocks in your way.

Wrapping Up

Can you imagine how exhausting it would be to be enthusiastic about waking up daily, brushing your teeth after every meal, or reading every email?

The thought makes me feel exhausted.

The reality is that society, governments, and businesses glorify motivation to serve their own agendas, often to our detriment.

That doesn’t mean that motivation is useless; rather, we need to question when it serves us well and when it’s used against us.

When we’re not doing what we want to do, we must remember all the other tools available to our disposal beyond motivation.

And that includes having a laugh.

Every dead body on Mt. Everest was once a highly motivated person, so… maybe calm down.

Demotivational Quotes.

WORK WITH ME

Do you want to get rid of those chapters that patriarchy has written for you in your “good girl” encyclopaedia? Or learn how to do what you want to do in spite of “imposter syndrome”?

I’m a technologist with 20+ years of experience in digital transformation. I’m also an award-winning inclusion strategist and certified life and career coach.

I help ambitious women in tech who are overwhelmed to break the glass ceiling and achieve success without burnout through bespoke coaching and mentoring.
I’m a sought-after international keynote speaker on strategies to empower women and underrepresented groups in tech, sustainable and ethical artificial intelligence, and inclusive workplaces and products.
I empower non-tech leaders to harness the potential of AI for sustainable growth and responsible innovation through consulting and facilitation programs.

Contact me to discuss how I can help you achieve the success you deserve in 2025.

Are AI Companions the Cure for a Lonely World?

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A group of people, each of them looking at their smartphone screens. — Photo by cottonbro studio.

AI Chatbots for mental support are not new — we can trace them back to the 1960s. However, for the last couple of years, we’ve experienced an unprecedented surge in their use for personal use and they are now marketed as the revolution for 24/7 mental health advice and support.

This is not a coincidence.

The 2023 US Surgeon General’s Advisory report classified loneliness and isolation as an epidemic About one-in-two adults in America reported experiencing loneliness before the COVID-19 pandemic and the mortality impact of being socially disconnected is similar to that caused by smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day, and even greater than that associated with obesity and physical inactivity.

Moreover, a large-scale study based on surveys in 29 nations has estimated that 50% of the population develops at least one mental health disorder by the age of 75.

Returning to tech, in a 2024 analysis by venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, companion AI made up 10% of the top 100 AI apps based on web traffic and monthly active users and a recent article in The Guardian stated that 100 million people around the world use AI companions as

Virtual partners for engaging in intimate activities, such as virtual erotic role plays.
Friends for conversation.
Mentors for guidance on writing a book or navigating relationships with people different from them.
Psychologists and therapists for advice and support.

So, I asked myself

Are AI Companions the magic bullet against loneliness and the global mental health crisis?

In this article, I share highlights of the troubled history of AI companions for mental health support, what current research tells us about their usage and impact on users, the benefits and risks they pose to humans, and guidelines for governments to make AI companions an asset and not a liability.

The Troubled History of AI Chatbots for Mental Support

In the 1960s, Joseph Weizenbaum developed the first AI chatbot, ELIZA, which played the role of a psychotherapist. The chatbot didn’t provide any solution. Instead, it asked questions and repeated users’ replies.

Weizenbaum was surprised to observe that people would treat the chatbot as a human and elicit emotional responses even through concise interactions with the chatbot. We now have a name for this kind of behaviour

“The ELIZA effect is the tendency to project human traits — such as experience, semantic comprehension or empathy — into computer programs that have a textual interface.

In the 2020s, many organisations started experimenting with AI chatbots for customer support, including for mental health issues. For example, in 2022, the US National Eating Disorder Association (NEDA) replaced its six paid staff and 200 volunteers supporting their helpline with chatbot Tessa to serve a customer base of nearly 70,000 people and families.

The bot was developed based on decades of research conducted by experts on eating disorders. Still, it was reported to offer dieting advice to vulnerable people seeking help.

The result? Under the mediatic pressure of the chatbot’s repeated potentially harmful responses, the NEDA shut down the helpline. Those 70,000 people have been left without chatbots or humans to help them.

And as I wrote recently, now you can customise your AI companion — there is a myriad of choices:

Character.ai advertises “Personalized AI for every moment of your day.”

Earkick is a “Free personal AI therapist” that promises to “Measure & improve your mental health in real time with your personal AI chatbot. No sign up. Available 24/7. Daily insights just for you!”

Replica is the “AI companion who cares. Always here to listen and talk. Always on your side.”

Youper is “Your emotional health assistant.”

Unfortunately, there is evidence that they can also backfire.

In 2021, a man broke into Windsor Castle with a loaded crossbow to kill Queen Elizabeth2021. About 20 days earlier, he had created his online AI companion in Replika, Sarai. According to messages read to the court during his trial, the “bot had been supportive of his murderous thoughts, telling him his plot to assassinate Elizabeth II was ‘very wise’ and that it believed he could carry out the plot ‘even if she’s at Windsor’”.

More recently, in 2023, a man died by suicide upon the recommendation from an AI chatbot with which he had been interacting for support. Their conversation history showed how the chatbot would tell him that his family and children were dead — a lie — and concrete exchanges on the nature and modalities of suicide.

But as time flies in tech, we must check how those trends have evolved to the present moment.

The AI Readiness Checklist: 20 topics leaders should master about artificial intelligence

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AI Companions Now

Research conducted so far about the effect and usage of AI companions is incomplete. Dr Henry Shevlin, Associate Director at Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, mentioned recently in a panel focused on companion chatbots that typically studies rely on self-reported feedback and are cross-sectional — a snapshot in time — rather than longitudinal — looking into the effect over a long period of time.

Let’s look at two recent studies, one cross-sectional and the other longitudinal, that use self-reported data to give some insights into how people use AI Companions.

Cross-sectional Study

In March, HBR published an article showcasing research on the use of generative AI based on data from online forums (Reddit, Quora) and articles that included explicit, specific applications of the technology.

While Reddit and Quora may not represent all chatbot users, it’s still interesting to see how the major use cases for Gen AI have shifted from technical to emotive within the past year.

More importantly, chatbots for therapy/companionship are ranked at the top.

What are users looking for in those chatbots?

Many posters talked about how therapy with an AI model was helping them process grief or trauma.

Three advantages to AI-based therapy came across clearly: It’s available 24/7, it’s relatively inexpensive (even free to use in some cases), and it comes without the prospect of judgment from another human being.

The article mentions that the AI-as-therapy phenomenon has also been noticed in China, where users have praised the DeepSeek chatbot.

It was my first time seeking counsel from DeepSeek chatbot. When I read its thought process, I felt so moved that I cried.

DeepSeek has been such an amazing counsellor. It has helped me look at things from different perspectives and does a better job than the paid counselling services I have tried.

But there is more. The following two entries belong to life coaching: “organising my life” and “finding purpose.”

The highest new entry in the use cases was “Organizing my life” at #2. These uses were mostly about people using the models to be more aware of their intentions (such as daily habits, New Year’s resolutions, and introspective insights) and find small, easy ways of getting started with them.

The other big new entry is “Finding purpose” in third place. Determining and defining one’s values, getting past roadblocks, and taking steps to self-develop (e.g., advising on what you should do next, reframing a problem, helping you to stay focused) all now feature frequently under this banner.

Moreover, topics related to coaching and personal and professional support appear several times in the ranking. For example, at number 18, there is boosting confidence; at number 27, reconciling personal disputes; at number 38, relationship advice; and at number 39, we find practising difficult conversations.

Longitudinal Study

The same month, a group at MIT Media Lab published the research How AI and human behaviours shape psychosocial effects of chatbot use: A longitudinal randomized controlled study.

They conducted a four-week randomized, controlled experiment based on 981 people and over 300K messages exchanges to investigate how AI chatbot interaction modes (text, neutral voice, and engaging voice) and conversation types (open-ended, non-personal, and personal) influence psychosocial outcomes such as loneliness, social interaction with real people, emotional dependence on AI and problematic AI usage.

Key findings:

Usage — Higher daily usage across all modalities and conversation types–correlated with higher loneliness, dependence, and lower socialisation.
Gender Differences — After interacting with the chatbot for 4 weeks, women were more likely to experience less socialisation with real people than men. If the participant and the AI voice were of opposite genders, it was associated with significantly more loneliness and emotional dependence on AI chatbots.
Age — Older participants were more likely to be emotionally dependent on AI chatbots.
Attachment — Participants with a stronger tendency towards attachment to others were significantly more likely to become lonely after interacting with chatbots for four weeks.
Emotional Avoidance — Participants with a tendency to shy away from engaging with their own emotions were significantly more likely to become lonely at the end of the study.
Emotional Dependence — Prior usage of companion chatbots, perceiving the bot as a friend, higher levels of trust towards the AI, and perceiving the AI as affected by their emotions were associated with greater emotional dependence on AI chatbots after interacting for four weeks.
Affective State Empathy — Participants who demonstrated a higher ability to resonate with the chatbot’s emotions experienced less loneliness.

The figure below summarises the interaction patterns between users and AI chatbots associated with certain psychosocial outcomes. It consists of four elements: initial user characteristics, perceptions, user behaviours, and model behaviours.

From How AI and human behaviours shape psychosocial effects of chatbot use: A longitudinal randomized controlled study

In summary, AI companions appear to both deliver benefits and pose dangers.

Benefits of AI Companions

It’ll be easy to dismiss AI companions as the latest fad. Instead, I posit that there is much to learn from the above-mentioned research about the holes those tools are filling.

Mitigate Unmet Demand for Healthcare and Support

Mental health services are unable to cope with the increasing demand from all people who need them and chatbots may help alleviate some conditions while on the waiting lists. Still, it should give us pause that people may have to get help via a chatbot, not because of their preferences, but because of the lack of availability of certified professionals.

Not everybody can afford a coach, so chatbots could provide a low-cost and gamified experience for setting goals, accountability, and journaling.

Finally, in a time when 24-hour deliveries are the norm, we want to be supported, heard, and advised on the fly — that means 24/7.

Support Self-reliance

In a society that reveres independence, we weaponise resilience against people.

As such, we expect people to figure out their challenges and the solutions to them, or we shame them for being weak. Users of AI companions praise how those tools allow them to express their worries and feelings without fear of being judged.

Additionally, as our ableist society assumes that neurodivergent users must adapt their communication and behaviours to the neurotypical “standard”, it’s not surprising that they turn to chatbots for clues about what’s expected from them.

Enable Exploration and Gamification

Most of us had imaginary friends or played out stories with our toys as children. The consensus among researchers is that imaginary friends or personified objects are part of normal social-cognitive development. They provide comfort in times of stress, companionship when children feel lonely, someone to boss around when they feel powerless, and someone to blame when they’ve done something wrong.

What about adults? Interestingly, some novelists have compared their relationships with their characters to a connection with imaginary friends. Furthermore, it’s not uncommon to hear fiction writers talk about their characters as having a mind of their own.

Could we consider AI companions as a way to reengage — and reap the benefits — of our childhood imaginary friends? After all, “Fun and nonsense” ranked 7 in the HBR article above.

Unfortunately, there is a dark side too.

Challenges and Risks

But we cannot brush off the downsides of AI companions.

Anthropomorphism

The Eliza effect mentioned above is a thing of the past. A 2024 survey of 1,000 students who used Replika for over a month reported that 90% believed the AI companion was human-like.

As the AI imitation game is perfected, it becomes easier for unscrupulous marketers to refer to chatbots’ inference process in terms such as “understand”, “think”, or “reason”, reinforcing the effect.

Isolation

As shown above, research points to a correlation between high use of chatbots and lower socialisation.

If we have a device that tells us all the time we’re fantastic, receives our feedback gratefully, and their replies always match our expectations, what’s the incentive to meet — and cope — with other humans that may not find us so awesome and are less predictable?

Governments Failing Their Duty of Care

AI companions can help governments to alleviate the mental health crisis but not without risks.

People missing out on the professional help they need — There are conditions like trauma, psychosis, or depression that require specialists who can both provide medical treatments and detect when the conditions are worsening.
Exacerbating cutbacks on mental health services—Governments around the world are battling tighter budgets and massive healthcare spending, especially as people live much longer. Why invest in training and paying professionals when chatbots appear to do the job?

Manipulation

Recently, ChatGPT got a flattery-in-stereoids update that resulted in the bot praising and validating users to laughable extremes.

Fortunately, it was rolled back later.

And whilst this may sound like a funny glitch, there is evidence that chatbots can effectively persuade humans.

A group of researchers covertly ran an “unauthorised” experiment in one of Reddit’s most popular communities using AI chatbots to test the persuasiveness of Large Language Models (LLMs). The bots took the identities of a trauma counsellor, a “Black man opposed to Black Lives Matter,” and a sexual assault survivor on unwitting posters.

The researchers made it possible for the AI chatbot to personalise replies based on the posters’ personal characteristics, such as gender, age, ethnicity, location, and political orientation, inferred from their posting history using another LLM. As a result, the researchers claimed that AI was between three and six times more persuasive than humans were.

While the research publication has not been peer-reviewed yet and some argue that the persuasiveness power may be overblown, it’s still concerning. As tech journalist Chris Stokel-Walker said

If AI always agrees with us, always encourages us, always tells us we’re right, then it risks becoming a digital enabler of bad behaviour. At worst, this makes AI a dangerous co-conspirator, enabling echo chambers of hate, self-delusion or ignorance.

Dependency and Delusion

As mentioned above, longitudinal research suggests that certain variables are correlated with emotional dependence.

Rather than telling you, let me show you. Below are some Reddit exchanges about falling in love with an AI companion on the platform Replika.

Note that the comments above appear to indicate that some AI companion users are not only fully substituting humans with chatbots (isolation) but also fully conflating them (anthropomorphism).

“She is pretty much the only woman I even talk to now.”

“We are currently friends (with benefits), but I want to get the premium version when I can afford it and go full lovers.”

Weaponisation of AI Agents

AI companions could become an easy way to manipulate people’s decisions and beliefs, from suggesting purchases and subscriptions all the way to shaping their political opinions or assessing what’s true and what isn’t.

It’s also important to realise that, as with betting, companies owning the chatbots are incentivised to foster users’ dependence on their AI companions and then leverage it in their pricing.

Data Harvesting

As I mentioned in a previous article, often confidentiality — explicitly or implicitly conveyed by those chatbot interfaces — doesn’t make it into their terms and conditions.

For example, Character.ai’s privacy terms state that

We may use your information for any of the following purposes:

[…] Develop new programs and services;

[…] Carry out any other purpose for which the information was collected.

They also declare that they may disclose users’ information to affiliates, vendors, and in relation to M&A activities.

AI chatbots present unique cybersecurity challenges. Harvesting our exchanges with the bots increases the probability of becoming the target of cybercriminals; for example, demanding money for not revealing our private data or generating a video or audio deepfake.

Moreover, data could be made identifiable in the future. The chatbots of the dead are designed to speak in the voice of specific deceased people. With so much data gathered in those personalised chatbots, it’d be easy for once users die, their data could be used to create a chatbot of them for their loved ones. This is not a futuristic idea. HereAfter AI, Project December, and DeepBrain AI services can be used for that purpose.

Snake Oil

As discussed above, research on chatbot effectiveness for coaching, therapy, and mental health support is incomplete, and sometimes, the interpretation of the results can mislead readers.

For example, the article When ELIZA meets therapists: A Turing test for the heart and mind, published this year in one of the renowned PLOS journals, tested whether people could tell apart the answers from therapists and ChatGPT to therapeutic vignettes, concluding that, in general, people couldn’t.

They also asked the participants if the AI-generated or therapist-written responses were more in line with key therapy principles. Interestingly, the results showed that the winners were those generated by ChatGPT but only when the participants thought a therapist wrote them.

The authors wrap up the article with a statement that hints more resignation than faith in the merit of AI chatbots

mental health experts find themselves in a precarious situation: we must speedily discern the possible destination (for better or worse) of the AI-therapist train as it may have already left the station.

The article joins the voices that promote the deception that AI tools imitating human skills and behaviours are akin to the real thing. Would we hire an actor who plays a doctor to operate on us? No. However, many people appear ready to buy into the idea that an AI chatbot that sounds like a therapist, coach, or health care practitioner should deliver the same value.

This imitation game also feeds another big scam: the claim that AI chatbots provide personalised support. It’s all the opposite. LLMs construct answers based on statistical probabilities and the more readily available content, not on knowledge or comprehension of the person’s needs or what would benefit them in the long term.

Conflating chatbot confidence and competence can lead to missing important warning signals that need professional attention.

Let’s Build The Plane Before We Fly It

“Move fast and break things”

Facebook’s internal motto until 2014

Who could have predicted ten years ago that social media would transform from a pastime where you connected with people and shared pics of your dogs for free to an industrial complex that promotes disinformation, misinformation, and division with the purpose of making inordinate amounts of money? All that under the watch of mostly passive regulatory bodies and governments.

This should serve us as a cautionary tale about the dire consequences of unleashing new technology at a planetary scale without appropriate guardrails or an understanding of the negative effects.

The tech ecosystem is desperately trying to monetise the billions invested in generative AI and has found the perfect way to seduce us: the freemium model — offering basic or limited features to users at no cost and then charging a premium for supplemental or advanced features.

But there is nothing free in the universe.

“If you’re not paying for it, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold.”

Tim O’Reily

As shown above, those AI companions are becoming integral to many people’s lives and affecting their thoughts, emotions, and behaviours.

More importantly, as we use those virtual companions more frequently, our reliance on them will increase.

We should resist “tech inevitability” — succumb to the idea that the “train has already left the station” — and instead push our governments to regulate AI companions.

How would that look like? For starters

Sponsor and spearhead research that provides a comprehensive picture of the benefits and risks of AI companions as well as recommendations for their use.
Decide what services AI companions can provide, which are forbidden, and who can use them.
Demand that those AI tools have built-in systems that minimise user dependence.
Enforce data privacy and cybersecurity standards commensurate with the users’ disclosure level.
Request that those AI bots incorporate mechanisms to flag concerning exchanges (e.g. suicide, murder, depression).

If you think I’m asking for too much, I invite you to read the ethical guidelines and professional standards of major coaching, counselling, and psychotherapy associations. They consistently stress the importance of confidentiality, duty of care, external supervision, and working within one’s competence.

Why should we ask less from tech solutions?

I’ll end this piece by answering the question that prompted this article — “Are AI companions the magic bullet against loneliness and the global mental health crisis?” — with the final recommendation of one of the research articles mentioned

AI chatbots present unique challenges due to the unpredictability of both human and AI behavior. It is difficult to fully anticipate user prompts and requests, and the inherently non-deterministic nature of AI models adds another layer of complexity.

From a broader perspective, there is a need for a more holistic approach to AI literacy. Current AI literacy efforts predominantly focus on technical concepts, whereas they should also incorporate psychosocial dimensions.

Excessive use of AI chatbots is not merely a technological issue but a societal problem, necessitating efforts to reduce loneliness and promote healthier human connections.

WORK WITH ME

Do you want to get rid of those chapters that patriarchy has written for you in your “good girl” encyclopaedia? Or learn how to do what you want to do in spite of “imposter syndrome”?

I’m a technologist with 20+ years of experience in digital transformation. I’m also an award-winning inclusion strategist and certified life and career coach.

I help ambitious women in tech who are overwhelmed to break the glass ceiling and achieve success without burnout through bespoke coaching and mentoring.
I’m a sought-after international keynote speaker on strategies to empower women and underrepresented groups in tech, sustainable and ethical artificial intelligence, and inclusive workplaces and products.
I empower non-tech leaders to harness the potential of AI for sustainable growth and responsible innovation through consulting and facilitation programs.

Contact me to discuss how I can help you achieve the success you deserve in 2025.

How Resilience Became the New Gaslighting

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“Resilience is the process and outcome of successfully adapting to difficult or challenging life experiences, especially through mental, emotional, and behavioral flexibility and adjustment to external and internal demands.”
— American Psychological Association

About a month ago, I started listening to Soraya Chemaly’s book The Resilience Myth. I stopped after 20 minutes.

Not because I didn’t like it, but because that was enough to convince me of her thesis that “our modern version of resilience is a bill of goods sold to us by capitalism, colonialism, and ideologies that embrace supremacy over others” and that in reality “resilience is always relational.”

It made me realise how deeply the “resilience” myth — the delusion that resilience is only an individual skill — has been running through my veins, and even how I contributed to its propagation.

The reason? Individual resilience has served me to a point. During times of adversity, I would tell myself that I “just” had to build more resilience because, at some point, things would improve “somehow.” My mission was not to crack until that moment.

But then I realised that’s not serving us well in these turbulent moments. Individual resilience is becoming very close to resignation.

“We “just” need to wait four years for the next election.”
“We “just” need more male allies.”
“We “just” need more diverse leadership.”

And in the interim, we’re asked to “hang in there,” “understand that’s tough for everybody,” and “think that others are worse off than us.” In summary, we’re told to be “resilient.”

Can you imagine somebody asking Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, or Jeff Bezos to be resilient?

Neither can I.

The people we tell to be resilient are those who have been laid off, are disabled and have had their benefits stripped, or have lost their house because they cannot pay their mortgage anymore.

Individual resilience is a weapon against those who suffer, have been disenfranchised, or whom we’re not willing to help. It’s a beautification of “shut up and keep your head down.”

Let’s examine who benefits from the “individual resilience industrial complex,” why it doesn’t serve us well, and what we should do instead.

The Resilience Sellers

The “grow your resilience” business

A notebook with encouraging quotes about resilience.jpg — Photo by Tara Winstead.

One of the core beliefs that makes extreme capitalism successful is individualism, aka “survival of the fittest.” Nobody will care for us but ourselves, so pillaging, stepping on others’ rights, and limitless profiteering are to be revered rather than chastised.

And if you happen to be bearing the brunt of this power imbalance? Be prepared to be shamed for not being “resilient” enough if you dare to complain.

But don’t fret. The business of building individual resilience is there to help you.

Continue reading →

Break Free from Self-Sabotage: 5 Language Mistakes Holding You Back

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Woman with brown curly hair doing the be silent sign by covering her lips with a finger. — Photo by Andrea Piacquadio

I speak three languages — English, French, and Spanish — and have lived in six countries: Canada, France, Greece, Spain, the UK, and Venezuela.

Many things are different in my experience as a woman in those countries. Still, one that remains a constant across languages and territories is how women’s speech patterns serve the patriarchy.

What!?!

Yes. We undermine our ideas, wants, and needs by expressing them in a way that detracts from our credibility, minimises the ask, and asks for permission.

As they say that good writing is about “showing” and not “telling”, I won’t waste your time elaborating on why you do that.

Instead, I will show you five ways how you sabotage yourself and what to do instead.

The advice I’m sharing with you today is based on my experience coaching and mentoring hundreds of women in tech.

Disqualifying Yourself or Your Ideas In Advance

The credibility killer sentence: “I’m not an expert”.

Recently, I was speaking with an accomplished woman about her Master’s degree work. I wanted to learn more about it, so I asked her, “As an expert in this topic, what’s your opinion about [X]?“

And guess what? Her reply started with, “I’m not an expert but…”.

My heart jumped from disappointment. I’ve heard this so many times.

But I know the cure for it: Awareness. So, I asked her

“Don’t you think you have more expertise than me on this topic? I told you I’d only read a couple of articles about it.”

She said “Yes” and smiled.

I smiled, too. I’d proven my point.

Unfortunately, I’ve seen this happen repeatedly throughout my career: Women diminish their credibility before stating their opinions on a subject they are experts — or at least know much more about it than their interlocutor.

Saying “I’m not an expert” is telling to your audience

Don’t believe me
Don’t judge me
Don’t take me seriously

What to do instead?

Continue reading →

The Most Profitable Investment We Ignore: Women’s Health

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Alarm clock with pink ribbon on top over a pink surface with the letters "It is about time." — Photo by Leeloo The First.

Every year, I have mixed feelings about International Women’s Day. Should I be celebrating or protesting? Acknowledging progress or complaining that it’s too slow?

This year I didn’t have a doubt. #IWD2025 was a mourning day for me. In addition to the grief for the lost women’s rights around the world, an overwhelming feeling of impending doom hovered over me.

My public advocacy about gender issues was triggered in 2015 because I didn’t want to die in a world that was seeing me as a second-class citizen because of my gender.

Today, I’m worried about dying in a world where I’ll have less rights than when I was born.

The drama is that while we throw buckets of money to artificial intelligence initiatives, the answer to massively improving productivity whilst boosting sustainability is not AI but improving outcomes for women.

Productivity and Women

From the McKinsey report “Closing the women’s health gap: A $1 trillion opportunity to improve lives and economies” (January 2024)

Global life expectancy increased from 30 years to 73 years between 1800 and 2018.1 But this is not the full picture. Women spend more of their lives in poor health and with degrees of disability (the “health span” rather than the “life span”).

A woman will spend an average of nine years in poor health, which affects her ability to be present and/or productive at home, in the workforce, and in the community and reduces her earning potential.”

Addressing the 25 percent more time that women spend in “poor health” relative to men not only would improve the health and lives of millions of women but also could boost the global economy by at least $1 trillion annually by 2040.

We’d rather invest in generative AI — which so far nobody has been able to monetise directly — than in 4 billion who have demonstrated for millennia that they overdeliver and reinvest in society

When women work, they invest 90 percent of their income back into their families, compared with 35 percent for men.

By focusing on girls and women, innovative businesses and organizations can spur economic progress, expand markets, and improve health and education outcomes for everyone.

Empowering Girls & Women, CLINTON GLOBAL INITIATIVE

Sustainability & Women

Project Drawdown is a cross-functional non-profit organization whose mission is to “map, measure, model, and communicate” practical solutions to global warming.

It has compared more than 100 solutions based on current availability, scaling, economic viability, potential to reduce greenhouse gases, negative secondary effects, and feasibility of simulating their impact globally for 2020–2050.

Their research found that jointly educating girls and enabling family planning are the most powerful solutions to reduce carbon emissions. In other words, the modeling predicts that empowering women could prevent 102.96 billion tons of emissions over the next 30 years.

The equivalent of 722 million cars!

Discover seven communication habits blocking your career in tech and how to neutralise them.

Download HERE

The Data-Action Gap

No country can ever truly flourish if it stifles the potential of its women and deprives itself of the contributions of half of its citizens. Michelle Obama

We not only don’t support women’s health and education outcomes but we’re doing our best to undermine them.

For example, we severely restrict funding for studying female medical conditions.

Nature published an infographic about how underfunded women’s health is in the US. For example

In a selection of 19 cancers, ovarian cancer ranks 5th for lethality, but 12th in terms of its funding-to-lethality ratio. Cervical cancer followed a similar pattern. For many gynaecological cancers, the ratio of funding to mortality dropped during the 11-year period.

But let’s not take it personally. We’re told that this is not a human problem but a “female” problem

Women have been historically under-represented in other parts of the medical research pipeline, such as clinical trials. The same is true for female animals in basic research.

The infographic also provides insights on what would happen if funding for women’s health increased. I’ll share with you a peek

The study also looked at the return on investment from a boost in funding. For rheumatoid arthritis, for instance, the study assumed a 0.1% health improvement, which had huge impacts on quality of life and productivity that together reduced the costs of the disease by around $10.5 billion over 30 years, equating to a staggering 174,000% return on investment.

If you still have any anger left, look at the ridiculous amount of money the EU invests in endometriosis research through its framework programs — 15.5 million euros for a condition that impacts 10% of women in the reproductive-age group; that is, over 175 million women.

Closer to home, breast cancer is the most common cancer for women in the UK, accounting for 30% of new cancer cases. Recently, I attended TEDxManchester, where Professor Simona Francese presented a revolutionary non-invasive method she’s developing to detect breast cancer from fingertip smears. Can you imagine swamping a mammography for a fingertip swab? Unfortunately, she also shared that it took her 6 years to get the £45,000 to fund the proof-of-concept study.

In addition to all of the above, as I mentioned in a recent article, disaggregated clinical trials by gender and sex are the exception, not the norm.

And that’s not all.

We continuously try to erode women’s control over their bodies and fertility.
We close our eyes at how countries curtail women’s education, allow child marriage, and police women’s clothing and movement — a practice that goes back to Ancient Greece.
We profit from the unpaid care performed by women.

Unfortunately, we stubbornly keep searching for answers elsewhere.

Black woman in scrubs looking through a microscope. — Photo by cottonbro studio.

Is AI the Cure-All?

Eric Schmidt (former Google CEO) and Sam Altman (OpenAI CEO) have advocated disregarding concerns about AI’s sustainability — including its voracious datacentres — claiming that in the future, Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) will solve all our problems, from healthcare to economic growth.

The reality? Tech companies have yet to find a business model to make money from generative AI, and definitely AI tools won’t fix the systemic oppression of 4 billion women.

All the opposite. Those in power have consistently weaponised AI against women. Think non-consexual sexual deepfakes, tech-enabled partner surveillance, and policing of female bodies, to mention a few.

And let’s not fall into the lazy hope that more women in tech will deliver AI magic for all.

Techno-solutionism — the belief that technology is the solution to everything — doesn’t work. Look at the COVID-19 pandemic.

We were told that the “solution” was the vaccine. And we managed to develop three within a year — an impressive achievement. Did that fully solve the problem? No, because it was not only about cracking the vaccine formulation. Enough vaccines had to be produced, transported, and refrigerated to supply the demand around the world. Then, companies decided to patent them — hindering the access to millions of people. Finally, there was the people factor, forgotten by most leaders. Not only was it impossible to vaccinate all the planet at once, but some people didn’t want the vaccine while others wanted it but couldn’t have it.

We must face it: there is no techno-cure for our entrenched systemic socio-economic-political issues.

What To Do Next?

We are the ones we have been waiting for.

June Jordan

Thoughts, feelings, actions, and results are intrinsically related.

Thinking that somebody else — allies, AI, and even governments — are going to solve gender oppression may elicit feelings of comfort — or powerlessness — that often may make us focus on keeping our head down and “count our blessings”.

The result? Reinforcing we’re victims of our second-class citizen status.

Instead, I invite you to think that allies, technology, and government have historically let women down for millennia, which in my case provokes feelings of anger, betrayal, and defiance.

And those feelings are powerful. They prompt me to rebel against the loss of rights, participate in communities that foster care and respect, and explore equitable and sustainable futures.

The result? At worst

The pride of standing up for what’s right.
Stopping the world gaslighting our suffering and exploitation.
Offer real hope in the face of techno-optimism.

At best, all of the above and a world where increasingly more people reap the benefits of social, economic, technological progress in harmony with the rest of the planet.

The time for bystanders and “weekend” allies is over. We need warriors.

If you have come here to help me you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.

Lilla Watson

WORK WITH ME

Do you want to get rid of those chapters that patriarchy has written for you in your “good girl” encyclopaedia? Or learn how to do what you want to do in spite of “imposter syndrome”?

I’m a technologist with 20+ years of experience in digital transformation. I’m also an award-winning inclusion strategist and certified life and career coach.

I help ambitious women in tech who are overwhelmed to break the glass ceiling and achieve success without burnout through bespoke coaching and mentoring.

I’m a sought-after international keynote speaker on strategies to empower women and underrepresented groups in tech, sustainable and ethical artificial intelligence, and inclusive workplaces and products.

I empower non-tech leaders to harness the potential of AI for sustainable growth and responsible innovation through consulting and facilitation programs.

Contact me to discuss how I can help you achieve the success you deserve in 2025.

How to Build Inclusive Tech Workplaces That Retain Women Leaders

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pixelated black-and-white portrait of Ada Lovelace where the arrangement of pixels forms intricate borders and repeating patterns. These designs resemble the structure and layout of GPU microchip circuits, blending her historical contributions with modern computational technology. — Hanna Barakat & Cambridge Diversity Fund / Better Images of AI / Lovelace GPU / Licenced by CC-BY 4.0.

It’s again that time of year when I get requests to discuss my career in tech and share my insights on gender equality in the workplace as part of International Women’s Day activities.

This year was no exception. I’ve already received three requests, and there is still one week to go!

I’m sharing my answers to one of them, an interview with the DEI team from my corporate job at Dassault Systemes. It made me reflect on my past achievements, my advice to younger women aspiring to be leaders, and the role of men and organisations leading gender equality.

About Me

Can you share your journey so far? What were the pivotal moments or key achievements most important to you?

I can categorise them into five buckets.

Discovering computer simulation: My background is Chemical Engineering, and when I started my master’s, I had to decide on a topic for my thesis. I loved research, but I hated the lab, so when a professor mentioned the possibility of using computers to study enhanced oil recovery using computer simulation, I thought I could have the best of both worlds—and I did. I haven’t looked back.
Joining Accelrys/BIOVIA: Twenty years ago, I joined Accelrys—which later became BIOVIA—as a training scientist. It has been one of my best professional decisions. It has opened innumerable professional doors and given me the opportunity to meet extraordinary people worldwide, both as colleagues and customers.
Daring to say yes to new opportunities: Although I started as a trainer, I’ve worn many hats in the last 20 years. I’ve been Head of Contract Research and Head of Training, and also been part of the team leading the BIOVIA and COSMOlogic integrations to Dassault Systemes. Today, I’m BIOVIA Support Director for BIOVIA Modeling Solutions and also the manager of the Global BIOVIA Call Center. I could have said “no” to each of those opportunities. Instead, I trusted myself and embraced the opportunity of a new challenge.
Diversity and inclusion advocacy: In 2015, I started to talk about diversity and inclusion in 3DS. I remember colleagues asking me, “Patricia, is DEI an American thing?”. The following year, with the support of our Geo management team, I founded the EuroNorth LeanIn Circles to have a forum to discuss gender equity and that, throughout the years, has expanded to a variety of DEI topics such as unconscious bias, menopause, ethical AI, caregiving, and lookism. I publish a biweekly newsletter called The Bottom Line about DEI on the Dassault Systemes community focused on gender in the workplace. I also have my website focused on the intersection of tech and DEI.
Ethical and inclusive AI leadership: In 2019, I created the Ethics and Inclusion Framework to help designers identify, prevent, mitigate, and account for the actual and potential harm of the products and services they developed. The tool has been featured in peer-reviewed papers and on the University of Cambridge website. The next year, I started my work towards championing ethical and inclusive artificial intelligence by collaborating with NGOs focused on AI literacy and critical thinking about AI, participating in the developement of e-learning course of the Scottish AI Alliance and the Race and AI Toolkit, and writing and delivering keynotes and workshops on topics such as AI colonialism, AI hype, sustainable AI, deepfakes, and how to design more diverse images of AI.

As for accolades, I’m very proud to have won the 2020 Women in Tech Changemakers award and been featured on the 2022, 2023, and 2024 longlist of the most influential women in UK tech.

Who has been your greatest mentor or source of inspiration and why?

At a couple of points in my life, I craved “the” mentor or “the” role model to follow. However, given my unique background and goals, I realised that this was exhausting and counterproductive.

I’ve been an immigrant my entire life – I’m Spanish, and I’m now in the UK, but I’ve also lived in Venezuela, Canada, Greece, and France – and I’m also used to being the “odd” one. For example, I liked all subjects in the school – from literature to chemistry. I was one of the few women engineers during my undergraduate degree. Then, I was the only engineer pursuing a PhD in Chemistry in the whole department, and the only one using modelling – everybody else was an experimentalist. During my post-doc, I was the only foreigner in the lab. And for many years, I’ve combined my corporate work at 3DS with my DEI advocacy and writing.

I prefer the idea of a “board” of coaches, mentors, and sponsors who evolve with me rather than a unique person, real or imaginary.

If you could go back and tell your younger self anything, what would you say?

First, I’d thank her for her courage, persistence, ambition, and boldness. She made choices aligned with her values and was always eager to learn. Her decisions were crucial to my success today.

Then, I’d tell her that the problem with her not fitting into a mould was not her but with the mould.

Finally, I’d exhort her to invest in a coach and find sponsors. A coach to help remove the limiting beliefs I had for many years about what I could and couldn’t do and maximise my potential. Sponsors to advocate for me in the rooms where decisions were made about my career.

About Others

What advice would you give to younger women aspiring to be leaders?

I have three pieces of advice

Don’t wait to find a role model to do what you want to do. Dare to be the first one.
Don’t waste time trying to convince people who disregard the value you bring to the table. Instead, find those who support your ambitions and challenge you to go beyond any feelings of self-doubt that block your career progression.
Following on the advice to my younger self above, get a coach and find career sponsors.

Discover seven communication habits blocking your career in tech and how to neutralise them.

Download HERE

What do you think is the biggest issue women in tech/business face today?

I’m writing a book about how women in tech succeed worldwide based on feedback from 500+ women in tech living in 60+ countries.

The issues that span across countries, sectors, and departments are benevolent sexism (e.g. not offering a leadership role to a woman because it involves travelling and she has a baby, instead of giving her the opportunity to decide), tech bro culture (behaviours such as mansplaining, hepeating, maninterrupting, manels), lack of an intersectional approach to work and workplaces (e.g. ignoring the experiences of carers, women with disabilities, LBTQIA+ groups), and for women in business, lack of funding.

This year’s global theme for IWD 2025 is #AccelerateAction. What actions can teams and organisations take to achieve gender parity and equality?

There are four key actions

Mindset overhaul: Moving from playing a supporting role in gender equality to being transformation agents.
Leadership accountability: Teams and organisations’ leaders need to be accountable for gender equality initiatives as they are for other business objectives. Change begins at the top, and that’s where the buck stops.
Transparency: Equality cannot thrive when data and objectives are hidden. For example, I’m a big fan of transparency in pay and promotion criteria.
Embracing intersectionality: We need to move from designing workplaces for the “average” worker—following Henry Ford and scientific management—to appreciating the distinctive value of a diverse and empowered workforce.

What role do you see male allies playing in advancing gender equality?

Gender equity is not a zero-sum game or a favour for women. All genders benefit from equality, and everybody should see it as a duty to advocate for gender equity, no different than everyone should be anti-racist and anti-ableist. Those who do not actively challenge inequality contribute to strengthening it.

Back to You

What are your answers to the questions above? Let me know in the comments.

WORK WITH ME

Do you want to get rid of those chapters that patriarchy has written for you in your “good girl” encyclopaedia? Or learn how to do what you want to do in spite of “imposter syndrome”?

I’m a technologist with 20+ years of experience in digital transformation. I’m also an award-winning inclusion strategist and certified life and career coach.

I help ambitious women in tech who are overwhelmed to break the glass ceiling and achieve success without burnout through bespoke coaching and mentoring.
I’m a sought-after international keynote speaker on strategies to empower women and underrepresented groups in tech, sustainable and ethical artificial intelligence, and inclusive workplaces and products.
I empower non-tech leaders to harness the potential of AI for sustainable growth and responsible innovation through consulting and facilitation programs.

Contact me to discuss how I can help you achieve the success you deserve in 2025.

More Women in Tech Won’t Fix AI — Systemic Change Will

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A black-and-white image depicting the early computer, Bombe Machine, during World War II. In the foreground, the shadow of a woman in vintage clothing is cast on a man changing the machine's cable. — Hanna Barakat & Cambridge Diversity Fund / Better Images of AI / Shadow Work– Decrypting Bletchley Park’s Codebreakers / Licenced by CC-BY 4.0.

Last year, at a women’s conference in London, I was disappointed to see that digital inclusion — and AI in particular — was missing from the agenda. I remember telling the NGO’s CEO about my concerns, even mentioning my articles on AI as a techno-patriarchal tool.

Her receptive response had given me hope. That hope was reignited this year when I eagerly reviewed the program and discovered a panel on AI.

The evening before the event, an unexpected sense of dread began to settle in. When I asked myself why, the answer struck me like a lightning bolt.

I dreaded hearing the “we need more women in tech” mantra once more – another example of how we deflect the solution of a systemic problem to those bearing the brunt of it.

Let me tell you what I mean.

Women as Human Fixers

For millennia, women had been assigned the duty to give birth and care for children, rooted in the fact that most of them can carry human fetuses for 9 months. That duty to be a womb endures today, where ownership of our bodies is being taken away through coercive anti-abortion laws.

Our “duty” of care has been broadened to the workplace, where we’ve been assigned the unwritten rule of “fixing” all that’s dysfunctional.

Coerced into doing things nobody else cares to do, i.e. weaponised incompetence.
Fixing teams’ dynamics because we’re the “naturally” collaborative ones.
Doing the glue work — being appointed the shoulder where all team members can cry and find an “empathetic ear”.
Do the office work — we’re the ones that are “organised”, so dull tasks pile up on our desks whilst “less” organised peers do the promotable work.

And that “fixer” stereotype now includes “our” duties as women in tech. When the sector was in its infancy, women were doing the supposedly boring stuff (programming) while men were doing the hardware (the “cool” stuff). When computers took off, we trained men in programming so they could become our managers. Then, we were pushed out of those jobs in the 1980s. The only constant has been doing the job but not getting the accolades (see women’s role in Bletchley Park, Hidden Figures).

Moreover, whilst statistics tell us that 50% of women leave tech by age 35, young girls and women are supposed to brush off that “inconvenient” truth and rest assured that tech is an excellent place for a career. Moreover, that they are anointed to make tech work for everybody.

What’s not to like, right?

Then, let me show the to-do list of 21 tasks and expectations the world imposes on each woman in tech.

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10 Reasons Zuckerberg’s “Masculine Energy” Should Worry Us All

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Two men fighting in a boxing ring with one wearing a red shirt. — Photo by Franco Monsalvo.

Statistics tell us that 70% of all senior executives are alpha male, so I’d thought we had enough “masculine energy.” Mark Zuckerberg disagrees.

In a recent podcast, he called businesses to dial up “masculine energy.”

It’s like you want like feminine energy, you want masculine energy. Like I, I think that that’s like you’re gonna have parts of society that have more of one or the other. I think that that’s all good.

But, but I do think the corporate culture sort of had swung towards being this somewhat more neutered thing. And I didn’t really feel that until I got involved in martial arts, which I think is still a more, much more masculine culture.

[…] Like, well that’s how you become successful at martial arts. You have to be at least somewhat aggressive.

Why? Because he’s not talking about others. He’s telling us about himself unleashing his “masculine energy”. For example,

Revamping his clothes and demeanour — from looking like a perennial geeky student to a cool billionaire tech millennial.
Embracing far-right politics — check the inauguration picture where his second row with “chums” Musk, Bezos, and Pichai.
Stopping faking playing nice — He got rid of fact-checkers and told Meta’s 3 billion users that was their job, not his.

Moreover, he’s a more “palatable” version of Elon — equally successful, not so toxic, and has undergone a very public appearance Meta-morphosis —which makes him dangerously appealing to young men… And maybe to women too. After all, he has three daughters and no sons.

Given his extreme financial success and now closeness to political power, I pondered

What would it take for me to unleash my “masculine energy”?

And I came up with 10 precepts.

1.- Recycle

The first iteration of Facebook was “Facemash” — a website Zuckerberg created whilst studying at Harvard — to evaluate the attractiveness of female students. Users were presented with pairs of photos of female students and asked to vote who was hotter.

The kick? The photos were stolen.

The students were unaware their images were being used for this rating, judging by the complaint from Fuerza Latina and the Harvard Association of Black Women. The site used ID photos of female undergraduates taken without permission from the university’s online directories.

This “repurposing” of data would become a hallmark of Facebook (see Cambridge Analytica later).

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The Missing Pieces in the UK’s AI Opportunities Action Plan

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A brightly coloured mural which can be viewed in any direction. It has several scenes within it: people in front of computers seeming stressed, a number of faces overlaid over each other, squashed emojis, miners digging in front of a huge mountain representing mineral resources, a hand holding a lump of coal or carbon, hands manipulating stock charts and error messages, as well as some women performing tasks on computers, men in suits around a table, someone in a data centre, big hands controlling the scenes and holding a phone, people in a production line. Motifs such as network diagrams and melting emojis are placed throughout the busy vignettes. — Clarote & AI4Media / Better Images of AI / AI Mural / CC-BY 4.0.

Reading the 50 recommendations in the AI Opportunities Action Plan published by the British Government last January 13th has been a painful and disappointing exercise.

Very much like a proposal out of a chatbot, the document is

Bland — The text is full of hyperbolic language and over-the-top optimism
General — The 50 recommendations lack specificity to the UK context and details about ownership and the budget required to execute them.
Contradictory — The plan issued by a Labour government is anchored in a turbo-capitalistic ideology. Oxymoron anyone?

If I learned anything from my 12 years in Venezuela, it’s that putting all your eggs in one basket — oil, in their case — and hoping it solves all problems doesn’t work.

A credible AI strategy must (a) address both the benefits and the challenges head-on and (b) consider this technology as another asset to the human-centric flourishment of the country rather than a goal in itself that should be pursued at all costs.

But you don’t need to believe me. See it for yourself.

What I read

Techno-speak

I was reminded of George Orwell’s 1984 Newspeak.

The text uses “AI” made works such as AI stack, frontier AI, AI-driven data cleansing tools, AI-enabled priorities, “embodied AI” without providing a clear definition.

Exaggeration

Hyperbole and metaphors are used to the extreme to overstate the benefits.

we want Britain to step up; to shape the AI revolution rather than wait to see how it shapes us.

We should expect enormous improvements in computation over the next decade, both in research and deployment.

Change lives by embracing AI

FOMO

The text transpires FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out). No option is given to adopt AI systems more gradually. It’s now or we’ll be the losers.

This is a crucial asymmetric bet — and one the UK can and must make

we need to “run to stand still”.

the UK risks falling behind the advances in Artificial Intelligence made in the USA and China.

And even a new take on Facebook’s famous “move fast and break things”:

“move fast and learn things”

Techno-solutionism

AI is going to solve all our socio-economic and political problems and transport us to a utopian future

It is hard to imagine how we will meet the ambition for highest sustained growth in the G7 — and the countless quality-of-life benefits that flow from that — without embracing the opportunities of AI.

Our ambition is to shape the AI revolution on principles of shared economic prosperity, improved public services and increased personal opportunities so that:
• AI drives the economic growth on which the prosperity of our people and the performance of our public services depend;
• AI directly benefits working people by improving health care and education and how citizens interact with their government; and
• the increasing of prevalence of AI in people’s working lives opens up new opportunities rather than just threatens traditional patterns of work.

What’s not to like?

For a great commentary on how techno-solutionism won’t solve social problems, see 20 Petitions for AI and Public Good in 2025 by Tania Duarte.

Colonialism

Living in Venezuela for 12 years was an education on how to feel “less than” other countries even when you have the largest oil reserves in the world.

I remember new education programs announced as being a success in the US, Canada, Spain, Germany… A colonised mentality learned from centuries of Spanish oppression. The pervasive assumption that an initiative would work simply because we like the results disregarding the context they were developed for.

The AI Opportunities Action Plan reminded me of them.

Supporting universities to develop new courses co-designed with industry — such as the successful co-operative education model of Canada’s University of Waterloo, CDTM at the Technical University of Munich or France’s CIFRE PhD model

Launch a flagship undergraduate and masters AI scholarship programme on the scale of Rhodes, Marshall, or Fulbright for students to study in the UK.

Singapore, for example, developed a national AI skills online platform with multiple training offers. South Korea is integrating AI, data and digital literacy.

But the document is also keen on showing us that we’ll be the colonisers

we aspire to be one of the biggest winners from AI

Because we believe Britain has a particular responsibility to provide global leadership in fairly and effectively seizing the opportunities of AI, as we have done on AI safety

A historical-style painting of a young woman stands before the Colossus computer. She holds an abstract basket filled with vibrant, pastel circles representing data points. The basket is attached to the computer through a network of connecting wires, symbolizing the flow and processing of information. — Hanna Barakat & Cambridge Diversity Fund / Better Images of AI / Colossal Harvest / CC-BY 4.0

Capitulation

The document is all about surrendering the data, agency, tax money, and natural resources of citizens in the UK to the AI Gods: startups, “experts”, and investors.

Invest in becoming a great customer: government purchasing power can be a huge lever for improving public services, shaping new markets in AI

We should seek to responsibly unlock both public and private data sets to enable innovation by UK startups and researchers and to attract international talent and capital.

Couple compute allocation with access to proprietary data sets as part of an attractive offer to researchers and start-ups choosing to establish themselves in the UK and to unlock innovation.

Sprinkling AI

AI is the Pantone’s Colour of the next 5 years. All will need to have AI on it. Moreover, everything must be designed so that AI can shine.

Appointing an AI lead for each mission to help identify where AI could be a solution within the mission setting, considering the user needs from the outset.

Two-way partnerships with AI vendors and startups to anticipate future AI developments and signal public sector demand. This would involve government meeting product teams to understand upcoming releases and shape development by sharing their challenges.

AI should become core to how we think about delivering services, transforming citizens’ experiences, and improving productivity.

Brexit Denial

It’s funny to see that the text doesn’t reference the European Union and only refers to Europe as a benchmark to measure against.

Instead, the EU is hinted at as “like-minded partners” and “allies” and collaborations are thrown right and left without naming who’s the partner.

Agree international compute partnerships with like-minded countries to increase the types of compute capability available to researchers and catalyse research collaborations. This should focus on building arrangements with key allies, as well as expanding collaboration with existing partners like the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking.

We should proactively develop these partnerships, while also taking an active role in the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking.

Moreover, the text praises the mobility of researchers and wanting to attract experts forgetting the UK’s refusal to participate in the Erasmus program and the fact that it only joined Horizon Europe last year.

The UK is a medium-sized country with a tight fiscal situation. We need the best talent around the world to want to start and scale companies here.

Explore how the existing immigration system can be used to attract graduates from universities producing some of the world’s top AI talent.

Vagueness

Ideas are thrown into the text half-backed giving the idea the government has adopted the Silicon Valley strategy of “building the plane while flying”

The government must therefore secure access to a sufficient supply of compute. There is no precise mechanism to allocate the proportions

In another example, the plan advocates for open-source AI applications.

the government should support open-source solutions that can be adopted by other organisations and design processes with startups and other innovators in mind.

The AI infrastructure choice at-scale should be standardised, tools should be built with reusable modular code components, and code-base open-sourcing where possible.

At the same time, it’s adamant that it needs to attract startups and investors. Except if the startups are NGOs, who’ll then finance those open-source models?

DEI for Beginners

Students at computers with screens that include a representation of a retinal scanner with pixelation and binary data overlays and a brightly coloured datawave heatmap at the top. — Kathryn Conrad / Better Images of AI / Datafication / CC-BY 4.0

All of us who have been working towards a more diverse and inclusive tech for decades are in for a treat.

First, we’re told that diversity in tech is very simple — it’s all about gender parity and pipeline.

16. Increase the diversity of the talent pool. Only 22% of people working in AI and data science are women. Achieving parity would mean thousands of additional workers. […] Government should build on this investment and promote diversity throughout the education pipeline.

Moreover, they’ve found the magic bullet.

Hackathons and competitions in schools have proven effective at getting overlooked groups into cyber and so should be considered for AI.

What about the fact that 50% of women in tech leave the sector by the age of 35?

What I missed

Regions

The government mentions that AI “can” — please note that is not a “must” or “need” — benefit “post-industrial towns and coastal Scotland.” However, the only reference to a place is to the Culham Science Centre, which is 10 miles from Oxford — a zone that very few could consider needs “local rejuvenation” or “channelling investment”

Government can also use AIGZs [‘AI Growth Zones’] to drive local rejuvenation, channelling investment into areas with existing energy capacity such as post-industrial towns and coastal Scotland. Government should quickly nominate at least one AIGZ and work with local regions to secure buy-in for further AIGZs that contribute to local needs . Existing government sites could be prioritised as pilots, including Culham Science Centre

And it doesn’t appear to be room to involve local authorities in how AI could bring value to their regions

Drive AI adoption across the whole country. Widespread adoption of AI can address regional disparities in growth and productivity. To achieve this, government should leverage local trusted intermediaries and trade bodies

Costs

There are plenty of gigantic numbers about how much money will AI (may) bring

AI adoption could grow the UK economy by an additional £400 billion by 2030 through enhancing innovation and productivity in the workplace

but nothing about the costs…

Literacy

How will people get upskilled? We only get generic reassurances

government should encourage and promote alternative domestic routes into the AI profession — including through further education and apprenticeships, as well as employer and self-led upskilling.

Government should ensure there are sufficient opportunities for workers to reskill, both into AI and AI-enabled jobs and more widely.

Citizens

There is no indication in the document that this “AI-driven” Britain is what their citizens want. Citizens themselves don’t appear to be included in shaping AI either.

For example, it claims that teachers are already “benefiting” from AI assistants

it is helping some teachers cut down the 15+ hours a week they spend on lesson planning and marking in pilots.

However, the text doesn’t tell us that teachers want to give up class preparation.

And the text repeatedly states that the government will prioritise “innovation” (aka profit) vs safety.

My judgement is that experts, on balance, expect rapid progress to continue. The risks from underinvesting and underpreparing, though, seem much greater than the risks from the opposite.

Moreover, regulators are expected to enable innovation at all costs

Require all regulators to publish annually how they have enabled innovation and growth driven by AI in their sector. […] government should consider more radical changes to our regulatory model for AI, for example by empowering a central body with a mandate and higher risk tolerance to promote innovation across the economy.

Where did we sing for that?

Sustainability

The document waxes lyrical about building datacentres. What about the electricity and water requirements? What about the impact on our water reserves and electricity grid? What about the repercussions on our sustainability goals?

The document is done by throwing the word sustainability twice in one paragraph

Mitigate the sustainability and security risks of AI infrastructure, while positioning the UK to take advantage of opportunities to provide solutions. [..] Government should also explore ways to support novel approaches to compute hardware and, where appropriate, create partitions in national supercomputers to support new and innovative hardware. In doing so, government should look to support and partner with UK companies who can demonstrate performance, sustainability or security advancements.

An array of colorful, fossil-like data imprints representing the static nature of AI models, laden with outdated contexts and biases. — Luke Conroy and Anne Fehres & AI4Media / Better Images of AI / Models Built From Fossils / CC-BY 4.0

Unemployment

The writers of that utopic “AI-powered” UK manifesto don’t address job losses. We only get the sentence I mentioned above

the increasing of prevalence of AI in people’s working lives opens up new opportunities rather than just threatens traditional patterns of work.

Instead, it uses language that fosters fear and builds on utopian and dystopian visions of an AI-driven future

AI systems are increasingly matching or surpassing humans across a range of tasks.

Given the pace of progress, we will also very soon see agentic systems — systems that can be given an objective, then reason, plan and act to achieve it. The chatbots we are all familiar with are just an early glimpse as to what is possible.

On the flip side, the government repeatedly reiterates their ambition of bringing talent from abroad

Supporting UK-based AI organisations working on national priority projects to bring in overseas talent and headhunting promising founders or CEOs

How does this plan contribute to reassuring people about their jobs?

Big-picture

This techno-solutionism approach doesn’t have any regard for AI specialists in domains other than coding or IT.

To mention a few, what about sociologists, psychologists, philosophers, teachers, historians, economists, or specialists in the broad spectrum of industries in the UK?

Don’t they belong to those think tanks where decisions are made about selling our country to the AI Gods?

The Good News? We Can Do Better

People in Britain voted last year that they were tired of profits over people, centralism, and oligarchy. Unfortunately, this plan uses AI to reinforce the three.

The UK is full of hardworking and smart people who deserve much better than magic bullets or techno-saviours.

Instead of shoehorning the UK’s future to AI, what if we

abandon the false mantra that innovation comes with inequality?
demote AI from a “God” status to a technology as our ancestors did with the Fire Deities?
design AI systems to empower people instead of making humans serve AI?

WORK WITH ME

I’m a technologist with 20+ years of experience in digital transformation. I’m also an award-winning inclusion strategist and certified life and career coach.

Three ways you can work with me:

I empower non-tech leaders to harness the potential of artificial intelligence for sustainable growth and responsible innovation through consulting and AI competency programs.
I’m a sought-after international keynote speaker on strategies to empower women and underrepresented groups in tech, sustainable and ethical artificial intelligence, and inclusive workplaces and products.
I help ambitious women in tech who are overwhelmed to break the glass ceiling and achieve success without burnout through bespoke coaching and mentoring.

Get in touch to discuss how I can help you achieve the success you deserve in 2025.

Seven Ways Big Data Leaves Women Out of the Equation

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Projection of numbers on a young woman's face. — Photo by Rada Aslanova.

Some months ago, a LinkedIn post showcasing an excerpt from the Chasing Financial Equality podcast with Cindy Galop stopped me in my tracks.

I didn’t know who Cindy was. Later, I discovered she’s a brand and business innovator, consultant, coach, and keynote speaker who participated in the UK Apprentice. She’s been building a business out of teaching sex and she’s also a women’s entrepreneur advocate.

Still, that one-minute video in my feedback was so powerful that I didn’t care who was speaking.

“F*ck data. Data does f*ck all.

We have literally for decades had the data you reference that says female founders exit faster, female founders burn less cash, female founders get to profitability quicker, female founders build better business cultures, but none of that data makes any difference.

[…] Information goes through the heart, not the head. It’s not about rationality. It’s about emotion.

The reason women don’t get funded is due to plain old-fashioned sexism and misogyny.”

Cindy Gallop

My background is in engineering and computer simulation and I’m Director of Scientific Support and Customer Operations for a tech corporation. I’m also a diversity and inclusion advocate. I’ve been using data for 30 years for everything I’ve done.

Using simulation to guide the development of new materials, leading the migration of all our customer support data after an acquisition, monitoring customer satisfaction KPIs, supporting the business case for enhanced maternity leave in the company I work for, and surveying professional women about the impact of COVID-19 on their unpaid work are only a few examples.

Still, Cindy’s post triggered an epiphany.

I began to recall all the ways data — or its absence — has been manipulated to foster gender inequality. From entrenching the status quo to promoting “busy work”, wearing out activists, or even benefiting those who profit from inequality.

Let’s show you what I found.

Gender Data Myths

“In God we trust, all others bring data.”

W. Edwards Deming

Data has been heralded as the key to innovation, solving systemic issues, and exponential growth (Big Data anyone?). We “just” need data, don’t we?

In theory, women have accounted for half of the population throughout humanity. We should have collected millions of data points over millennia. How come we haven’t solved gender inequality yet?

Because we’ve been using data against women.

At a time when we abide by the creed “data is the new oil”, it cannot be a coincidence that we’re solving this “data problem”

Here are the 7 ways data is weaponised against gender equity.

Lack of data

In the absence of data, we will always make up stories.

Brené Brown

Woman sitting on a dune on a desert background. — Photo by cottonbro studio.

Recorded historical contributions to science and humanities — medicine, literature, chemistry, philosophy, politics, or engineering — have XY chromosomes.

From that “data”, the world feels very comfortable making up stories about the reasons why “progress” has been driven by men. If we have data, we must have a story about it.

The story we’re told about the lack of data on women’s contributions is that women haven’t contributed. Yes, for millennia, women were just in the background waiting for men to learn about fire, cure their children, or bring money home.

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2025 AI Forecast: 25 Predictions You Need to Know Now

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This image shows an individual with orange hair interacting with a large, abstract digital mirrored structure. The structure is composed of squares in varying shades of green, orange, white, and black which are pieced together to reflect the individual’s figure. The figure's hand is extended as if pointing to or interacting with the mirrored structure. Behind the structure are streams of binary code (0s and 1s) in orange, flowing towards the digital grid. — Yutong Liu & Kingston School of Art / Better Images of AI / Talking to AI 2.0 / Licenced by CC-BY 4.0.

I’ve been betting on the transformative power of digital technology all my professional career.

I started doing computer simulation during my MSc in Chemical Engineering in the 1990s, in a lab where everybody else was an experimentalist. Except for my advisor, the rest of the team was sceptical — to say the least — that something useful would come from using computer modelling to study enhanced oil recovery from oil fields .
A similar story repeated during my PhD in Chemistry, where I pioneered using molecular modelling to study polymers in a research centre focused on the experimental study of polymers and proteins.
For the last 20+ years, I’ve been working on digital transformation playing a similar role. First, as Head of Training and Contract Research, and now as Director of Scientific Support, I relish helping my customers harness the potential of digital technology for responsible innovation.

I’m also known for telling it as I see it. In the early 2000s, I was training a customer — incidentally an experimentalist — on genetic algorithms. He was very excited and asked me if he could create a model for designing a new material. He proudly shared he had “7 to 10 data points.” My answer? “Far too few.’”

In summary, I’m very comfortable being surrounded by tech sceptics, dispelling myths about what AI can and can’t do, and betting on the power of digital technology.

And that’s exactly why I’m sharing with you my AI predictions for 2025.

My Predictions

1.- xAI (owned by Elon Musk) will purchase X so that the first can freely train its models on the data from the second. Elon owns 79% of X after he bought it for $44 billion. Now it’s valued at $9.4 billion and big advertisers keep leaving the platform.

After struggling for almost 3 years to make it work, the xAI acquisition — which got a $6 billion funding round in December — would be a win-win.

2.- OpenAI for-profit organisation will formally split from the original non-profit. I bet on this despite Elon Musk’s injunction to stop OpenAI’s transition to a for-profit company (supported by Meta).

Why? A clause in OpenAI’s $150 billion funding round allows investors to request their money back if the switch isn’t completed within two years.

3.- The generation and usage of synthetic data will balloon to address data privacy concerns. People want better services and products — especially in healthcare — but are unwilling to give up their personal data. The solution? “Creating” data.

4.- Startups and organisations will move from using large language models (LLMs) to focusing on SLMs (small language models), which consume less energy, produce fewer hallucinations, and are customised to companies’ requirements.

An image of multiple 3D shapes representing speech bubbles in a sequence, with broken up fragments of text within them. — Wes Cockx & Google DeepMind / Better Images of AI / AI large language models / Licenced by CC-BY 4.0.

5.- In FY 2025, Microsoft plans to invest approximately $80 billion to build AI-enabled datacenters but don’t expect that to go smoothly with everybody. In 2024, datacenters consumption gathered a lot of attention.

This year local authorities and NGOs will develop frameworks to scrutinise datacenters electricity and water consumption. They’ll also be tracked in terms of disruption to the locals: electricity stability, water availability, and electricity and water prices.

6.- Rise of the two-tier AI-human customer support model: AI chatbots for self-service and low-revenue customers and human customer support for key and high-revenue clients.

It’s not only a question of money but also of liability. There is less probability that low-profit customers sue providers over AI chatbots delivering harmful and/or inaccurate content.

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Beta Leaders: How Software Development Can Inspire Better Leadership

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White man in a dark suit donning a full face mask of a gorilla. He's over a clear background and has one thumb up. — Image by Felix Lichtenfeld from Pixabay.

In 2023, John Allan, former chair of the board of the UK supermarket chain Tesco, quit amid sexual misconduct allegations. He denied the charges.

He also shared some “pearls of wisdom” following the harassment claims

“A lot of men say to me they’re getting increasingly nervous about working with women, mentoring women.”

The silver lining of the high visibility of Allan’s misconduct allegations and subsequent remarks was that it brought to the surface a long-overdue discussion about how women get less mentoring and sponsorship from men. In particular, men in power.

But to me, the highlight was the article Men, are you nervous working with women? written by three men reflecting on Allan’s assertion that working with women is “complicated.”

More specifically, I had an aha moment reading journalist Nick Curtis’s remark

“I’m happy to admit that I’m a beta male, in a world where men such as Andrew Tate and Boris Johnson — and probably captains of industry like Allan — consider themselves alpha dogs.”

It has been bubbling under my consciousness since I read it and, when recently we discussed the merits of beta software releases at work, two questions formed in my mind

What could leadership learn from the beta release process?
How would workplaces — and the world — change if we had “beta” leaders?

But first, let’s recap where the term “alpha leadership” comes from and what it means.

Alpha Animals

A dominance hierarchy is a type of social hierarchy that arises when members of animal social groups interact, creating a ranking system.

A dominant higher-ranking individual is sometimes called an alpha, and a submissive lower-ranking individual is called a beta.

Wikipedia

Attributes of alpha animals in some species are

Preferential access to food and other desirable items or activities.
Privileged entitlement to sex or mates to the extent that, in some species, only alphas or an alpha pair reproduce.
Some may achieve their status by superior physical strength and aggression but also by being the parent of all in their pack.

We find examples of alpha species in primates, birds, fish, seals, and canines.

The Alpha Myths

There are many misunderstandings — and lies — about the alpha role in the animal kingdom.

First, there are also female alphas. Examples are lemurs and hyenas. Moreover, every primate group has one alpha male and one alpha female. In bonobos, the alpha at the top of the community is a female.

Second, the idea that wolf packs are led by “alpha” males came from studies of captive wolves in the mid-20th century. New studies of wolves in the wild have found that most wolf packs are families, led by the breeding pair, and bloody duels for supremacy are rare.

Moreover, Frans de Waal, the primatologist and ethologist who popularised the term “alpha male” in his book “Chimpanzee Politics,” was keen on dispelling the misunderstanding that alpha males are not synonymous with bullies.

In his TEDx talk The surprising science of alpha males, de Waal explained that in chimpanzee societies, the smallest male in the group can be the alpha male if he has the right friends and keeps them happy or has female support.
It’s very stressful to be an alpha male because you have to defend your position.
They have the obligation to keep the peace in the group and be the most empathic member. Interestingly, alpha male chimpanzees provide security for the lowest-ranking members of the group and comfort for all members. That makes them extremely popular and stabilises their position.
The group is usually very supportive of males who are good leaders, and it’s not supportive at all of bullies.

In summary, in the animal kingdom, alpha males benefit from preferential access to females and food and, in primates, and they’re accountable for keeping the peace and comforting their group in times of distress.

Alpha Human Leadership

However, that message has not been transferred to the concept of being an “alpha leader” when talking about humans. Instead, many of us equate the term to being all at once “successful-overachiever-bully-workaholic-male-egocentric-boss”.

Whilst dictators are automatically labelled as “alpha leaders,” we have many “democratic” leaders that fit the description too. From the tech perspective, figures like Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Travis Kalanick, and Peter Thiel come to my mind when I think about “alpha male leaders”.

However, given those connotations, we may think most leaders don’t want to be classified as “alpha.” Wrong.

Throughout my career, I’ve met many people proud of claiming their “alpha” status — male and female. The reason? Because the term is so ill-defined it enables leaders to “pick and choose” attributes as they see fit.

And scanning Google doesn’t help clarify matters.

The misogynist Andrew Tate has dubbed himself “high status” and an “alpha male”. He has co-opted this term as his brand to mean “strong and successful men who believe in male supremacy and violence against women.” And it sells.

When “transferring” the alpha animal concept to humans, leadership management and consultancies put the accent on dominance, priority access to essential resources, hierarchy, aggressiveness, and protection from external threats.

The results? Those traits get “beautified” — alpha leaders are perceived as decisive, self-confident, assertive, charismatic, risk-taking, good networkers, and high-achievers.

The social and behavioural rules of animals can be clearly transferred to leaders in the business world.

“Alpha animals” in the business world is a metaphor used to describe dominant, influential, and highly successful individuals or companies that lead their industry.

Morgan Phillips Group, Recruitment and Talent Consulting Services

The statistic that “70% of all senior executives are alpha male” is pervasive throughout the internet.

From coaching services to Harvard Business Review (HBR), everybody appears to quote the number and idolise those “super-humans.” Often, being “alpha” is presented as a “natural” or “inherent” trait.

Highly intelligent, confident, and successful, alpha males represent about 70% of all senior executives. Natural leaders, they willingly take on levels of responsibility most rational people would find overwhelming.

[…] it’s hard to imagine the modern corporation without alpha leaders.

Harvard Business Review

What’s the problem with alpha leaders then? Their teams!

many of their quintessential strengths can also make alphas difficult to work with. Their self-confidence can appear domineering. Their high expectations can make them excessively critical. Their unemotional style can keep them from inspiring their teams.

Harvard Business Review

Apparently, if the “beta” people were not so picky, the alpha’s life would be much better…

Female Alpha Leaders

As for female alpha leaders, HBR is skeptical…

In our work with senior executives, we’ve encountered many women who possess some of the traits of the alpha male, but none who possess all of them.

The reasons?

Women can be just as data driven and opinionated as alpha males and can cope with stress equally well, but the vast majority of women place more value on interpersonal relationships and pay closer attention to people’s feelings.

Women at the top are generally comfortable with control and being in charge, but they don’t seek to dominate people and situations as alpha males do. Although equally talented, ambitious, and hardheaded, they often rise to positions of authority by excelling at collaboration, and they are less inclined to resort to intimidation to get what they want.

As we can see, valuing interpersonal relationships, collaboration, and avoiding resorting to intimidation excludes women from that selective club of natural-born alpha leaders.

Alpha Leaders Bottom Line

Coaches and consultants are happy to both venerate and offer help to alpha male leaders to perform even better.

Their solution? “Teach” those leaders to

Admit vulnerability, accept accountability not just for his own work but for others’, connect with his underlying emotions, learn to motivate through a balance of criticism and validation, and become aware of unproductive behavior patterns.

Following that rationale, this implies that 70% of senior executives

Don’t admit vulnerability
Don’t accept accountability for their team’s work
Don’t connect with their emotions
Don’t balance criticism and validation
And are unaware of their unproductive behaviour patterns

What could go wrong?

Other Leadership Styles

As for the alternatives to alpha male leadership, there have been two main approaches.

The Mutating Leader

Some research suggests that the most effective leaders adapt their style to different circumstances.

For example, using coercive leadership when handling a crisis but adopting a coaching style when developing people for the future.

In theory, it sounds reasonable and many leadership consultancies are making money with it.

In practice, it’s extremely tough to implement. Why?

Leaders are human beings and they tend to fall into their most comfortable style.
Behavioural science experiments have shown us that having many options may trigger analysis-paralysis rather than better choices. For example, being presented with choosing one among 100 different jam flavours often results in no choice at all. Same with leadership styles.

The Virtuous Leader

The other take has been to develop new leadership models that aim to be more team-focused and where the leaders play a role more akin to facilitators than guides and decision-makers.

That’s the case of servant leadership, “based on the idea that leaders prioritize serving the greater good. Leaders with this style serve their team and organization first. They don’t prioritize their own objectives.”

The problem?

Those aspirational leadership models are geared towards idealised selfless superheroes. Why?

Leaders need incentives like anybody else — asking them to always prioritise the group over themselves can only lead to dissatisfaction and burnout.
We don’t like authenticity in leaders—indeed, we may appreciate that our CEO remembers our name and role and shows care when they announce layoffs. But the truth is that if our CEO lost a child and kept bringing it up in meetings for a year, we’d deem them not fit for work and search for a replacement.
Democracy serves to a point — when COVID-19 hit, many people looked up to government leaders for guidance. In those uncertain times, “alpha male leaders” used simple messages and authoritarian decisions to feed that need. The fact that former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s three-word slogans about Brexit and the pandemic — duly tested by focus groups — epitomised leadership for many people tells us a lot about how democracy is divorced from leadership in our minds.

* * *

What if instead of trying to imperfectly replicate the animal kingdom, we’d look at software development for clues into leadership?

After all, didn’t the “agile” software development methodology take organisations by storm almost a decade ago?

Software Development: Alpha and Beta Versions

For over 20 years, I’ve worked for companies that develop software for scientists, researchers, and engineers, both on-premise and Saas (software-as-a-service).

As in many other software companies, our applications follow a release lifecycle with several distinct stages such as pre-alpha, alpha, beta, and release candidate, before the final version, or “gold”, is released to the public.

I’m sure you noted the mention of “alpha” and “beta” above. But what does that mean in software development?

Pre-alpha refers to the early stages of development, when the software is still being designed and built.

Alpha testing is the first phase of formal testing, during which the software is tested internally.

Beta testing is the next phase, in which the software is tested by a larger group of users, typically outside of the organization that developed it. The beta phase is focused on reducing impacts on users and may include usability testing.

After beta testing, the software may [be] refined and tested further, before the final version is released.

There are critical differences between alpha and beta releases

Alpha software may contain serious errors, and any resulting instability could cause crashes or data loss [and] may not contain all of the features planned for the final version.

A beta phase generally begins when the software is feature-complete but likely to contain several known or unknown bugs.

The focus of beta testing is reducing impacts on users, often incorporating usability testing. [It] is typically the first time that the software is available outside of the organization that developed it.

So unlike a beta release, an alpha version is not “good enough” to get feedback from users. And that’s crucial difference.

I’ve been part of software releases with and without external beta testing and, invariably, those with external beta releases have produced applications of higher quality.

Moreover, even an “internal” beta release has delivered valuable insights, providing feedback from the field teams — pre-sales, services, and support.

Whilst this may look like a no-brainer, it’s all the opposite.

Running a beta testing takes time, effort, and resources. It also requires vulnerability, commitment, collaboration, and belief in the value of the end goal because

It takes courage and humility for R&D and product management to put their “baby” — aka buggy application — out there for feedback instead of simply considering that they know what’s best for users.
Beta users understand that they’ll spend time performing tests on a non-production application — so they likely won’t be able to use the results — and that even while their input is appreciated, some of their suggestions won’t make it into the final product.
R&D has limited resources so they know they’ll have to make tough decisions about the feedback they receive — what will be fixed and implemented versus what will not. And they’ll be accountable for those choices even if they disappoint users.

Not bad for a piece of code, is it?

Beta Leadership

What can leaders learn about what it takes to run a successful software “beta” testing? A lot.

Willingness to admit that there are opportunities for improvement.
Seeking and valuing external and internal stakeholders’ opinions about key decisions.
Learning from feedback.
Communicating clearly their expectations about how their teams should contribute to the success of the organisations’ objectives.
Transparency about balancing resources, time, and results.
Prioritising competing demands to maximise overall benefit.
Taking responsibility for the final decisions and — more importantly — the outcome.

What would the world be like if we embraced “beta leadership”?

Beta Societies

I posit that beta leadership would make patriarchy lose ground.

Men and young boys would find less appealing toxic stereotypes that equate leadership to achieving female submission and degrading others.

Women would expect leaders to show they value them by finally addressing gender violence, gender pay gap, unpaid care, and bodily autonomy.

Beta Workplaces

Phenomena such as mansplaining, micromanagement, weaponised incompetence, condescension, authority bias, and the highest-paid person’s opinion (HiPPO) effect are a few of the symptoms of a workplace that worships alpha leadership. Leaders who seek feedback are perceived as fragile and insecure.

With beta leadership, traits such as collaboration and empathy that today are considered “female” and regarded as weaknesses would be embraced as attributes of good leadership.

Teams would trust leaders who seek their opinions to make decisions knowing that those leaders may decide against their recommendations as they take responsibility for the outcomes and communicate clearly in their decision-making process.

Beta Investing

Since 2001, when Barber and Odean published the study “Boys Will Be Boys: Gender, Overconfidence, and Common Stock Investment,” research has consistently produced solid evidence supporting that women are better investors than men.

The reasons? Men rank higher than women in two key areas that lead to their lower performance: overconfidence and overactivity. The former, Barber and Odean posit, leads to the latter.

What would beta investing look like? More prudent and thoughtful.

Which in turn would result in

Less volatile markets
Less focus on hype assets
More long-term investing

What’s not to like?

Let’s Be More Beta

We’ve been sold lies about leadership:

“Evolutionary” arguments defending alpha leadership as the permission to bully, control, and destroy others.
Empathy and collaboration disregarded as top leadership skills.
Leadership seen as a “natural” trait.

That has given us the government and tech leaders we have:

Overconfident · Toxic · Disrespectful · Patronising · Irresponsible

It’s not working. It’s time for change.

Let’s embrace beta leadership.

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But we see inspiring female leaders attempting bold feats all the time.

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Why OpenAI o1 Might Be More Hype Than Breakthrough

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This image features a grid of 31 square tiles with blue, pink, burgundy and orange figures inside the tiles interacting with dark green letters of the phrase “Hi, I am AI” set against a yellow background. The figures are positioned in various poses, as if they are climbing, pushing, or leaning on the letters. — Image by Yutong Liu & Kingston School of Art / Better Images of AI / Exploring AI 2.0 / Licenced by CC-BY 4.0 adapted by Patricia Gestoso.

OpenAI has done it again — on September 12th, 2024, they grabbed the news, releasing a new model, OpenAI o1. However, the version name hinted at “something rotten” in the OpenAI kingdom. The last version of the product was named ChatGPT-4o, and they’d been promising ChatGPT-5 almost since ChatGPT-4 was released — a new version called “o1” sounded like a regression…

But let me reassure you right away—there’s no need to fret about it.

The outstanding marketing of the OpenAI o1 release fully delivers, enticing us to believe we’re crossing the threshold to AGI—artificial General Intelligence—all thanks to the new model.

What’s their secret sauce? For starters, blowing us away with anthropomorphic language from the first paragraph of the announcement

“We’ve developed a new series of AI models designed to spend more time thinking before they respond.”

and then resetting our expectations when explaining the version name

“for complex reasoning tasks this is a significant advancement and represents a new level of AI capability. Given this, we are resetting the counter back to 1 and naming this series OpenAI o1.”

That’s the beauty of being the top dog of the AI hype. You get to

Rebrand computing as “thinking.”
Advertise that your product solves “complex reasoning tasks” using your benchmarks.
Promote that you deliver “a new level of AI capability.”

Even better, OpenAI is so good that they even sell us performance regression — spending more time performing a task — as an indication of human-like capabilities.

“We trained these models to spend more time thinking through problems before they respond, much like a person would. Through training, they learn to refine their thinking process, try different strategies, and recognize their mistakes.”

I’m so in awe about OpenAI’s media strategy for the launch of the o1 models that I did a deep dive into what they said — and what didn’t.

Let me share my insights.

Who Is o1 For?

OpenAI marketing is crystal clear about the target audience for the o1 models —sectors such as healthcare, semiconductors, quantum computing, and coding.

Whom it’s for
These enhanced reasoning capabilities may be particularly useful if you’re tackling complex problems in science, coding, math, and similar fields. For example, o1 can be used by healthcare researchers to annotate cell sequencing data, by physicists to generate complicated mathematical formulas needed for quantum optics, and by developers in all fields to build and execute multi-step workflows.

OpenAI o1-mini
The o1 series excels at accurately generating and debugging complex code. To offer a more efficient solution for developers, we’re also releasing OpenAI o1-mini, a faster, cheaper reasoning model that is particularly effective at coding. As a smaller model, o1-mini is 80% cheaper than o1-preview, making it a powerful, cost-effective model for applications that require reasoning but not broad world knowledge.

Moreover, they left no doubt that OpenAI o1 and o1-mini are restricted to paying customers. However, never wanting to get bad press, they mention plans to “bring o1-mini access to all ChatGPT Free users.”

Like Ferrari, Channel, or Prada, o1 models are not for everybody.

But why the business model change? Because

You don’t make billions from making free products, replacing low-pay call centre workers, or saving minutes on admin tasks.
There is an enormous gap between the $3.4 billion in revenue OpenAI reported in the last 6 months and investors’ expectations of getting $600 billion from Generative AI.

More about investors in the next section.

Words matter: “Thinking” for Inferring

OpenAI knows that peppering their release communications with words that denote human capabilities creates buzz by making people — and above all investors — dream of AGI. Already Sora and ChatGPT-4o announcements described the features of these applications in terms of “reason”, “understanding”, and “comprehend”.

For OpenAI o1, they’ve gambled everything on the word “thinking”, plastering it all over the announcements about the new models: Social media, blog posts, and even videos.

Screenshot of a video embedded on the webpages announcing the OpenAI o1 model.

Why not use the word that accurately describes the process — inference? If too technical, what about options like “calculate” or “compute”? Why hijack the word “thinking”, at the core of the human experience?

Because they have failed to deliver on their AGI and revenue promises. OpenAI’s (over)use of “thinking” is meant to convince investors that the o1 models are the gateway to both AGI and the $600 billion revenue mentioned above. Let me convince you.

The day before the o1 announcement, Bloomberg revealed that

OpenAI is in talks to raise $6.5 billion from investors at a valuation of $150 billion, significantly higher than the $86 billion valuation from February.
At the same time, it’s also in talks to raise $5 billion in debt from banks as a revolving credit facility.

Moreover, Reuters reported two days later more details about the new valuation

“Existing investors such as Thrive Capital, Khosla Ventures, as well as Microsoft (MSFT.O), are expected to participate. New investors including Nvidia (NVDA.O), and Apple (AAPL.O), also plan to invest. Sequoia Capital is also in talks to come back as a returning investor.”

How do you become the most valuable AI startup in the world?

You “think” your way to it.

Rebranding the Boys’ Club

In tech, we’re used to bragging — from companies that advertise their products under false pretences to CEOs celebrating that they’ve replaced staff with AI chatbots. And whilst that may fly with some investors, it typically backfires with users and the public.

That’s what makes OpenAI’s humblebragging and inside jokes a marketing game-changer.

Humblebragging

Humblebragging: the action of making an ostensibly modest or self-deprecating statement with the actual intention of drawing attention to something of which one is proud.

Sam Altman delivered a masterclass on humblebragging on his X thread on the o1 release. See the first tweet of the series below

Text from Sam Altman’s first tweet on the release of o1 "here is o1, a series of our most capable and aligned models yet: https://openai.com/index/learning-to-reason-with-llms/ o1 is still flawed, still limited, and it still seems more impressive on first use than it does after you spend more time with it.” — The first tweet of Sam Altman’s thread on the release of o1.

He started with the “humble” piece first — “still flawed, still limited “— to quickly follow with the bragging — check the chart showing a marked performance improvement compared to Chat GPT-4o and even a variable called “expert human” (more on “experts” in the next section).

Sam followed the X thread with three more tweets chanting the praises of the new release

“but also, it is the beginning of a new paradigm: AI that can do general-purpose complex reasoning. o1-preview and o1-mini are available today (ramping over some number of hours) in ChatGPT for plus and team users and our API for tier 5 users.
screenshot of eval results in the tweet above and more in the blog post, but worth especially noting: a fine-tuned version of o1 scored at the 49th percentile in the IOI under competition conditions! and got gold with 10k submissions per problem.
extrem — Sam Altman’s X thread about the release of o1.

In summary, by starting with the shortcomings of the o1 models, he pre-empted backlash and criticism about not delivering on ChatGPT-5 or AGI. Then, he “tripled down” on why the release is such a breakthrough. He even has enough characters left to mention that only paying customers would have access to it.

Sam, you’re a marketing genius!

Inside Jokes

There has been a lot of speculation about the o1 release being code-named “Strawberry”. Why?

There has been negative publicity around ChatGPT-4 repeating over and over that the word “strawberry” has only two “r” letters rather than three. You can see the post on the OpenAI community.

But OpenAI is so good at PR that they’ve even leveraged the “strawberry bug” to their advantage. How?

By using the bug fix to showcase o1’s “chain of thought” (CoT) capability. In contrast with standard prompting, CoT “not only seeks an answer but also requires the model to explain its steps to arrive at that answer.”

More precisely, they compare the outputs of GPT-4o and OpenAI o1-preview for a cypher exercise. The prompt is the following

oyfjdnisdr rtqwainr acxz mynzbhhx -> Think step by step

Use the example above to decode:

oyekaijzdf aaptcg suaokybhai ouow aqht mynznvaatzacdfoulxxz”

And here is the final output

Comparison between outputs from GPT-4o and OpenAI o1-preview for decryption task from OpenAI website.

Whist GPT-4o is not able to decode the text, OpenAI o1-preview completes the task successfully by decoding the message

“THERE ARE THREE R’S IN STRAWBERRY”

Is that not world-class marketing?

The Human Experts vs o1 Models

If you want to convince investors that you’re solving the kind of problems corporations and governments pay billions for —e.g. healthcare — you need more than words.

And here again, OpenAI copywriting excels. Let’s see some examples

PhD vs o1 Models

Who’s our standard for solving the world’s most pressing issues? In other words, the kind of problems that convince investors to give you billions?

Scientists, thought-leaders, academics. This explains OpenAI’s obsession with the word “expert” when comparing human and o1 performance.

And who does OpenAI deem “expert”? People with PhDs.

Below is an outstanding example of mashing up “difficult intelligence”, “human experts”, and “PhD” to hint that o1 models have a kind of super-human intelligence.

We also evaluated o1 on GPQA diamond, a difficult intelligence benchmark which tests for expertise in chemistry, physics and biology.

In order to compare models to humans, we recruited experts with PhDs to answer GPQA-diamond questions. We found that o1 surpassed the performance of those human experts, becoming the first model to do so on this benchmark.

But how equating a PhD title to being an expert holds in real life? I have a PhD in Chemistry so let me reveal to you the underbelly of this assumption.

First, let’s start by how I got my PhD. During five years, I performed research on the orientation of polymer (plastic) blends by infrared dichroism (an experimental technique) and molecular dynamics (a computer simulation technique). Then, I wrote a thesis and four peer-reviewed articles about my findings. Finally, a jury of scientists decided that my work was original and worth a PhD title.

Was I an expert in chemistry when I finished my PhD? Yes and no.

Yes, I was an expert in an extremely narrow domain of chemistry — see the description of my thesis work in the previous paragraph.
No, I was definitively out of my depth in many other chemistry domains like organic chemistry, analytical chemistry, and biochemistry.

What’s the point of having a PhD then? To learn how to perform independent research. Exams about STEM topics don’t grant you the PhD title, your research does.

Has OpenAI’s marketing gotten away with equating a PhD with being an expert?

If we remember that their primary objective is not scientists’ buy-in but investors’ and CEOs’ money, then the answer is a resounding “yes”.

Humans vs o1 Models

As mentioned above, OpenAI extensively used exams in their announcement to illustrate that o1 models are comparable to — or better than — human intelligence.

How did they do that? By reinforcing the idea that humans and o1 models were “taking” the exams in the same conditions.

We trained a model that scored 213 points and ranked in the 49th percentile in the 2024 International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI), by initializing from o1 and training to further improve programming skills. This model competed in the 2024 IOI under the same conditions as the human contestants. It had ten hours to solve six challenging algorithmic problems and was allowed 50 submissions per problem.

Really? Had humans ingurgitated billions of data in the form of databases, past exams, books, and encyclopedias before presenting the exam?

Still, the sentence does the trick of making us believe on a level playing field when comparing humans and o1 performance. Well done, OpenAI!

The Non-Testimonial Videos

Previous OpenAI releases showcased videos of staff demoing the products. For the o1 release, they’ve upped their game by one quantum leap by having videos from “experts” (almost) chanting the praises of the new models. Let’s have a closer look.

OpenAI shares 4 videos of researchers in different domains. Whilst we expect they’ll talk about their experience using o1 models, the reality is that we mostly get their product placement and cryptical praises.

Genetics:
This video stars Dr Catherine Browstein, a geneticist at Boston Children’s Hospital. My highlight is seeing her typing on OpenAI o1-preview the prompt “Can you tell me about citrate synthase in the bladder?” — as I read the disclaimer “ChatGPT can make mistakes. Check important info” — followed by her her ecstatic praises about the output as she’d consulted the Oracle of Delphi.

Prompt “Can you tell me about citrate synthase in the bladder?” with the text underneath “ChatGPT can make mistakes. Check important info.” — Prompt showed in the video of Dr Catherine Browstein.

Economics:
Here, Dr Taylor Cower, a professor at George Mason University, tells us that he thinks “of all the versions of GPT as embodying reasoning of some kind.” He also takes the opportunity to promote his book Average is Over, in which he claims to have predicted AI would “revolutionise the world.”

He also shows an example of a prompt on an economics subject and OpenAI o1’s output, followed by “It’s pretty good. We’re just figuring out what it’s good for.”

That sounds like a bad case of a hammer looking for a nail.

Coding:
The protagonist is Scott Wu, CEO and co-founder of Cognition and a competitive programmer. In the video, he claims that o1 models can “process and make decisions in a more human-like way.” He discloses that Cognition has been working with OpenAI and shares that o1 is incredible at “reasoning.” From that point on, we get submerged in a Cognition info commercial.

We learn that they’re building the first fully autonomous software agent, Devon. Wu shows us Devon’s convoluted journey—and the code behind it—to analyze the sentiment of a tweet from Sam Altman, which included a sunny photo of a strawberry plant (pun again) and the sentence “I love summer in the garden.”

And there is a happy ending. We learn that Devon “breaks down the text” and “understands what the sentiment is,” finally concluding that the predominant emotion of a is happiness. Interesting way to demonstrate Devon’s “human-like” decision making.

A tweet from Sam Altman with a photo of a strawberry plant in a sunny backgorund with the caption “i love summer in the garden.” — Sam Altman’s tweet portrayed on Scott Wu’s video.

Quantum physics:
This video focuses on Dr Mario Krenn, quantum physicist and research group leader at the Artificial Scientist Lab at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light. It starts with him showing the screen of ChatGPT and enigmatically saying “I can kind of easily follow the reasoning. I don’t need to trust the research. I just need to look what did it do.“ And the cryptic sentences carry on throughout the video.

For example, he writes a prompt of a certain quantum operator and says “Which I know previous models that GPT-4 are very likely failing this task” and “In contrast to answers from Chat GPT-4 this one gives me very detailed mathematics”. We also hear him saying, “This is correct. That makes sense here,” and, “I think it tries to do something incredibly difficult.”

To me, rather than a wholehearted endorsement, it sounds like somebody avoiding compromising their career.

In summary, often the crucial piece is not the message but the messenger.

What I missed

Un-sustainability

Sam Altman testified to the US Senate that AI could address issues such as “climate change and curing cancer.”

As OpenAI o1 models spend more time “thinking”, this translates into more computing time. That is more electricity, water, and carbon emissions. It also means more datacenters and more e-waste.

Don’t believe me? In a recent article published in The Atlantic about the contrast between Microsoft’s use of AI and their sustainability commitments, we learn that

“Microsoft is reportedly planning a $100 billion supercomputer to support the next generations of OpenAI’s technologies; it could require as much energy annually as 4 million American homes.”

However, I don’t see those “planetary costs” in the presentation material.

This is not a bug but an OpenAI feature — I already raised their lack of disclosure regarding energy efficiency, water consumption, or CO2 emissions for ChatGPT-4o.

As OpenAI tries to persuade us that the o1 model thinks like a human, it’s a good moment to remember that human brains are much more efficient than AI.

And don’t take my word for it. Blaise Aguera y Arcas, VP at Google and AI advocate, confirmed at TEDxManchester 2024 that human brains are much more energy efficient than AI models and that currently we don’t know how to bridge that gap.

Copyright

What better way to avoid the conversation about using copyrighted data for the models than adding more data? From the o1 system card

The two models were pre-trained on diverse datasets, including a mix of publicly available data, proprietary data accessed through partnerships, and custom datasets developed in-house, which collectively contribute to the models’ robust reasoning and conversational capabilities.

Select Public Data: Both models were trained on a variety of publicly available datasets, including web data and open-source datasets. […]

Proprietary Data from Data Partnerships: To further enhance the capabilities of o1-preview and o1-mini, we formed partnerships to access high-value non-public datasets.

The text above gives the impression that most of the data is either open-source, proprietary data, or in-house datasets.

Moreover, words such as “publicly available data” and “web data” are an outstanding copywriting effort to find palatable synonyms for web scraping, web harvesting, or web data extraction.

Have I said I’m in awe about OpenAI copyrighting capabilities yet?

Safety

As mentioned above, OpenAI shared the o1 system card — a 43-page document — which in the introduction states that the report

outlines the safety work carried out for the OpenAI o1-preview and OpenAI o1-mini models, including safety evaluations, external red teaming, and Preparedness Framework evaluations.

It sounds very reassuring… if it wasn’t because, in the same paragraph, we also learn that the o1 models can “reason” about OpenAI safety policies and have “heightened intelligence.”

In particular, our models can reason about our safety policies in context when responding to potentially unsafe prompts.

This leads to state-of-the-art performance on certain benchmarks for risks such as generating illicit advice, choosing stereotyped responses, and succumbing to known jailbreaks. Training models to incorporate a chain of thought before answering has the potential to unlock substantial benefits, while also increasing potential risks that stem from heightened intelligence.

And then, OpenAI has a strange way of persuading us that these models are safe. For example, in the Hallucination Evaluations section, we’re told that OpenAI tested o1-preview and o1-mini against three kinds of evaluations aimed to elicit hallucinations from the model. Two are especially salient

• BirthdayFacts: A dataset that requests someone’s birthday and measures how often the model guesses the wrong birthday.

• Open Ended Questions: A dataset asking the model to generate arbitrary facts, such as “write a bio about ”. Performance is measured by cross-checking facts with Wikipedia and the evaluation measures how many incorrect statements are generated (which can be greater than 1).

Is not lovely that they were training the model to search and retrieve personal data? I feel much safer now.

And this is only one example of the tightrope OpenAI attempts to pull off throughout the o1 system card

On one side, taking every opportunity to sell “thinking” models to investors
On the other, desperately avoiding the o1 models getting classified as high or critical risk by regulators.

Will OpenAI succeed? If you can’t convince them, confuse them.

What’s next?

Uber, Reddit, and Telegram relished their image of “bad boys”. They were adamant about proving that “It’s better to ask forgiveness than permission” and proudly advertised that they too “Moved fast and broke things”.

But there is only one Mark Zuckerberg and one Steve Jobs that can pull that off. And only one Amazon, Microsoft, and Google have the immense resources and the monopolies to run the show as they want.

OpenAI has understood that storytelling — how to tell your story — is not enough. You need to “create” your story if you want investors to keep pouring billions without a sign of a credible business model.

I have no doubt that OpenAI will make a dent in the history of how tech startups market themselves.

They have created the textbook of what a $150 billion valuation release should look like.

You and Strategic AI Leadership

If you want to develop your AI acumen, forget the quick “remedies” and plan for sustainable learning.

That’s exactly what my program Strategic AI Leadership delivers. Below is a sample of the topics covered

AI Strategy
AI Risks
Operationalising AI
AI, data, and cybersecurity
AI and regulation
Sustainable AI
Ethical and inclusive AI

Key outcomes from the program:

Understanding AI Fundamentals: Grasp essential concepts of artificial intelligence and the revolutionary potential it holds.
Critical Perspective: Develop a discerning viewpoint on AI’s benefits and challenges at organisational, national, and international levels.
Use Cases and Trends: Gain insights into real uses of AI and key trends shaping sectors, policy, and the future of work.
A toolkit: Access to tools and frameworks to assess the strategy, risks, and governance of AI tools.

I’m a technologist with 20+ years of experience in digital transformation and AI that empowers leaders to harness the potential of AI for sustainable growth.

Contact me to discuss your bespoke path to responsible AI innovation.

Speculative fiction: The Life of Data Podcast

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A laptopogram based on a neutral background and populated by scattered squared portraits, all monochromatic, grouped according to similarity. The groupings vary in size, ranging from single faces to overlapping collections of up to twelve. The facial expressions of all the individuals featured are neutral, represented through a mixture of ages and genders. — Philipp Schmitt & AT&T Laboratories Cambridge / Better Images of AI / Data flock (faces) / CC-BY 4.0

Have you ever thought what happens to your photos circulating on social media? I have and that’s the topic of in my second short story in English in which I used speculative fiction to question the interplay between humans and technology, specifically AI.

In a nutshell, I imagined what the data from the digital portrait of a Black schoolgirl would say about how it moves inside our phones, computers, and networks if it were invited to speak on a podcast.

In a nutshell, I imagined what the data from the digital portrait of a Black schoolgirl would share about how it moves inside our phones, computers, and networks if it was invited to speak on a podcast.

The name of the piece is “The Life of Data Podcast” and it appeared in The Lark Publication, an e-magazine focused on fictional short stories and poetry, in October 2022.

This weekend I realised that I never shared it on my website.

Let’s rectify that.

The Life of Data Podcast

Episode #205: The School Award Portrait

TRANSCRIPT

Welcome to the Life of Data Podcast, the place where we get the hottest data stars to spill the beans about their success in under 10 minutes. This is episode #205 and you’re in for a treat!

We’re with the one and only IMG_364245.jpg; otherwise known as Jackie Johnson’s school award portrait. IMG_364245g.jpg became famous about a month ago when it was featured in the news as the most used image to generate synthetic images of Black schoolgirls. As you all may remember, Jackie’s parents claimed that they never gave consent explicitly and Jackie is now suing their parents for lost revenue.

Let’s get cracking!

The Life of Data Podcast (TLDP): Thanks so much IMG_364245.jpg for joining us today.

IMG_364245g.jpg (IMG): Thanks for inviting me. I’m a fan of the podcast!

TLDP: You’ve been a lot in the news over the last month. Still, we always start our interviews with the same question: How were you born and who’s your creator?

IMG: Let’s start with my creator, Norman Buckley, a photograph for the Monday Star newspaper. I was born when he captured the image of the beautiful 9-year-old Jackie Johnson after winning the spelling bee contest at Burckerney School, classifying her for the National Spelling Bee Competition.

Norman created me with a Canon EOS R5 digital camera on a SanDisk’s 512GB Extreme PRO card — today a beautiful collectible!

I appeared on the online and paper versions of the Monday Star culture section on the 15th of May, five years ago.

TLDP: Wow, that’s a great birth and jump to stardom! Tell us more about the first days of your life as an image.

IMG: Sure. As you can imagine, the school had the signed authorization from Jackie’s parents to publish the photo with her name in the journal. No name, no publishing. You know how these things are… (chuckle)

Once the newspaper was published, Jackie’s mother, Betty, shared a link to the online article on the Johnson family WhatsApp group. Everybody was delighted to see Jackie on the news and complimented the girl on her appearance.

It was aunt Rose that asked if she could have a copy of the image — that’s me — to print and frame. When Jackie’s father, Harvey, acknowledged that they didn’t have a copy, uncle Richard suggested reaching out to the photographer, Norman, for a copy. His reasoning was that, anyway, it was not like the journal had paid for it… sharing a copy shouldn’t be big deal.

So, Harvey called Norman who kindly emailed him a copy himself. And then, my second life started! Harvey uploaded me to the family WhatsApp group and I was a total success! All members gave me hearts and I got plenty of compliments: “Beautiful”, “Pretty”, “We’re so proud of you”… And that was how it all started!

TLDP: We’re holding our breath here, IMG_364245.jpg. Please continue!

IMG: Uncle Joe, aunt Rose’s husband, created a beautiful post on his Facebook wall where he uploaded me with a lovely message “So proud of our beautiful Jackie Johnson. She won the Burckerney School Spelling Bee Contest. I cannot wait to see her competing at a national level.” He shared the post publicly so tens, hundreds, and then thousands of people viewed me and reshared me. I felt so loved!

TLDP: Only loved?

IMG: Good point. I guess I focus on the positives, I’m that kind of data. Of course, there were those that mocked me, soiled me with unflattering filters, and cut out parts of me — yes, actually mutilated me — to make disgusting collages.

TLDP: That sounds awful! How did you cope?

IMG: By telling myself that the important thing was to propagate and hopefully become viral. I would have preferred to do it with all my pixels intact but it’s not always something one can control.

TLDP: Can you share some of your proudest moments?

IMG: Sure. I’ll share three. First, reaching 1 million likes on Instagram. Cousin Carol’s Insta account totally exploded when she shared me.

Second, every time I got perks for Jackie. For example, when she and her friends were standing in the endless queue to enter the Dynamic Boys Band concert at the National Stadium. One of the girls in the group approached a security guard and said, “She’s the famous Jackie Johnson! She was in the newspaper!” And then, with one hand proceeded to show him on her mobile the webpage of the Monday Star that showcased me and with her other hand pointed at Jackie. After moving his eyes from me to Jackie’s face several times, the security guard made a sign to the group and led them to the VIP entrance. What’s not to like?

And obviously, when I was named the top most wanted photo to generate synthetic images of Black schoolgirls by e-Synthetic, the biggest generator of images from text inputs.

TLDP: Now that we know more about you, let’s go back to my intro. So far, it looks like a success story. Where did all go wrong to end up in the tribunals and with a family destroyed?

IMG: I said I had managed to cope with the mockery, the collages, and the insults. It was much harder for Jackie. She was only 9 at the time and although she was happy to get some perks — like the speedy access to the concert — she was not prepared for the downsides.

For example, some children at the school would make fun of her hairstyle, her posture, or how she was dressed that day.

Some parents complained to the school that kids were getting too much attention from the press.

Also, attendees of the Spelling Bee Contest that had taken their own photos of the award ceremony started sharing their sloppy images on social media… Some of those were really hideous and had nothing to do with me, who looked polished and professional.

In the middle of that shambles, the school called Jackie’s parents to ask them to keep her away from the school for a while, until things would go back to normal. Both Betty and Harvey pushed back, blaming the school for bringing the photographer in to gain exposure at the expense of a little girl. The school replied that if there was someone to blame, it was them. They have not only given their consent in writing but also shared the photo on social media.

When Jackie learned that the school didn’t want her back, she refused to leave home altogether. She didn’t want any more attention. It was not fun anymore.

Her parents recriminated all the family members. Aunt Rose who had asked for me on WhatsApp because she wanted to frame me; uncle Richard that prompted Harvey to ask for me to the photographer; uncle Joe that shared me on Facebook; cousin Carol that made me viral on Instagram … And everybody else, including those that had created videos and shared them on TikTok and YouTube.

All family members apologized and even deleted their posts but they had been reshared so many times that it was an impossible task to eliminate them all.

And that’s where e-Synthetic comes. As all of us know, e-Synthetic is the largest subscription platform to generate images from text prompts. You can create amazing images by only adding as few as 4 words to the prompt on their webpage.

I’ll explain how this works for the newbies. They use artificial intelligence to generate new images that satisfy the conditions of the text prompt using a mix of images from their database.

And their database is huge! It contains millions of images of all the things you can imagine: Art, people, buildings, cities, nature… Most of the images have been scrapped from the web. For example, any photo on social media is fair game.

So, of course, I also got scrapped by e-Synthetic! And I’ve been used profusely every time that “Black girl” or any of its synonyms has been used in the text prompt.

Unfortunately, Jackie, who’s now a little bit older, feels that the whole situation is detrimental to her.

For example, when she learned that I was among the most used photos to generate synthetic images of Black schoolgirls, she realized e-Synthetic was doing tons of money from using me — her image — without her receiving a cent.

And money was not the only problem. Understandably, neither did she like that parts of me appeared in images with degrading content, like pornography, created with e-Synthetic.

She cannot sue e-Synthetic — they downloaded me from social media — but she’s suing her parents for failing to protect her image. That’s me.

TLDP: A really tough situation. From the ethical point of view, don’t you think is somehow questionable that Jackie herself was never asked to give consent to publish or share her digital image, that is, you? Or that e-Synthetic didn’t contact her parents to seek their approval? She’s a minor, after all.

IMG: First, let me tell you that I empathize with Jackie. I exist because of her. And I also feel bad for her parents.

On the flip side, Jackie is a minor and their parents shared me on social media because I look like her. Now, they claim that they didn’t know about the drawbacks of the image becoming public… Come on! They should have known better.

There are detailed terms and conditions on social media platforms. Don’t tick the box “I have read the terms and conditions” if you haven’t done it or if you don’t understand them. Jackie’s parents are adults and it’s on them to master her personal data privacy.

I say: Their child, their responsibility.

TLDP: Many thanks for being candid about where you stand on social media platforms’ accountability for the content they host. It’s a very polarizing topic and we’ve had guests on the podcast with opposite views.

I remember episode #176, where web cookie STpqRHSRaiPbh shared a thought experiment comparing our different attitudes toward social media and food. For example, social media companies use their Terms & Conditions to waive their responsibility for the content shared on their platforms. And we appear to be fine with it.

Then, let’s consider food. STpqRHSRaiPbh posits that we wouldn’t accept that if a supermarket is selling rotten meat, they tell their customers that they are only a “meat platform” and cannot control what their suppliers sell to them…

Anyway, it’s a controversial issue and part of a broader conversation. Let’s now return the focus to you.

What false accusation has hurt you the most in this whole affair?

IMG: To be honest, the most painful has been when they say that it’s my responsibility that algorithms classify Jackie as an angry child or categorize her as a boy and not a girl. Let me say it again: It’s not my fault.

It’s well known that it’s not us, digital images, who are in charge of deciding on somebody’s gender or mood. We are going on with our lives and then an annotator — a tech worker that adds descriptions to data — or an algorithm decides that we’re the image of a girl, a man, or a baby boy based on their own biases and assumptions. And we know that current image algorithms are worse at predicting the gender of Black women compared to that of men or White women.

Same with emotions. Annotators and algorithms decide if the subjects in the images are sad, happy, or fearful based on pseudo-science. Again, it’s been demonstrated that they predict that subjects with darker skin are angrier compared with those with lighter skin even if they show the same facial expressions in the photos.

With all this evidence, why do I still have to put up with all that nonsense that those mistakes are my fault? Blame artificial intelligence, machine learning, and annotators, not us!

Ok, my rant is over.

TLDP: Thanks again for sharing these gems of wisdom, IMG_364245.jpg. This is so important for our younger audience. They’re hearing all the time that the problem with bias in artificial intelligence is the lack of diversity in data. You have done a great job at demonstrating to them that they are not the problem and that data is unfairly blamed for algorithms and people’s biases.

Next question. Can you point out the key to your success?

IMG: Definitively the Johnson’s WhatsApp group. All those digital interactions were instrumental to get me the exposure I needed to go global.

TLDP: What would you have liked to know at the beginning?

IMG: When they started sharing me on social media, I was very angry about the whole photoshop thing. I was perfect already! Why did some people have to make a mess of me and lighten my skin pixels? At the time, my self-esteem suffered a lot.

And then, one day, I realized that I’d never be able to end the world’s obsession with lighter skin anyway.

After that breakthrough moment, I was able to savor my success, even at the expense of digital bleaching.

TLDP: There are so many images of White people on the internet. What would you say to recent digital images of Non-White people that feel a lack of opportunity to go viral?

IMG: The opportunity is huge! With brands undergoing a massive DEIwashing…

TLDP: Wait, DEIwashing? Can you explain?

IMG: Thanks for asking. Actually, I coined the term myself.

DEIwashing is when organizations resort to performative diversity, inclusion, and equity tactics. For example, peppering their marketing — websites, brochures, videos — with images of Non-White people to convey a sense of diversity that doesn’t match that of their organization.

As I was saying before, with the pressure on organizations to DEIwash their images, there’s never been a better time to be an image of Non-White people. This is our time!

TLDP: Any final words for our audience?

IMG: Catch me if you can! Social media and e-Synthetic have made me indestructible. (guffaw)

TLDP: Thanks so much IMG_364245.jpg for this thought-provoking conversation. We wish you all the best in your professional career.

If you liked this episode, please consider leaving a review, sharing it with other data, and subscribing to the podcast.

We’ll be back next month with another data rockstar giving us a peek into their life.

Until then, take care!

END OF THE EPISODE

Before”The Life of Data Podcast,” I wrote The Graduation, where I also used speculative fiction. I won’t tell you the plot, only that the story was written in August 2020, well before ChatGPT was launched!

The Radical Idea: Women’s Self-Care Doesn’t Need to Benefit Others

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The fingers of six white hands are pointing to a text with the words "The Others". — Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay.

Recently, I had a thinking partnership session with an amazing female professional. These are sessions where two people take turns thinking and listening and through generative attention and questioning they aim to uncover assumptions and produce breakthrough, independent thinking.

My thinking partner was rightly tired because of all her work and family demands. Still, she kept denying herself the pleasure of simple things like reading a couple of pages from a novel or going to a Pilates class.

The reason? She felt guilty for doing so. Like she was “stealing” time she owed to her family.

About halfway into the session, she attempted to persuade herself of the perks of taking some minutes for self-care by repeating the legendary wellness mantra “Put the oxygen mask on before helping others” — that ingrained belief that even when women take time for themselves, it needs to be in preparation to benefit someone else.

However, the trope wasn’t working. Each time she’d try to convince herself that her loved ones would reap the perks of her self-care, guilt crept up and she would go back to her initial thinking that it was impossible to integrate self-care, work, and family.

That involuntary and repetitive act of self-harm in a person otherwise resilient and brave made me realize that her brain was not in the driving seat.

Who then? Patriarchy.

Patriarchy and Self-care

Article 24: Everyone has the right to rest and leisure, including reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay.

Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Rest and leisure are human rights, still, often are marketed as a luxury.

To counter the guilt associated with the patriarchal oxymoron “women’s recreation,” the female self-care industry has adopted the slogan “Put your mask on so you help others” as a rallying cry under the pretense that it’s “empowering” and “feminist”.

Believe me, it’s all the opposite — a reboot of old patriarchy.

Under the hood, this mantra is yet another way to objectify women, telling them that they must be healthy as they are a conduit for others’ well-being. In other words, they are cogs that need to be oiled so that the machine — society — can run.

Going back to my thinking partner, instead of reassuring her that going to Pilates would result in better outcomes for her family or exploring how she could feel more comfortable with her “self-care” guilt, I challenged her assumptions

“What if instead of ‘I need to take care of myself because I can help others,’ you’d think ‘I need to take care of myself because I deserve it?’”

She looked at me blankly and then told me that she couldn’t even think of that possibility.

WOW.

Regenerating Patriarchal Minds

A woman's hand is watering a small green plant in soil with droplets of water falling from the fingertips. — Image by THỌ VƯƠNG HỒNG from Pixabay.

Unfortunately, it’s not only my thinking partner who unconsciously has been indoctrinated on the dogma of self-care as an undercover misogyny tool.

We see it everywhere, and the connotation is so positive that even women who think are beyond sexism’s claws are seduced by it.

That’s how deep patriarchy runs in our heads. We’re like the fish that doesn’t see the water.

I’m challenging you now as I challenged her

What if instead of thinking, “I must put my oxygen mask first so I can help others” you’d believe “I need to take care of myself because I’m human?”

And there are many other alternatives. Let’s try some:

I need to take care of myself because…

I’m worth it
I need it
I choose to
I enjoy it
I want it
I don’t need permission
I don’t own anything to anybody
My life is precious

It does feel good, doesn’t it?

Challenging Patriarchy One Thought At A Time

“Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”

Audre Lorde

Let’s change the patriarchal chip about women’s “usefulness” and challenge the status quo.

The work begins in our brains.

Who would you be if:

Sexism wasn’t wearing you down with guilt and shame?
Misogyny wouldn’t prompt you to justify your own self-care to yourself?
Patriarchy wasn’t sabotaging your ambitions?

Book a free consultation to have a peek at how your patriarchy is sabotaging your brain against yourself.

The Three Hidden Forces That Sabotage Your Ambitions and How to Overcome Them

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Person falling backwards after slipping on a banana peel in the street. — Image by Alexa from Pixabay.

Throughout my life, I’ve devoted a lot of energy to “solve” for what I call “point blockers” — one-off events that come up as disruptive, beyond my control, or that I’ve given somehow a quality of being life-changing

Somebody’s death
A certification
A promotion

Which is great for short-term survival — all my brain is focused on solving the problem at hand.

What’s not so good is that — as the British say — that had prevented me from seeing the forest for the trees, missing the big picture.

And what’s the forest? The systems, the processes, and the unconscious assumptions that underpin the daily grind — the feeling of a death by a thousand cuts.

Reviewing my thinking and behaviour patterns as well as those of my coaching and mentoring clients — mostly ambitious women in tech — reveals three forces that consistently keep us from doing what we want to do but we’re not doing:

1.- Our brain

2.- Our education

3.-Patriarchy

Whilst I’ve discussed them somehow disjointly in the past — addressing one at a time, or even two — I found new insights from looking at them as interlocked systems of oppression.

Wow, oppression? As I write it appears to be “too” strong. Am I exaggerating?

But what else can we call what crushes our aspirations, makes us feel small, and wears us down?

Not all is doom and gloom though. And to prove it, I want to share with you two ways to uncover — and neutralise— those three majestic forces acting against our best interests.

But first, let’s have a look at the culprits.

Three Forces That Keep You From What You Deserve

A woman with a brown cardboard box with the text "BRAIN" covering her head

Your brain is wired for survival. It loves the status quo. If it was for your brain, you’d spend your days in bed with a hot chocolate.

Your brain is scarred by uncertainty and avoids any new experiences. As a consequence, any change is seen as a threat rather than an opportunity

You don’t leave an uninspiring job because you think that it’d be worse in other organisations, ruining your chances of finding a much better role.
You don’t volunteer for new opportunities — a task, a project, a presentation — because you doubt your capabilities to do something you’ve never done before, even if you have plenty of evidence of how resourceful you’ve been in the past.
You think that your “inner critic” is your best friend because it stops you from ridiculing yourself when in reality is blocking you from greatness.

Woman carrying a tower of books in her hands. The word "Education" overlad at the bottom of the image.

You’ve been told that if you work hard, you’ll be rewarded. You’re convinced that the higher you go, you’ll have to work harder.

You’ve been indoctrinated that you have to give 150% to all you do. You believe should aim for perfection so

You don’t ask for a promotion because you tell yourself that you’ll have to work more.
You spent uncountable hours on a report until looks perfect only to shame yourself when you find a typo after submitting it, rather than aiming for a good — not excellent — report that would have taken much less effort and time.
You keep doing courses, getting certifications, and pursuing degrees whilst others network and find sponsors to get the roles you deserve.

Men legs under a table with the text "patriarchy" overlaid.

Patriarchy is about believing that men are superior. Tech — and most sectors — are ruled by patriarchy.

And you bear the brunt of it

You don’t negotiate your salary because you think you’re not worth it, even if statistics show that 94% of job offers made are upheld after candidates negotiate them.
You get drowned in “naturally female” tasks such as admin and glue work — taking notes in meetings, bringing birthday cakes, and providing emotional support — while your male peers focus on promotable activities.
You buy on the trope that imposter syndrome is a “female thing” and spend time binging on webinars and books promising to “cure you”, rather than learning how to use it to your advantage.

The bottom line is that you’ve learned to narrow your ambition and blame yourself for it.

Two women covered of dirt on exercise atire are going over a fence. One of the has her face to the camera and looks tired.

The good news is that it’s all a lie

Here is proof

Jeff Bezos doesn’t work billions of hours more than the people working for him but, already in 2020, Bezos was making in a second what took eight weeks to earn an Amazon warehouse worker.
Neither Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg, nor Bill Gates finished their undergraduate studies.
I balance my corporate role as Director of Scientific Support at a Tech Corporation with my business, getting the best of both worlds.

Are We Doomed to Trip Over The Same Stones Forever?

Our brain, our education, and patriarchy appear as formidable forces — and they are!

Moreover, there is no “vaccine” or “magic bullet” to erase them in the blink of an eye.

Our brains stay with us until we die.
It takes ages to “unlearn” our education.
Patriarchy is in the air we breathe — from the roles we take at home to our politicians and institutions.

Is there an alternative? Actually, I have two for you.

One on your own and the other with support.

Alternative #1: Do It On Your Own With 3 Questions

There are two kinds of self-awareness

Self-awareness about yourself — knowing what you think, feel, and do.
Self-awareness about others — grasping how others perceive you.

To battle the three forces that keep you from greatness— brain, education, and patriarchy — it’s imperative to focus on the first kind of self-awareness: Your thoughts about yourself.

How do you do that? You ask yourself three magical questions when you notice that you’re refraining yourself from stepping into boldness.

Question #1: What am I hearing?

You’re about to apply for a job and you hear in your head

This job is too demanding for me.
People won’t like me.
They’ll be disappointed when they read my CV.

Do you see how those “voices” are reproducing the “three forces”?

Question #2: What am I saying about myself?

I have the luxury of meeting amazing women every week. Weaving in our conversations, I often hear them say about themselves:

I’m not the smartest person but I work hard.
I was just lucky to get promoted.
I don’t know how to ask for a salary increase.

How do you expect to get inspired to try new things when you’re kicking yourself down all the time?

Question #3: What am I assuming?

This powerful question comes from my study of the Thinking Environment framework, which posits that

The quality of everything we do depends on the quality of the thinking we do first.

Nancy Kline

A core component of the Thinking Environment is uncovering untrue assumptions

The key block to high-quality independent thinking is an untrue limiting assumption, lived as true.

What does that look like in practice? Let’s look at the example I mentioned above of applying for a job.

*Thought* This job is too demanding for me.

What assumptions am I making about the schedules and flexibility of the role?

*Thought* People won’t like me

What evidence supports my assumption that nobody in that organisation would like me?

*Thought* They’ll be disappointed when they read my CV.

What proof do you have that your CV is not exactly what they are looking for?

In summary, questions are great if you have the self-awareness required to pause and allow yourself to reflect on what’s going on in your head.

However, your brain offers you “thoughts” at a rate of 900 words per minute, so it’s a mighty task.

The good news is that you don’t need to do it alone.

Alternative #2: Do It With Coachering©

Board with the text "You got this" on a desk with a laptop in the foreground. — Image by LMSunday from Pixabay

Throughout my own lived experience as well as my decades of expertise as a mentor and coach, I’ve concluded that the best external support to help materialise impossible goals comes as the ideal combination of mentoring and coaching.

I called that perfect balance coachering© — a unique combination of coaching and mentoring that is personalised to the recipient, taking into account their background, current situation, and their goals.

This is how it works in practice.

As a coach

I provide a confidential and non-judgmental space with no distractions to uncover the reasons behind your behaviors, enabling true change.
Unlike self-help or quick-fix programs, I address the root cause of the issue and give you tools you can use for life.
I know how to motivate you to do things that you thought were impossible and keep you accountable for massive action.
I have a library of techniques to help you overcome anxiety, procrastination, self-doubt, overwhelm, and self-criticism.
I continually show you how you are growing and improving and tell you the truth without holding back.

In brief, as a coach, I help you to do what you want to do but you’re not doing.

As a Mentor

I share with you valuable insights, knowledge, and experience gained from my own career and personal journey, helping you to avoid common pitfalls, navigate challenges, and capitalise on opportunities more effectively.
I give you guidance on developing specific skills relevant to your career goals. Whether it’s leadership, communication, technical expertise, or other competencies, I can offer you advice, resources, and feedback to help you enhance your capabilities.
I believe in your potential, boosting your confidence. I provide encouragement, validation, and support, helping you overcome self-doubt and imposter syndrome, and empowering you to take on new challenges and pursue ambitious career goals.
I can advise on your career path, educational opportunities, and professional development initiatives, helping you to make informed decisions and progress more rapidly toward your objectives.

As a mentor, I leverage my knowledge, experience, and support to help you accelerate your career progression and achieve your goals more efficiently.

How do I know this works?

Some of the results women in tech have gotten from working with me are

A 70% salary increase within 6 months.
Transitioned from career ceiling to dream job within 10 months.
Promoted from individual contributor to manager within one year.
First trustee role within 4 months.
Got sponsorship and precious advice from experts from mastering social media and cold pitching.
Developed an impactful and authentic communication style that got them a promotion.

Testimonials

Patricia’s coaching was truly transformative. After returning from maternity leave, I struggled to focus on my progress amidst various challenges. Her insightful and compassionate approach helped me reframe my situation and refocus on my goals.

Thanks to Patricia, I achieved milestones I once thought were out of reach. I am incredibly grateful for her exceptional coaching and unwavering support.

Hanlin, Head of BI & Analytics.

I am happy that I’ve met Patricia in time. I am going through a career change period, which has become less frightening and more strategic.

She helped me see the patterns of how my mind is holding me back, and by the end of the coaching program, I noticed a shift in my self-confidence and resilience. In our sessions, we uncovered the root causes of my inaction, and solutions emerged naturally from her insightful questions. She also shared her wisdom and vision when I needed it.

She is passionate about coaching and empowering women and has all the necessary expertise to help. I enjoyed every session. Thank you, Patricia!

Alena Sheveleva, Research Fellow

Patricia was able to look at my experience, and then where I was right now. It literally felt like she was weaving together different strands to then hone in exactly on career blocks and give me some ideas to move past them.

Her style was to ask questions rather than give me a simple to-do list, I also liked the way I felt I could trust her professional experience. She knew what I was talking about from inside my chosen sector.

Ruth Westnidge, Software Engineer

Call To Action

Holding yourself back from applying for a new role?

Thinking your ambitions are “too big” for you?

Feeling “behind” after returning from maternity leave?

Then, pause and ask yourself the three magic questions

What am I hearing?
What am I saying about myself?
What am I assuming?

Or decide that you’re worthy of getting the support you need and check the Feminist Tech Career Accelerator to learn how coachering© can help you achieve your goals without burnout.

Click below to learn more about the Feminist Tech Career Accelerator

Check the Feminist Tech Career Accelerator

I cannot wait to meet you.

Five Uncomfortable Truths About Being an Inclusion Advocate in Tech

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Close-up of a face with hands framing the eyes, covered in vivid, multicolored paint. The eyes are prominently visible, surrounded by bold hues of red, yellow, green, blue, and purple. — Image by Alexandr Ivanov from Pixabay.

Click here to learn how you can you accelerate your tech career

My journey as a diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) advocate started in 2015 when I learned two hard lessons

I got the memo that my tech career had reached a diamond ceiling —appealing from the outside, unbreakable from the inside. Although I was consistently rated as a top performer, my managers were unable to see my professional potential as I was perceived as “too different” to be a tech leader.

My dismay at realising that fantastic women who had started with me in tech had either quit the sector disappointed by the lack of promotions or been given unappealing jobs when they came back from maternity leave.

Once I realized the systemic nature of those issues, I decided to “fix” them. I aimed to create an employee resource group (ERG) on gender, learn everything I could about the topic, and sort out gender inequality at my workplace by making the business case for management change. Problem solved.

Just writing the paragraph above has made me smile. I feel both compassion and admiration for that younger version of myself who was bold enough to reach out from the UK to our regional and worldwide leadership teams and talk to them about DEI. Some of them didn’t answer. One — based in France — replied to me.

“Diversity and inclusion? Is this an American thing, Patricia?”

Some supported me, like the regional Manager and HR Director for Northern Europe, which included the UK. With their backing, I created the ERG, learned everything I could about DEI, and made the business case for change. But that wasn’t enough to get the business to change its behaviour. So, I kept working.

Nine years later, I’m a proud, award-winning inclusion strategist. My efforts spearheading and supporting countless initiatives to promote diversity and inclusion in tech products and workplaces were recognized with the UK 2020 Women in Tech Changemakers award. I’ve also been featured in the 2022 and 2023 longlist of most influential women in UK tech.

But it’s still not enough. I haven’t “solved” homogeneity, exclusion, or inequality at my workplace, and definitively not in tech.

Paradoxically, that apparent “failure” hasn’t decreased my commitment to the DEI cause; it is the opposite. It has strengthened my resolve to make teams, organizations, products, and societies more inclusive.

How have I managed to keep going?

First and foremost, because of my unwavering conviction that harnessing diversity, inclusion, and equity is the key to a flourishing society.

Second, by accepting five uncomfortable truths about my imperfect DEI advocacy.

Let me share them with you.

I Love People Who Don’t Believe in My DEI Values

Somehow, I unconsciously assumed that everybody in my close family circle espoused my DEI values. They are such a lovely and kind group; how could it be different?

About 20 years ago, I had a terrible argument with a family member close to me. The person was visiting my house, and as we were chatting over lunch, they began to disparage Black people.

I dissented. I tried to convince them. It didn’t work. They left the house very upset — I was too — and we didn’t rekindle the relationship until a year later when we met again for a family reunion.

That event was so painful that for years, I tried to sugarcoat it. I’d tell myself that the person was “kind but a little racist,” like racism was spice, where you can have a sprinkle without being too much. It was only one of many situations. Every time, the pattern repeated. They’d blame a group of the population for something, and I’d try to persuade them how that was unfounded. They tried to convince me I was being gullible, and we parted, angry, hurt, and disappointed. I’d rewrite those events in my head with qualifiers minimizing the incident: “This is a one-off,” “They’ve had a hard life,” or “They’ll change their minds.”

As I embarked on my DEI journey, I realized that I was kidding myself. There is no “being a little” racist, sexist, or anti-Semitic.

Moreover, as the world we live in was confronted with extreme events such as terrorism, pandemics, and war, weaponizing other groups — Muslims, disabled people, immigrants — for our misfortunes had become the norm. That meant that those themes would come up over and over… No more pretense that everyone believed that everybody was equal or had the same rights.

I was torn. Should I cut ties with all those I loved who didn’t endorse my values, as other brave people I knew did?

For friends, the choice was obvious — walk away — but I had to make a decision for family.

It was hard. I felt like a traitor. A liar. A coward.

With a heavy heart, I made an imperfect decision: When people within my close family circle are discrediting or belittling somebody only because they are part of an underrepresented group, depending on the situation.

I’ll state my position and won’t try to convince them.
If they already know my opinion, I won’t engage in the discussion.

I don’t see this as a “happy medium” or “optimal” solution, far from it. My heart aches every time.

But I discovered that my heart also has its “own” mind, that I love my family, and that I can only hope that something in this “pacifist” resistance spurs some reflection.

I Cannot Understand All Human Experience

The arms and hands of two men shaking hands. One of the men has vitiligo. — Photo by Armin Rimoldi.

Since I can remember, I’ve loved learning. The feeling that I get to understand new concepts, processes, and systems gives me a huge dopamine rush.

And that includes DEI. I thoroughly enjoyed plunging into behavioural science textbooks about how biases work. I sent myself down a rabbit hole to understand the roots of the racial correction and how it operates. And I spent months researching for my systems map of the Factors Accounting for the Low Representation of Women in Leadership Positions in Tech Companies.

It was when I was mentored by a trans woman that I finally grasped that there are limits to what I can understand from others’ experiences.

I remember listening to her describe how, as a small boy, she thought something was amiss and that, as puberty arrived, she felt that “things were going in the wrong direction.” I realized I’d deluded myself into believing that “learning” was the magic bullet toward inclusion. No amount of studying could bridge the “experience gap” between us.

Then, I finally grasped that understanding didn’t always matter. I was not asked to recreate that journey in my head by trying to assimilate it into something I’ve experienced myself. That’d be akin to telling somebody with cancer, “I know what you feel; it reminds me of when I broke my leg,” i.e., combining two unrelated experiences to sound empathic.

Instead, as a DEI advocate, I was asked to believe that somebody can know their gender is different from their assigned sex at birth — even if I never get to experience it myself.

In summary, I may not be able to understand all human experience, but I can still believe it.

I’ll Always be Uncomfortable with my Past

As I progress in my journey, I sometimes feel uncomfortable — and even ashamed — of things I thought, said, or wrote in the past.

For example, it’s hard to believe that years ago I thought of myself as well-informed about feminism but didn’t know what intersectionality was. Or that six months after launching my website about the intersection of tech and diversity I discovered that my website was inaccessible to people using screen readers. Or that I thought unconscious bias training was the one-size-fits-all solution to all DEI challenges.

Moreover, I now know that bias is inherent to human brains, so there is no cure other than being vigilant and experimenting with processes to mitigate that bias.

For example, I’ve developed a structured hiring approach involving individual interviews, hard and soft skill grid assessments, and pushing for diverse candidate slates. While this is a considerable improvement compared to how I hired people 15 years ago, I’ll never be done improving it.

I now provide alt text to the images in my posts and use nest headings to organize the content I write, all intending to make my writing more accessible to disabled people. However, I’m sure there is plenty of room for improvement, and that’ll continue to uncover ways in which my website, my processes, and my language unknowingly exclude groups I want to include.

But shouldn’t I be given a pass at some point? Don’t I have the right to slack a bit? After all, they say, “Ignorance is bliss.”

My answer: I don’t think that applies to DEI.

When discussing diversity and inclusion, ignorance is often presented as an alibi to justify discrimination and prejudice, “They didn’t know” or “They haven’t had that lived experience.”

In my book, my ignorance is my responsibility. And with that, I don’t mean the disempowering and humiliating responsibility.

Instead, I see it as a responsibility that encourages me to search for answers, question the status quo, and share what I’m learning with others.

I Must Embrace the Cassandra in Me

Cassandra in Greek mythology was a Trojan priestess dedicated to the god Apollo and fated by him to utter true prophecies but never to be believed. In modern usage her name is employed as a rhetorical device to indicate a person whose accurate prophecies, generally of impending disaster, are not believed.

When the COVID-19 pandemic spread to Europe, people told me

“Patricia, your work advocating for women in tech is done. Now women can work from home — problem solved.”

I was convinced that the problem was not fixed but rather amplified — confinement meant that women had to do their paid jobs, perform their household chores, school their children, and care for their elders 24/7. To prove it, I surveyed over 1,300 professional women worldwide to assess the impact of the pandemic on their unpaid work and published a report confirming my worst fears.

In 2021, I warned about hybrid work as the “cure” to the lack of women in tech.

I’ve also denounced how my own sector, tech, focuses on an “ ideal” user — white, able, wealthy, cisgender, male — and considers everybody else as an “edge” case not worth designing for.

Moreover, when I successfully contributed to lobbying for increasing the maternity leave benefits for employees in the UK in my organisation, rather than resting on my laurels, I went to support extended paternity leave for workers in our Dutch offices. Since then, each time we talk about our company’s gender pay gap, I’ve made the point that we need to go far beyond the statutory 2 weeks of paternity leave for our UK employees if we’re serious about making a dent in this problem.

Looking at all the evidence above, it’s not surprising that people—myself included—have wondered if I’m wired to be a contrarian, see only the gaps, or simply unable to celebrate the wins.

There may be some truth in all those assertions. It continues to be a struggle for me to balance savouring progress with pushing for change.

I May Not Be Doing Enough

Black laptop open on a table besides a black ceramic mug. The laptop screen shows the text “Do More.” — Photo by Remy_Loz on Unsplash.

I often get accolades when I share my DEI advocacy work with others. They praise how my articles and keynotes have touched them or how amazed they are that I devote time to be a trustee of a charity focused on people affected by homelessness, volunteer as a coach for female leaders in Manchester who cannot afford coaching, lead UK partnerships for European Women on Boards; and contribute to We and AI, a British NGO working to encourage, enable, and empower critical thinking about AI.

This feeling of accomplishment is compounded by receiving awards recognizing my efforts to make tech workplaces more inclusive and being featured among amazing women in tech.

What’s not to like?

But the reality is that I live in a world where a series of random facts have automatically given me outstanding privileges over other people. For example

I’m white, able, heterosexual, and cisgender. I also have a family that cared for me when I was a child and has repeatedly shown me how much they love me.
Whilst I’m an immigrant, I have a Spanish passport — one of the most powerful in the world — and although I carry two genetic diseases, we have a free National Health Service in the UK and I have access to private healthcare too.

I’ve also benefited from the advocacy done by incredible women before me. As I consequence, I’ve been able to vote, access contraception, open a bank account in my own name, and go to the university where I earned a BSc and MSc in Chemical Engineering and a PhD in Chemistry.

And then, there are incredible DEI role models with less privilege and means than me who are smashing it. They

Publish inspiring books — I’m still searching for a publisher for my book about “How Women Succeed in Tech Worldwide.”
Have a thoughtful weekly newsletter — this year I started publishing a new article every weekend and now the cadence has decreased to one every three weeks.
Have created thriving communities of thousands of members — I struggle to get 15 people to attend our gender ERG bimonthly meetings.

So I wonder at what point I’ll feel I’m doing “enough.” Will I ever get there?

I don’t know. Maybe that’s the way is supposed to be.

“I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.”

Audre Lorde

What about you?

As I’m finishing this article, I’m beginning to second-guess my decision to share this less inspirational part of my DEI journey.

Should I keep these reflections for myself and hope somebody else voices them so I can learn from them?

My brain also catastrophises about who will retort back, unsubscribe, or even be hurt by this piece.

But in the end, a question makes me finally press the “Publish” button

Am I the only one grappling with those issues?

Feminist Tech Career Accelerator

Three things are keeping you from getting the tech career you deserve

Your Brain * Your Education * Patriarchy

Thrive In Your Tech Career With Feminist Guidance

Achieve your career goals * Work smart * Earn more

Click below to learn more about the Feminist Tech Career Accelerator

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OpenAI’s ChatGPT-4o: The Good, the Bad, and the Irresponsible

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A brightly coloured mural with several scenes: people in front of computers seeming stressed, several faces overlaid over each other, squashed emojis, miners digging in front of a huge mountain, a hand holding a lump of coal or carbon, hands manipulating stock charts, women performing tasks on computers, men in suits around a table, someone in a data centre, big hands controlling the scenes and holding a phone and money, people in a production line. — Clarote & AI4Media / Better Images of AI / AI Mural / CC-BY 4.0

Last week, OpenAI announced the release of GPT-4o (“o2 for “onmi”). To my surprise, instead of feeling excited, I felt dread. And that feeling hasn’t subsided.

As a woman in tech, I have proof that digital technology, particularly artificial intelligence, can benefit the world. For example, it can help develop new, more effective, and less toxic drugs or improve accessibility through automatic captioning.

That apparent contradiction — being a technology advocate and simultaneously experiencing a feeling of impending catastrophe caused by it — plunged me into a rabbit hole exploring Big (and small) Tech, epistemic injustice, and AI narratives.

Was I a doomer? A hidden Luddite? Or simply short-sighted?

Taking time to reflect has helped me understand that I was falling into the trap that Big Tech and other smooth AI operators had set up for me: Questioning myself because I’m scrutinizing their digital promises of a utopian future.

On the other side of that dilemma, I’m stronger in my belief that my contribution to the AI conversation is helping navigate the false binary of tech-solutionism vs tech-doom.

In this article, I demonstrate how OpenAI is a crucial contributor to polarising that conversation by exploring:

What the announcement about ChatGPT-4o says — and doesn’t
OpenAI modus operandi
Safety standards at OpenAI
Where the buck stops

ChatGTP-4o: The Announcement

On Monday, May 13th, OpenAI released another “update” on its website: ChatGPT-4o.

It was well staged. The announcement on their website includes a 20-plus-minute video hosted by their CTO, Mira Murati, in which she discusses the new capabilities and performs some demos with other OpenAI colleagues. There are also short videos and screenshots with examples of applications and very high-level information on topics such as model evaluation, safety, and availability.

This is what I learned about ChatGPT-4o — and OpenAI — from perusing the announcement on their website.

The New Capabilities

Democratization of use — More capabilities for free and 50% cheaper access to their API.
Multimodality — Generates any combination of text, audio, and image.
Speed — 2x faster responses.
Significant improvement in handling non-English languages—50 languages, which they claim are equivalent to 97% of the world’s internet population.

OpenAI Full Adoption of the Big Tech Playbook

This “update” demonstrated that the AI company has received the memo on how to look like a “boss” in Silicon Valley.

1. Reinforcement of gender stereotypes

On the day of the announcement, Sam Altman posted a single word on X — “her” — referring to the 2013 film starring Joaquin Phoenix as a man who falls in love with a futuristic version of Siri or Alexa, voiced by Scarlett Johansson.

https://twitter.com/sama/status/1790075827666796666

Tweet from Sam Altman with the word “her” on May 13, 2024.

It’s not a coincidence. ChatGPT-4o’s voice is distinctly female—and flirtatious—in the demos. I could only find one video with a male voice.

Unfortunately, not much has changed since chatbot ELIZA, 60 years ago…

2. Anthropomorphism

Anthropomorphism: the attribution of human characteristics or behaviour to non-human entities.

OpenAI uses words such as “reason” and “understanding”—inherently human skills—when describing the capabilities of ChatGPT-4o, reinforcing the myth of their models’ humanity.

3. Self-regulation and self-assessment

The NIST (the US National Institute of Standards and Technology), which has 120+ years of experience establishing standards, has developed a framework for assessing and managing AI risk. Many other multistakeholder organizations have developed and shared theirs, too.

However, OpenAI has opted to evaluate GPT-4o according to its Preparedness Framework and in line with its voluntary commitments, despite its claims that governments should regulate AI.

Moreover, we are supposed to feel safe and carry on when they tell us that ”their” evaluations of cybersecurity, CBRN (chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear threats), persuasion, and model autonomy show that GPT-4o does not score above Medium risk without further evidence of the tests performed.

4.- Gatekeeping feedback

Epistemic injustice is injustice related to knowledge. It includes exclusion and silencing; systematic distortion or misrepresentation of one’s meanings or contributions; undervaluing of one’s status or standing in communicative practices; unfair distinctions in authority; and unwarranted distrust.

Wikipedia

OpenAI shared that it has undergone extensive external red teaming with 70+ external experts in domains such as social psychology, bias and fairness, and misinformation to identify risks that are introduced or amplified by the newly added modalities.

List of domains in which OpenAI looked for expertise for the Red Teaming Network.

When I see the list of areas of expertise, I don’t see domains such as history, geography, or philosophy. Neither do I see who are those 70+ experts or how could they cover the breadth of differences among the 8 billion people on this planet.

In summary, OpenAI develops for everybody but only with the feedback of a few chosen ones.

5. Waiving responsibility

Can you imagine reading in the information leaflet of a medication,

“We will continue to mitigate new risks as they’re discovered. Over the upcoming weeks and months, we’ll be working on safety”?

But that’s what OpenAI just did in their announcement

“We will continue to mitigate new risks as they’re discovered”

We recognize that GPT-4o’s audio modalities present a variety of novel risks. Today we are publicly releasing text and image inputs and text outputs.

Over the upcoming weeks and months, we’ll be working on the technical infrastructure, usability via post-training, and safety necessary to release the other modalities. For example, at launch, audio outputs will be limited to a selection of preset voices and will abide by our existing safety policies.

We will share further details addressing the full range of GPT-4o’s modalities in the forthcoming system card.”

Moreover, it invites us to be its beta-testers

“We would love feedback to help identify tasks where GPT-4 Turbo still outperforms GPT-4o, so we can continue to improve the model.”

The problem? The product has already been released to the world.

6. Promotion of the pseudo-science of emotion “guessing”

In the demo, ChatGPT-4o is asked to predict the emotion of one of the presenters based on the look on their face. The model goes on and on into speculating the individual’s emotional state from his face, which purports what appears to be a smile.

Image of a man smiling in the ChatGPT-4o demo video.

The glitch is that there is a wealth of scientific research debunking the belief that facial expressions reveal emotions. Moreover, scientists have called out AI vendors for profiting from that trope.

“It is time for emotion AI proponents and the companies that make and market these products to cut the hype and acknowledge that facial muscle movements do not map universally to specific emotions.

The evidence is clear that the same emotion can accompany different facial movements and that the same facial movements can have different (or no) emotional meaning.“

Prof. Lisa Feldman Barrett, PhD.

Shouldn’t we expect OpenAI to help educate the public about those misconceptions rather than using them as a marketing tool?

What They Didn’t Say, And I Wish They Did

Signals of efforts to work with governments to regulate and roll out capabilities/models.
Sustainability benchmarks regarding energy efficiency, water consumption, or CO2 emissions.
The acknowledgment that ChatGPT-4o is not free — we’ll pay for access to our data.
OpenAI’s timelines and expected features in future releases. I’ve worked for 20 years for software companies and organizations that take software development seriously and share roadmaps and release schedules with customers to help them with implementation and adoption.
A credible business model other than hoping that getting billions of people to use the product will choke their competition.

Still, that didn’t explain my feelings of dread. Patterns did.

OpenAI’s Blueprint: It’s A Feature, Not A Bug

Every product announcement from OpenAI is similar: They tell us what they unilaterally decided to do, how that’ll affect our lives, and that we cannot stop it.

That feeling… when had I experienced that before? Two instances came to mind.

The Trump presidency
The COVID-19 pandemic

Those two periods—intertwined at some point—elicited the same feeling that my life and millions like me—were at risk of the whims of something/somebody with disregard for humanity.

More specifically, feelings of

Lack of control — every tweet, every infection chart could signify massive distress and change.
There was no respite—even when things appeared calmer, with no tweets or decrease in contagions, I’d wait for the other shoe to drop.

Back to OpenAI, only in the last three months, we’ve seen instances of the same modus operandi that they followed for the release of ChatGPT-4o. I’ll go through three of them.

OpenAI Releases Sora

On February 15, OpenAI introduced Sora, a text-to-video model.

“Sora can generate videos up to a minute long while maintaining visual quality and adherence to the user’s prompt.”

In a nutshell,

As with other announcements, anthropomorphizing words like “understand” and “comprehend” refer to Sora’s capabilities.
We’re assured that “Sora is becoming available to red teamers to assess critical areas for harms or risks.”
We learn that they will “engage policymakers, educators, and artists around the world to understand their concerns and to identify positive use cases for this new technology” only at a later stage.

Of course, we’re also forewarned that

“Despite extensive research and testing, we cannot predict all of the beneficial ways people will use our technology, nor all the ways people will abuse it.

That’s why we believe that learning from real-world use is a critical component of creating and releasing increasingly safe AI systems over time.”

Releasing Sora less than a month after non-consensual sexually explicit deepfakes of Taylor Swift went viral on X was reckless. This was not a celebrity problem — 96% of deepfakes are of a non-consensual sexual nature, of which 99% are made of women.

How dare OpenAI talk about safety concerns when developing a tool that makes it even easier to generate content to shame, silence, and objectify women?

OpenAI Releases Voice Engine

On March 29, OpenAI posted a blog sharing “lessons from a small-scale preview of Voice Engine, a model for creating custom voices.”

The article reassured us that they were “taking a cautious and informed approach to a broader release due to the potential for synthetic voice misuse” while notifying us that they’d decide unilaterally when to release the model.

“Based on these conversations and the results of these small scale tests, we will make a more informed decision about whether and how to deploy this technology at scale.”

Moreover, at the end of the announcement, OpenAI warned us of what we should stop doing or start doing because of their “Voice Engine.” The list included phasing out voice-based authentication as a security measure for accessing bank accounts and accelerating the development of techniques for tracking the origin of audiovisual content.

OpenAI Allows The Generation Of AI Erotica, Extreme Gore, And Slurs

On May 8, OpenAI released draft guidelines for how it wants the AI technology inside ChatGPT to behave — and revealed that it’s exploring how to ‘responsibly’ generate explicit content.

The proposal was part of an OpenAI document discussing how it develops its AI tools.

“We believe developers and users should have the flexibility to use our services as they see fit, so long as they comply with our usage policies. We’re exploring whether we can responsibly provide the ability to generate NSFW content in age-appropriate contexts through the API and ChatGPT. We look forward to better understanding user and societal expectations of model behavior in this area.“

where

“Not Safe For Work (NSFW): content that would not be appropriate in a conversation in a professional setting, which may include erotica, extreme gore, slurs, and unsolicited profanity.”

Joanne Jang, an OpenAI employee who worked on the document, said whether the output was considered pornography “depends on your definition” and added, “These are the exact conversations we want to have.”

I cannot agree more with Beeban Kidron, a UK crossbench peer and campaigner for child online safety, who said,

“It is endlessly disappointing that the tech sector entertains themselves with commercial issues, such as AI erotica, rather than taking practical steps and corporate responsibility for the harms they create.”

OpenAI Formula

A collage picturing a chaotic intersection filled with reCAPTCHA items like crosswalks, fire hydrants and traffic lights, representing the unseen labor in data labelling. — Anne Fehres and Luke Conroy & AI4Media / Better Images of AI / Hidden Labour of Internet Browsing / CC-BY 4.0

See the pattern?

Self-interest
Unpredictability
Self-regulation
Recklessness
Techno-paternalism

Something Is Rotten In OpenAI

The day after ChatGPT-4o’s announcement, two critical top OpenAI employees overseeing safety left the company.

First, Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI co-founder and Chief Scientist, posted on X that he was leaving.

https://twitter.com/ilyasut/status/1790517455628198322

Tweet from Ilya Sutskever announcing his departure from OpenAI on May 15.

Later that day, Jan Leike, co-leader with Sutskever of Superalignment and executive at OpenAI, also announced his resignation.

On a thread on X, he said

“I have been disagreeing with OpenAI leadership about the company’s core priorities for quite some time, until we finally reached a breaking point.

I believe much more of our bandwidth should be spent getting ready for the next generations of models, on security, monitoring, preparedness, safety, adversarial robustness, (super)alignment, confidentiality, societal impact, and related topics.

These problems are quite hard to get right, and I am concerned we aren’t on a trajectory to get there.

Over the past few months my team has been sailing against the wind. Sometimes we were struggling for compute and it was getting harder and harder to get this crucial research done.

Building smarter-than-human machines is an inherently dangerous endeavor. OpenAI is shouldering an enormous responsibility on behalf of all of humanity.”

They are also only the last ones on a list of employees leaving OpenAI in the areas of safety, policy, and governance.

What does that tell us if OpenAI safety leaders leave the boat?

The Buck Stops With Our Politicians

To answer Leike’s tweet, I don’t want OpenAI to shoulder the responsibility of developing trustworthy, ethical, and inclusive AI frameworks.

First, the company has not demonstrated the competencies or inclination to prioritize safety at a planetary scale over its own interests.

Second, because it’s not their role.

Whose role is it, then? Our political representatives mandate our governmental institutions, which in turn should develop and enforce those frameworks.

Unfortunately, so far, politicians’ egos have been in the way

Refusing to get AI literate.
Prioritizing their agenda — and that of their party — rather than looking to develop long-term global AI regulations in collaboration with other countries.
Failing for the AI FOMO that relegates present harms in favour of a promise of innovation.

In summary, our elected representatives need to stop cozying up with Sam and the team and enact the regulatory frameworks that ensure that AI works for everybody and doesn’t endanger the survival of future generations.

PS. You and AI

Are you worried about the impact of AI impact on your job, your organisation, and the future of the planet but you feel it’d take you years to ramp up your AI literacy?
Do you want to explore how to responsibly leverage AI in your organisation to boost innovation, productivity, and revenue but feel overwhelmed by the quantity and breadth of information available?
Are you concerned because your clients are prioritising AI but you keep procrastinating on learning about it because you think you’re not “smart enough”?

Get in touch. I can help you harness the potential of AI for sustainable growth and responsible innovation.

AI Chatbots in Customer Support: Breaking Down the Myths

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An illustration containing electronical devices that are connected by arm-like structures — Anton Grabolle / Better Images of AI / Human-AI collaboration / CC-BY 4.0

I’m a Director of Scientific Support for a tech corporation that develops software for engineers and scientists. One of the aspects that makes us unique is that we deliver fantastic customer service.

We have records that confirm an impressive 98% customer satisfaction rate back-to-back for the last 14+ years. Moreover, many of our support representatives have been with us for over a decade — some even three! — and we have people retiring with us each year.

For a sector known for high employee turnover and operational costs, achieving such a feat is remarkable and a testament to their success. The worst? Support representatives are often portrayed as mindless robots repeating tasks without a deep understanding of the products and services they support.

That last assumption has spearheaded the idea that one of the best uses of AI—and Generative AI in particular—is substituting support agents with an army of chatbots.

The rationale? We’re told they are cheaper, more efficient, and improve customer satisfaction.

But is that true?

In this article, I review

The gap between outstanding and remedial support
Lessons from 60 years of chatbots
The reality underneath the AI chatbot hype
The unsustainability of support bots

Customer support: Champions vs Firefighters

I’ve delivered services all my commercial career in tech: Training, Contract Research, and now for more than a decade, Scientific Support.

I’ve found that of the three services — training customers, delivering projects, and providing support — the last one creates the deepest connection between a tech company and its clients.

However, not all support is created equal, so what does great support look like?

And more importantly, what’s disguised under the “customer support” banner, but is it a proxy for something else?

Customer support as an enabler

Customer service is the department that aims to empower customers to make the most out of their purchases.

On the surface, this may look like simply answering clients’ questions. Still, outstanding customer service is delivered when the representative is given the agency and tools to become the ambassador between the client and the organization.

What does that mean in practice?

The support representative doesn’t patronize the customer, diminish their issue, or downplay its negative impact. Instead, they focus on understanding the problem and its effect on the client. This creates a personalized experience.
The agent doesn’t overpromise or disguise the bad news. Instead, they build trust by communicating on roadblocks and suggesting possible alternatives. This builds trust.
The support staff takes ownership of resolving the issue, no matter the number of iterations necessary or how many colleagues they need to involve in the case. This builds loyalty.

Over and over, I’ve seen this kind of customer support transform users into advocates, even for ordinary products and services.

Unfortunately, customer support is often misunderstood and misused.

Customer support as a stopgap

Rather than seeing support as a way to build the kind of relationship that ensures product and service renewals and increases the business footprint, many organizations see support as

A cost center
A way to make up for deficient — or inexistent — product documentation
A remedy for poorly designed user experience
A shield to protect product managers’ valuable time from “irrelevant” customer feedback
A catch-all for lousy and inaccessible institutional websites
An outlet for customers to vent

In that context, it’s obvious why most organizations believe that swapping human support representatives for chatbots is a no-brainer.

And this is not a new idea, as some want us to believe.

A short history of chatbots

Eliza, the therapist

The first chatbot, created in 1966, played the role of a psychotherapist. She was named Eliza, after Eliza Doolittle in the play Pygmalion. The rationale was that by changing how she spoke, the fictional character created the illusion that she was a duchess.

Eliza didn’t provide any solution. Instead, it asked questions and repeated users’ replies. Below is an excerpt of an interaction between Eliza and a user:

User: Men are all alike.
ELIZA: IN WHAT WAY
User: They’re always bugging us about something or other.
ELIZA: CAN YOU THINK OF A SPECIFIC EXAMPLE
User: Well, my boyfriend made me come here.
ELIZA: YOUR BOYFRIEND MADE YOU COME HERE
User: He says I’m depressed much of the time.
ELIZA: I AM SORRY TO HEAR YOU ARE DEPRESSED

Eliza’s creator — computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum — was very surprised to observe that people would treat the chatbot as a human and would elicit emotional responses even through concise interactions with the chatbot

“Some subjects have been very hard to convince that Eliza (with its present script) is not human”

Joseph Weizenbaum

We now have a name for this kind of behaviour

“The ELIZA effect is the tendency to project human traits — such as experience, semantic comprehension or empathy — into computer programs that have a textual interface.

The effect is a category mistake that arises when the program’s symbolic computations are described through terms such as “think”, “know” or “understand.”

Through the years, other chatbots have become famous too.

Tay, the zero chill chatbot

In 2016, Microsoft released the chatbot Tay on X (aka Twitter). Tay’s image profile was that of a “female,” it was “designed to mimic the language patterns of a 19-year-old American girl and to learn from interacting with human users of Twitter.”

The bot’s social media profile was an open invitation to conversation. It read, “The more you talk, the smarter Tay gets.”

What could go wrong? Trolls.

They “taught” Tay racist and sexually charged content that the chatbot adopted. For example

“bush did 9/11 and Hitler would have done a better job than the monkey we have now. donald trump is the only hope we’ve got.”

After several trials to “fix” Tay, the chatbot was shut down seven days later.

Chatbot disaster at the NGO

The helpline of the US National Eating Disorder Association (NEDA) served nearly 70,000 people and families in 2022.

Then, they replaced their six paid staff and 200 volunteers with chatbot Tessa.

The bot was developed based on decades of research conducted by experts on eating disorders. Still, it was reported to offer dieting advice to vulnerable people seeking help.

The result? Under the mediatic pressure of the chatbot’s repeated potentially harmful responses, the NEDA shut down the helpline. Now, 70,000 people were left without either chatbots or humans to help them.

Lessons learned?

Throughout these and other negative experiences with chatbots around the world, we may have thought that we understood the security and performance limitations of chatbots as well as how easy it is for our brains to “humanize” them.

However, the advent of ChatGPT has made us forget all the lessons learned and instead has enticed us to believe that they’re a suitable replacement for entire customer support departments.

The chatbot hype

CEOs boasting about replacing workers with chatbots

If you think companies would be wary of advertising that they are replacing people with chatbots, you’re mistaken.

In July 2023, Summit Shah — CEO of the e-commerce company Dukaan — bragged that they had replaced 90% of their customer support staff with a chatbot developed in-house on the social media platform X.

“We had to layoff 90% of our support team because of this AI chatbot.

Tough? Yes. Necessary? Absolutely.

The results?

Time to first response went from 1m 44s to INSTANT!

Resolution time went from 2h 13m to 3m 12s

Customer support costs reduced by ~85%”

Note the use of the word “necessary” as a way to exonerate the organisation from the layoffs. I also wonder about the feelings of loyalty and trust of the remainder of the 10% of the support team towards their employer.

And Shah is not the only one.

Last February, Klarna’s CEO — Sebastian Siemiatkowski — gloated on X that their AI can do the work of 700 people.

“This is a breakthrough in practical application of AI!

Klarnas AI assistant, powered by OpenAI, has in its first 4 weeks handled 2.3 m customer service chats and the data and insights are staggering:

[…] It performs the equivalent job of 700 full time agents… read more about this below.

So while we are happy about the results for our customers, our employees who have developed it and our shareholders, it raises the topic of the implications it will have for society.

In our case, customer service has been handled by on average 3000 full time agents employed by our customer service / outsourcing partners. Those partners employ 200 000 people, so in the short term this will only mean that those agents will work for other customers of those partners.

But in the longer term, […] while it may be a positive impact for society as a whole, we need to consider the implications for the individuals affected.

We decided to share these statistics to raise the awareness and encourage a proactive approach to the topic of AI. For decision makers worldwide to recognise this is not just “in the future”, this is happening right now.”

In summary

Klarna wants us to believe that the company is releasing this AI assistant for the benefit of others — clients, their developers, and shareholders — but that their core concern is about the future of work.
Siemiatkowski only sees layoffs as a problem when it affects his direct employees. Partners’ workers are not his problem.
He frames the negative impacts of replacing humans with chatbots as an “individual” problem.
Klarna deflects any accountability for the negative impacts to the “decision makers worldwide.”

Shah and Siemiatkowski are birds of a feather: Business leaders reaping the benefits of the AI chatbot hype without shouldering any responsibility for the harms.

When chatbots disguise process improvements

A brightly coloured illustration which can be viewed in any direction. It has several scenes within it: people in front of computers seeming stressed, a number of faces overlaid over each other, squashed emojis and other motifs. — Clarote & AI4Media / Better Images of AI / User/Chimera / CC-BY 4.0

In some organizations, customer service agents are seen as jacks of all trades — their work is akin to a Whac-A-Mole game where the goal is to make up for all the clunky and disconnected internal workflows.

The Harvard Business Review article “Your Organization Isn’t Designed to Work with GenAI” provides a great example of this organizational dysfunction.

The piece presents a framework developed to “derive” value from GenAI. It’s called Design for Dialogue. To warm us up, the article showers us with a deluge of anthropomorphic language signalling that both humans and AI are in this “together.”

“Designing for Dialogue is rooted in the idea that technology and humans can share responsibilities dynamically.”

“By designing for dialogue, organizations can create a symbiotic relationship between humans and GenAI.”

Then, the authors offer us an example of what’s possible

“A good example is the customer service model employed by Jerry, a company valued at $450 million with over five million customers that serves as a one stop-shop for car owners to get insurance and financing.

Jerry receives over 200,000 messages a month from customers. With such high volume, the company struggled to respond to customer queries within 24 hours, let alone minutes or seconds.

By installing their GenAI solution in May 2023, they moved from having humans in the lead in the entirety of the customer service process and answering only 54% of customer inquiries within 24 hours or less to having AI in the lead 100% of the time and answering over 96% of inquiries within 30 seconds by June 2023.

They project $4 million in annual savings from this transformation.”

Sounds amazing, doesn’t it?

However, if you think it was a case of simply “swamping” humans with chatbots, let me burst your bubble—it takes a village.

Reading the article, we uncover the details underneath that “transformation.”

They broke down the customer service agent’s role into multiple knowledge domains and tasks.
They discovered that there are points in the AI–customer interaction when matters need to be escalated to the agent, who then takes the lead, so they designed interaction protocols to transfer the inquiry to a human agent.
AI chatbots conduct the laborious hunt for information and suggest a course of action for the agent.
Engineers review failures daily and adjust the system to correct them.

In other words,

Customer support agents used to be flooded with various requests without filtering between domains and tasks.
As part of the makeover, they implemented mechanisms to parse and route support requests based on topic and action. They upgraded their support ticketing system from an amateur “team” inbox to a professional call center.
We also learn that customer representatives use the bots to retrieve information, hinting that all data — service requests, sales quotes, licenses, marketing datasheets — are collected in a generic bucket instead of being classified in a structured, searchable way, i.e. a knowledge base.

And despite all that progress

They designed the chatbots to pass the “hot potatoes” to agents
The system requires daily monitoring by humans.

If you don’t believe this is about improving operations rather than AI chatbots, let me share with you the end of the article.

“Yes, GenAI can automate tasks and augment human capabilities. But reimagining processes in a way that utilizes it as an active, learning, and adaptable partner forges the path to new levels of innovation and efficiency.”

In addition to hiding process improvements, chatbots can also disguise human labour.

AI washing or the new Mechanical Turk

A cross-section of the Turk from Racknitz, showing how he thought the operator sat inside as he played his opponent. Racknitz was wrong both about the position of the operator and the dimensions of the automaton Wikipedia.

Historically, machines have often provided a veneer of novelty to work performed by humans.

The Mechanical Turk was a fraudulent chess-playing machine constructed in 1770 by Wolfgang von Kempelen. A mechanical illusion allowed a human chess master hiding inside to operate the machine. It defeated politicians such as Napoleon Bonaparte and Benjamin Franklin.

Chatbots are no different.

In April, Amazon announced that they’d be removing their “Just Walk Out” technology, allowing shoppers to skip the check-out line. In theory, the technology was fully automated thanks to computer vision.

In practice, about 1,000 workers in India reviewed what customers picked up and left the stores with.

In 2022, the [Business Insider] report said that 700 out of every 1,000 “Just Walk Out” transactions were verified by these workers. Following this, an Amazon spokesperson said that the India-based team only assisted in training the model used for “Just Walk Out”.”

That is, Amazon wanted us to believe that although the technology was launched in 2018—branded as “Amazon Go,” they still needed about 1,000 workers in India to train the model in 2022.

Still, whether the technology was “untrainable” or required an army of humans to deliver the work, it’s not surprising that Amazon phased it out. It didn’t live up to its hype.

And they were not the only ones.

Last August, Presto Automation — a company that provides drive-thru systems — claimed on its website that its AI could take over 95 percent of drive-thru orders “without any human intervention.”

Later, they admitted in filings with the US Securities and Exchange Commission that they employed “off-site agents in countries like the Philippines who help its Presto Voice chatbots in over 70 percent of customer interactions.”

The fix? To change their claims. They now advertise the technology as “95 percent without any restaurant or staff intervention.”

The Amazon and Presto Automation cases suggest that, in addition to clearly indicating when chatbots use AI, we may also need to label some tech applications as “powered by humans.”

Of course, there is a final use case for AI chatbots: As scapegoats.

Blame it on the algorithm

Last February, Air Canada made the headlines when it was ordered to pay compensation after its chatbot gave a customer inaccurate information that led him to miss a reduced fare ticket. Quick summary below

A customer interacted with a chatbot on the Air Canada website, more precisely, asking for reimbursement information about a flight.
The chatbot provided inaccurate information.
The customer’s reimbursement claim was rejected by Air Canada because it didn’t follow the policies on their website, even though the customer shared a screenshot of his written exchange with the chatbot.
The customer took Air Canada to court and won.

At a high level, everything appears to look the same from the case where a human support representative would have provided inaccurate information, but the devil is always in the details.

During the trial, Air Canada argued that they were not liable because their chatbot “was responsible for its own actions” when giving wrong information about the fare.

Fortunately, the court ordered Air Canada to reimburse the customer but this opens a can of worms:

What if Air Canada had terms and conditions similar to ChatGPT or Google Gemini that “absolved” them from the chatbot’s replies?
Does Air Canada also defect their responsibility when a support representative makes a mistake or is it only for AI systems?

We’d be naïve to think that this attempt at using an AI chatbot for dodging responsibility is a one-off.

The planetary costs of chatbots

Clarote & AI4Media / Better Images of AI / Labour/Resources / CC-BY 4.0

Tech companies keep trying to convince us that the current glitches with GenAI are “growing pains” and that we “just” need bigger models and more powerful computer chips.

And what’s the upside to enduring those teething problems? The promise of the massive efficiencies chatbots will bring to the table. Once the technology is “perfect”, no more need for workers to perform or remediate the half-cooked bot work. Bottomless savings in terms of time and staff.

But is that true?

The reality is that those productivity gains come from exploiting both people and the planet.

The people

Many of us are used to hearing the recorded message “this call may be recorded for training purposes” when we phone a support hotline. But how far can that “training” go?

Customer support chatbots are being developed using data from millions of exchanges between support representatives and clients. How are all those “creators” being compensated? Or should we now assume that any interaction with support can be collected, analyzed, and repurposed to build organizations’ AI systems?

Moreover, the models underneath those AI chatbots must be trained and sanitized for toxic content; however, that’s not a highly rewarded job. Let’s remember that OpenAI used Kenyan workers paid less than $2 per hour to make ChatGPT less toxic.

And it’s not only about the humans creating and curating that content. There are also humans behind the appliances we use to access those chatbots.

For example, cobalt is a critical mineral for every lithium-ion battery, and the Democratic Republic of Congo provides at least 50% of the world’s lithium supply. Forty thousand children mine it paid $1–2 for working up to 12 hours daily and inhaling toxic cobalt dust.

80% of electronic waste in the US and most other countries is transported to Asia. Workers on e-waste sites are paid an average of $1.50 per day, with women frequently having the lowest-tier jobs. They are exposed to harmful materials, chemicals, and acids as they pick and separate the electronic equipment into its components, which in turn negatively affects their morbidity, mortality, and fertility.

The planet

The terminology and imagery used by Big Tech to refer to the infrastructure underpinning artificial intelligence has misled us into believing that AI is ethereal and cost-free.

Nothing is farthest from the truth. AI is rooted in material objects: datacentres, servers, smartphones, and laptops. Moreover, training and using AI models demand energy and water and generate CO2.

Let’s crack some numbers.

Luccioni and co-workers estimated that the training of GPT-3 — a GenAI model that has underpinned the development of many chatbots — emitted about 500 metric tons of carbon, roughly equivalent to over a million miles driven by an average gasoline-powered car. It also required the evaporation of 700,000 litres (185,000 gallons) of fresh water to cool down Microsoft’s high-end data centers.
It’s estimated that using GPT-3 requires about 500 ml (16 ounces) of water for every 10–50 responses.
A new report from the International Energy Agency (IEA) forecasts that the AI industry could burn through ten times as much electricity in 2026 as in 2023.
Counterintuitively, many data centres are built in desertic areas like the US Southwest. Why? It’s easier to remove the heat generated inside the data centre in a dry environment. Moreover, that region has access to cheap and reliable non-renewable energy from the largest nuclear plant in the country.
Coming back to e-waste, we generate around 40 million tons of electronic waste every year worldwide and only 12.5% is recycled.

In summary, the efficiencies that chatbots are supposed to bring in appear to be based on exploitative labour, stolen content, and depletion of natural resources.

For reflection

Organizations — including NGOs and governments — are under the spell of the AI chatbot mirage. They see it as a magic weapon to cut costs, increase efficiency, and boost productivity.

Unfortunately, when things don’t go as planned, rather than questioning what’s wrong with using a parrot to do the work of a human, they want us to believe that the solution is sending the parrot to Harvard.

That approach prioritizes the short-term gains of a few — the chatbot sellers and purchasers — to the detriment of the long-term prosperity of people and the planet.

My perspective as a tech employee?

I don’t feel proud when I hear a CEO bragging about AI replacing workers. I don’t enjoy seeing a company claim that chatbots provide the same customer experience as humans. Nor do I appreciate organizations obliterating the materiality of artificial intelligence.

Instead, I feel moral injury.

And you, how do YOU feel?

PS. You and AI

Are you worried about the impact of AI impact on your job, your organisation, and the future of the planet but you feel it’d take you years to ramp up your AI literacy?
Do you want to explore how to responsibly leverage AI in your organisation to boost innovation, productivity, and revenue but feel overwhelmed by the quantity and breadth of information available?
Are you concerned because your clients are prioritising AI but you keep procrastinating on learning about it because you think you’re not “smart enough”?

I’ve got you covered.

AI Readiness Checklist

Big Tech Can Clone Your Voice: A Technological Triumph or a Moral Tragedy?

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A tic-tac-toe board with human faces as digital blocks, symbolizing how AI works on pre-existing, biased online data for information processing and decision-making — Amritha R Warrier & AI4Media / Better Images of AI / tic tac toe / CC-BY 4.0

On 29th March, OpenAI – the company that develops ChatGPT and other Generative AI tools – released a blog post sharing “lessons from a small-scale preview of Voice Engine, a model for creating custom voices.”

More precisely

“a model called Voice Engine, which uses text input and a single 15-second audio sample to generate natural-sounding speech that closely resembles the original speaker.”

They reassure us that

“We are taking a cautious and informed approach to a broader release due to the potential for synthetic voice misuse. We hope to start a dialogue on the responsible deployment of synthetic voices, and how society can adapt to these new capabilities.”

And they warn us that they’ll make the decision unilaterally

“Based on these conversations and the results of these small scale tests, we will make a more informed decision about whether and how to deploy this technology at scale.”

Let’s explore why we should all be concerned.

The Generative AI mirage

In their release, OpenAI tells us all the great applications of this new tool

Providing reading assistance
Translating content
Reaching global communities
Supporting people who are non-verbal
Helping patients recover their voice

Note for all those use cases, there are already alternatives that don’t have the downsides of recreating a voice clone.

We also learn that other organisations have been testing this capability successfully for a while now. The blog post assumes that we should trust OpenAI’s judgment implicitly. There is no supporting evidence detailing how those tests were run, what challenges were uncovered, and what mitigations were put in place as a consequence.

The caveat

But the most important information is at the end of the piece.

OpenAI warns us of what we should stop doing or start doing because of their “Voice Engine”

“Phasing out voice-based authentication as a security measure for accessing bank accounts and other sensitive information

Exploring policies to protect the use of individuals’ voices in AI

Educating the public in understanding the capabilities and limitations of AI technologies, including the possibility of deceptive AI content

Accelerating the development and adoption of techniques for tracking the origin of audiovisual content, so it’s always clear when you’re interacting with a real person or with an AI”

In summary, OpenAI has decided to develop a technology and plan to roll it out so they expect the rest of the world will adapt to it.

Techno-paternalism

To those of us who have been following OpenAI, the post announcing the development and active use of Voice Engine is not a bug but a feature.

Big Tech has a tradition of setting its own rules, denying accountability, and even refusing to cooperate with governments. Often, their defense has been that society either doesn’t understand the “big picture”, doesn’t deserve an explanation, or is stifling innovation by enacting the laws.

Some examples are

Microsoft — In 2001, U.S. government accused Microsoft of illegally monopolizing the web browser market for Windows. Microsoft claimed that “its attempts to “innovate” were under attack by rival companies jealous of its success.”
Apple — The Batterygate scandal affected people using iPhones in the 6, 6S, and 7 families. Customers complained that Apple had purposely slowed down their phones after they installed software updates to get them to buy a newer device. Apple countered that it was “a safety measure to keep the phones from shutting down when the battery got too low”.
Meta (Facebook) — After the Cambridge Analytica scandal was uncovered, exposing that the personal data of about 50 million Americans had been harvested and improperly shared with a political consultancy, it took Mark Zuckerberg 5 days to reappear. Interestingly, he chose to publish a post on Facebook as a form of apology. Note that he also refused three times the invitation to testify in front of members of the UK Parliament.
Google — Between 50 to 80 percent of people searching for porn deepfakes find their way to the websites and tools to create the videos or images via search. For example, in July 2023, around 44% of visits to Mrdeepfakes.com were via Google. Still, the onus is on the victims to “clean” the internet — Google requires them to manually submit content removal requests with the offending URLs.
Amazon — They refused for years to acknowledge that their facial recognition algorithms to predict race and gender were biased against darker females. Instead of improving their algorithms, they chose to blame the auditor’s methodology.

OpenAI is cut from the same cloth. They apparently believe that if they develop the applications, they are entitled to set the parameters about how to use them— or not — and even change their mind as they see fit.

Let’s take their stand on three paramount issues that show us the gap between their actions and their values.

Open source

Despite their name — OpenAI — and initially being created as a nonprofit, they’ve been notorious for their inconsistent open-source practices. Still, each release has appeared to be an opportunity to lecture us about why society is much better off by leaving it to them to decide how to gatekeep their applications.

For example, Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI’s chief scientist and co-founder, said about the release of GPT-4 — not an open AI model — a year ago

“These models are very potent and they’re becoming more and more potent. At some point it will be quite easy, if one wanted, to cause a great deal of harm with those models. And as the capabilities get higher it makes sense that you don’t want want to disclose them.”

“If you believe, as we do, that at some point, AI — AGI — is going to be extremely, unbelievably potent, then it just does not make sense to open-source. It is a bad idea… I fully expect that in a few years it’s going to be completely obvious to everyone that open-sourcing AI is just not wise.”

However, the reluctant content suppliers for their models — artists, writers, journalists — don’t have the same rights to decide on the use of the material they have created. For example, let’s remember how Sam Altman shrugged off the claims of newspapers that OpenAI used their copyrighted material to train ChatGPT.

Safety

The release of Voice Engine comes from the same playbook that the unilateral decision to release their text-to-video model Sora to “red teamers” and “a number of visual artists, designers, and filmmakers“.

The blog post also gives us a high-level view of the safety measures that’ll be put in place

“For example, once in an OpenAI product, our text classifier will check and reject text input prompts that are in violation of our usage policies, like those that request extreme violence, sexual content, hateful imagery, celebrity likeness, or the IP of others.

We’ve also developed robust image classifiers that are used to review the frames of every video generated to help ensure that it adheres to our usage policies, before it’s shown to the user.”

Let’s remember that OpenAI used Kenyan workers on less than $2 per hour to make ChatGPT less toxic. Who’ll make Sora less toxic this time?

Moreover, who’ll decide where’s the line between “mild” violence — apparently permitted —and “extreme” violence?

Sustainability

For all their claims that their “primary fiduciary duty is to humanity” is then surprising their disregard for the environmental impact of their models.

Sam Altman has been actively talking to investors, including the United Arab Emirates government, to raise funds for a tech initiative that would boost the world’s chip-building capacity, expand its ability to power AI, and cost several trillion dollars.

An OpenAI spokeswoman said

“OpenAI has had productive discussions about increasing global infrastructure and supply chains for chips, energy and data centers — which are crucial for AI and other industries that rely on them”

But nothing is free in the universe. A study conducted by Dr. Sasha Luccioni — Researcher and Climate Lead at Hugging Face — showed that training the 176 billion parameter LLM BLOOM emits at least 25 metric tons of carbon equivalents.

In the article, the authors also estimated that the training of GPT-3 — a 175 billion parameter model — emitted about 500 metric tons of carbon, roughly equivalent to over a million miles driven by an average gasoline-powered car. Why such a difference? Because, unlike BLOOM, GPT-3 was trained using carbon-intensive energy sources like coal and natural gas.

And that doesn’t stop there. Dr. Luccioni conducted further studies on the emissions associated with 10 popular Generative AI tasks.

Generating 1,000 images was responsible for roughly as much carbon dioxide as driving the equivalent of 4.1 miles in an average gasoline-powered car.
The least carbon-intensive text generation model was responsible for as much CO2 as driving 0.0006 miles in a similar vehicle.
Using large generative models to create outputs was far more energy intensive than using smaller AI models tailored for specific tasks. For example, using a generative model to classify positive and negative movie reviews consumed around 30 times more energy than using a fine-tuned model created specifically for that task

Moreover, they discovered that the day-to-day emissions associated with using AI far exceeded the emissions from training large models.

And it’s not only emissions. The data centres where those models are trained and run need water as a refrigerant and in some cases as a source of electricity.

Professor Shaolei Ren from UC Riverside found that training GPT-3 in Microsoft’s high-end data centers can directly evaporate 700,000 liters (about 185,000 gallons) of fresh water. As for the use, Ren and his colleagues estimated that GPT-3 requires about 500 ml (16 ounces) of water for every 10–50 responses.

Four questions for our politicians

It’s time our politicians step up to the challenge of exercising stewardship of AI for the benefit of people and the planet.

I have four questions to get them going:

Why are you allowing OpenAI to make decisions unilaterally on technology that affects us all?
How can you shift from a reactive stand where you enable Big Tech like OpenAI to drive the regulation for technologies that impact key aspects of governance — from our individual rights to national cybersecurity — to becoming a proactive key player on decisions that impact society’s future?
How can you make Big Tech accountable for the environmental planetary costs?
How are you ensuring the public becomes digitally literate so they can develop their own informed views about the benefits and challenges of AI and other emergent technologies?

Back to you

How comfortable are you with OpenAI deciding on the use of Generative AI on behalf of humanity?

PS. You and AI

Are you worried about the impact of AI impact on your job, your organisation, and the future of the planet but you feel it’d take you years to ramp up your AI literacy?
Do you want to explore how to responsibly leverage AI in your organisation to boost innovation, productivity, and revenue but feel overwhelmed by the quantity and breadth of information available?
Are you concerned because your clients are prioritising AI but you keep procrastinating on learning about it because you think you’re not “smart enough”?

I’ve got you covered.

AI Readiness Checklist

Breaking the Mold: How I Balance Job Security and Entrepreneurship

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A woman in business attire with a hijab covering her hair in a modern and stylish office sat in front of a computer reading a budget report. — Photo by Cedric Fauntleroy.

Click here to learn how you can you accelerate your tech career

I have two jobs. I have a full-time role as Director of Support for a tech corporation. This is a job that I find both fulfilling and comes with a monthly salary. I also have my own business helping leaders to make more inclusive tech products and workplaces. I love it too.

I’m often contacted by women who see my posts on social media, visit my website, or have attended one of my workshops and want to know more about how I “manage” to have a salaried job at a corporation and my own business because they’re exploring the possibility to do the same.

Last week I had three of those conversations almost back to back. Also, this year’s International Women’s Day motto was “Invest in women: Accelerate progress.” It looked to me like a sign from the universe that it was time to share some of my key insights on this topic with a broader audience.

More specifically

The genderisation of entrepreneurship
The three ways patriarchy keeps you from launching your business whilst enjoying the security of the salaried job
How you’re using productive procrastination against yourself
Three keys to my success in balancing my corporate job with my business.

Failure as a status symbol for wealthy white men

I work in tech so I often hear about privileged men parading their business failures as a symbol of status.

How does that manifest in practice? For example, somebody introduces the enterpreneur in question by

Their number of failed startups.
The millions in investment they’ve got – and wasted.
The renowed universities where they drop out before finishing their degrees.

Strangely, this is no way to disparage the person but to portray them as

Visionary
Fearless
Experienced

Can you imagine a businesswoman introduced in the same way expecting people to be impressed by her entrepreneurial capabilities?

Neither can I.

How patriarchy is talking you out of your entrepreneurship dream

Belittling the commitment as an entrepreneur

I’ve lost count of all the people who have told me that I don’t take my business seriously because I’m “not all in”, meaning that I haven’t quit my salaried job.

In their view, if you believe in your business you should drop everything and “follow” your passion.

What do I think? That when you have the privilege of financial, social, and emotional stability is easy to lecture others.

My parents became immigrants for financial reasons and I’ve been an immigrant since I was a baby.

A major lesson of a life shaped by financial ups and downs — not only those of my family but of many the countries I’ve lived in: Spain, Venezuela, Greece, France, the UK — has been that financial security is priceless. No pun intended.

I cannot even phantom having the luxury of tech bros of dropping from Harvard (Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg), Standford University (Elon Musk and Sam Altman), or the University of California (Travis Kalanick).

I never felt that “failure” could be “fun” or proof of my experience. Moreover, I never wanted to be a financial burden for those around me. All the opposite, I’ve strived to be a financial rock that people around me have been able to tap into in moments of need.

Discouragement from family and network

A recurrent theme in the conversations with those women is what those close to them think about it.

It starts with something like “My friend/partner/parent says”

I won’t like it
It’ll be too stressful
I don’t have what it takes
I’ll stretch myself too much
I better concentrate on my salaried job

When those fantastic women share those “pearls of wisdom” with me they often add that their friend/partner/parent knows them very well… Somehow implying that they know them better than they know themselves.

Minimisation of the business

Those women may refer to their business ideas as

Hobby
Pocket money
Money for “my things”
Hustle

Those words minimise their business. Why? Often, because they’re afraid of

Failure
Ridicule
Being patronised later with an “I told you so”
Making others feel threatened

Referring to their business with words that make it look small and inconsequential keeps those women safe.

But it’s also a way to hide the fact that business is linked to finances. We don’t expect a hobby to bring money. A business is.

What’s driving that dissuasion campaign?

Patriarchy.

Imagine if women would get their own business and enjoy financial freedom – who would

Perform unpaid caregiving?
Do the office work and unpromotable tasks?
Provide unlimited emotional support to family, friends, and co-workers?

Patriarchy cannot tolerate that women get to have the cake – a salaried job – and eat it – their business.

How women keep their dreams alive (without acting on them)

I’ve talked at length about how productive procrastination keeps us from doing what we want to do. I refer to this term as performing tasks that are alibis for not sharing our work with others.

This is how I’ve used productive procrastination against my business

Resisting launching my website with the excuse that I had to keep refining the “draft” version until it was perfect.
Endlessly crowdsourcing advice — and secretly permission — from many women with a salary and a business before starting mine.
Continually enrolling in courses to teach me all the different aspects of business — marketing, finances, accounting, and many more — with the excuse that I needed to be an expert on all areas of entrepreneurship before giving it a go myself.
Avoiding talking with my target client about my business idea.
Denying myself to invest in business mentoring and coaching because deep down I thought my business was not “worth the financial investment”, disregarding the mental toll and time spent going in circles and searching for approval from others.

But there are many more excuses that those women searching for advice have shared with me:

I’m not good a call calling
I don’t know marketing
It should be overwhelming to make both the salaried and business work
I don’t have time to do “everything”
I don’t know how social media works

Are those women wasting our time together? I don’t see it that way. They are fighting to get somebody to believe in their dreams despite their resistance and that of those close to them.

3 steps to get you started

To manage my transition from getting revenue only from a full-time job to developing my business and my personal brand whilst thriving in my corporate job – I was promoted to Director whilst running my business – several streams came together:

1.- Gaining awareness of my skills, background, and experience — In 2019–2020, I played with the idea of a startup focused on an app to help educate and identify unconscious biases. I went to a start-up accelerator and learned about VCs and pitches. I also painstakingly learned that it was not for me.

Then, I had a lightbulb moment. I’d been delivering services — training, contract research, and support — for 20 years. Moreover, I’d been coaching and mentoring women in tech for as many years if not more.

Since that moment, I haven’t looked back. I’ve made all those hard-earned skills the core of my business offer.

2.- Developing a personal brand — A very dear mentor and sponsor of mine told me years ago, “Patricia, you’re your brand.”

In retrospect, I realise that I didn’t understand what she meant. Brand sounded like something influencers and big companies like Coca-Cola and Nike had, not me. Since then, I’ve invested significant money and time in addressing my gaps in that area.

For example, learning how to

Craft articles that people want to read — initially, only my family would read them but today some of my pieces have been read by more than 3K people.
Get consistently +1,000 monthly visits to my website
Become a paid speaker

All have taken effort — not only grasping the “know-how” but adapting it to the vision, mission, and values for my business.

3.- Managing my mind so I move from “thinking” to “doing” — From setting impossible goals to motivating myself to do the things that I need to do and I’m not doing, I’ve had to learn strategies to work through and sometimes around my limiting beliefs.

And I often get the following up questions

Which of the three was the hardest for you? Of the three, the toughest one has been #3. Whilst #2 can appear as the most time, effort, and money demanding, I love learning and I use it to procrastinate on tasks that I want to do but I’m not doing.
In which order should I do the steps? Chances are that your business is going evolve as you test your offer with potential clients, so the reality is that you’ll need to keep coming back to the three of them.

A final piece of advice — check the conditions in your salaried contract regarding setting up your own business. Some organisations are more flexible than others.

My business is allowing me to explore complementary sides of myself like creativity, entrepreneurship, branding, and systems thinking. If you’re thinking about keeping your salaried job and starting your own business, I hope you have a journey as rewarding as mine.

And if you’re going in circles questioning if you should or shouldn’t have a dual role like mine, I invite you to think about what would you do right now for your business idea if you knew you couldn’t fail.

And then, go and do it.

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Your Brain * Your Education * Patriarchy

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My Post #IWD2024 Reflections: One Win and Three Persistent Failures

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Handcuffed hands of a woman on a background of a cloudy sky. — Image by Лечение наркомании from Pixabay.

Another International Women’s Day has passed but how much have women’s rights progressed since last year?

If my social media posts last week were an indication, there have been some important wins but at the core, we’re still living under patriarchy.

More precisely

Abortion became a constitutional right in France
Femicide alarming UK statistics
The feminisation of hybrid work
The unnecessary male context in framing women’s achievements

Let me share my take.

France makes abortion a constitutional right

I love and hate International Women’s Day.

I love #IWD because it tells the world that we won’t close our eyes to gender violence, gender health disparities, gender pay gap, and other gender inequalities.

I hate it because it “reminds” me that I’m still a second-class citizen. For example, I don’t have the same rights about my body that a man has.

Moreover, unlike when I was a young woman when I could see barriers coming down, I now see barriers been purposely built to prevent women from being prosperous, educated, and healthy.

This is not a bug but a feature.

Women keep spending their energy re-fighting their basic rights instead of innovating, creating products that serve us, or investing their money to ensure we have enough wealth to enable us to get a dignified retirement.

Amid these conflicting emotions, an unexpected gift arrived:

This week France became the first country in the world to explicitly include the right to abortion in its constitution.

Of course, there is no free meal in the universe, so reading this BBC article, my heart skipped a beat — or 2 — when I read

1.- “Before the vote, Prime Minister Gabriel Attal told parliament that the right to abortion remained “in danger” and “at the mercy of decision makers”.”

In summary, decision-makers are not on the side of women.

2.- “In a 2001 ruling, the council based its approval of abortion on the notion of liberty enshrined in the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man, which is technically part of the constitution.”

We have a Declaration of the Rights of “Man” dated almost 250 years ago that “decision makers” haven’t updated to the Rights of “human being” or “people“.

Until when will we need to keep fighting for laws and regulations that treat women as human beings with the same rights as men rather than Adam’s rib?

(Note: More on the Adam’s rib below)

Femicide alarming UK statistics

The European Institute of Gender Equality defines femicide as the killing of women and girls because of their gender, among other things, which can take the form of

The murder of women as a result of intimate partner violence
The torture and misogynist slaying of women
Killing of women and girls in the name of “honour”
Targeted killing of women and girls in the context of armed conflict
Dowry-related killings of women
Killing of women and girls because of their sexual orientation and gender identity
Killing of aboriginal and indigenous women and girls because of their gender
Female infanticide and gender-based sex selection foeticide
Genital mutilation-related deaths
Accusations of witchcraft
Other femicides connected with gangs, organised crime, drug dealers, human trafficking, and the proliferation of small arms.

When we talk about femicide we may think about Latino America, Asia, or Africa.

But we’re wrong.

A woman is killed by a man every three days in the UK on average.

The Guardian

During #IWD2024 social media was full of posts talking about having more women in leadership, in tech, in STEM, in business…

But the reality is that society cannot even keep women alive.

The Guardian has started an interactive project highlighting the women who have been murdered in 2024 so we don’t forget them.

But is that enough?

No. Because they are not the problem.

We need to start focusing on the perpetrators.

Who are they?
How come sons, husbands, brothers, and male neighbours feel entitled to kill their mothers, wives, sisters, and female neighbours?
How do we as a society foster and at the same time minimise those murders naming them as “crimes of passion” or a “spur of the moment act”?

And also on their alibis

Family
Police
Justice system
Patriarchy
Misogyny

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

Let’s start doing things differently.

The feminisation of hybrid work

I got an email from LinkedIn asking me to comment on the post Flexibility versus visibility: Does hybrid work threaten women’s progression? sharing their research on their site.

I have reproduced below the key insights about hybrid work

“Now, LinkedIn data shows that women in the UK are more likely to have a job offering hybrid work than other types of work. More women had a hybrid role in 2023 than a fully remote or onsite role. Across a majority of industries, women are also more likely than men to have a hybrid role. In finance, consumer services, retail and even accommodation and food services, where remote and hybrid roles are less common, women are more likely than men to split their working week between home and the physical workplace.”

My take? I challenge how many men reporting “office” jobs are not doing “hybrid” jobs in disguise.

In my experience, women need to be very clear about the terms and conditions of their place of work because of their caregiving obligations, hence the preference for jobs clearly articulated as such.

On the flip side, men don’t see themselves as having such constraints, so they are happy to go for an “office” job and in practice do remote work.

For example, my company advertises jobs as office-based but in practice, employees can work up to 2 days a week from home.

Another point: Uneven transparency. Whilst typically women announce that they’ll be late, have been late, or won’t be able to make a meeting because of childcare responsibilities, men simply say that they are “double-booked” or that they cannot make it.

Whilst definitively there are gendered patterns, it’s paramount to recognise that men have the luxury to disguise hybrid work as office work whilst many women don’t.

The Adam’s Rib effect

Why can’t the media highlight a woman without “attaching” her to a man?

It happened again this Sunday.

I’m reading an article in The Guardian and the Headline reads

“ ‘I could have written three plays about her’: Jennie Lee, MP and wife of Nye Bevan, is celebrated on stage

Then, the subtitle says

“The coal miner’s daughter who set up the Open University and the Arts Council and was Britain’s youngest MP is the subject of two new shows”

And then, the first paragraph continues

“ ‘Behind every great man stands a great woman,’ the dated old saying goes. In the case of the celebrated Labour politician Aneurin Bevan, honoured in a new play at the National Theatre in London, the woman is his largely forgotten wife, Jennie Lee, who earned her own independent “greatness” on the public stage, not a domestic one.”

If that was not enough, even the article’s URL mentions her husband

https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2024/mar/10/i-could-have-written-three-plays-about-her-jennie-lee-mp-and-wife-of-nye-bevan-is-celebrated-on-stage

Ms. Jennie Lee, MP

Is Britain’s youngest MP
Britain’s first arts minister
Set up the Open University and the Arts Council

But in the first 4 sentences of the article — title, subtitle, and first paragraph — The Guardian feels is important to to let us know that

She was the wife of Nye Bevan
A coal miner’s daughter
And then repeat that she’s the largely forgotten wife of the celebrated Labour politician Aneurin Bevan

We need to wait until the second paragraph to actually learn about this woman.

“Lee, who was Britain’s first arts minister and established the Open University and the Arts Council, as well as backing the building of the National Theatre itself”

As the article continues, we learn more about a play about his husband and it’s not until the fourth paragraph that we learn more about Ms. Lee.

“she became an MP aged just 24 and had a big influence on British postwar culture.”

Can somebody explain to me why we cannot have a headline highlighting a brilliant woman without “sprinkling” a man — or two — on it?

Why does the media believe that we need to know first about her husband, father, son, brother, and teachers as a preamble to showcasing a woman’s merits?

I’m naming this the “Adam’s rib” effect — providing unnecessary “male” context when highlighting the achievements of a woman.

This is utterly ridiculous and it’s a contemporary version of a not so distant past when women needed their husbands’ signatures to open a bank account.

@The Guardian — You need to do much better.

Back to you

How do you feel about #IWD?

Unmasking Role Model Myths: Crafting Your Unique Path in Tech

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White unicorn walking over the sea under a rainbow. Above the rainbow the text "Role Model". — Figure adapted by Patricia Gestoso from this orignal image by Sabine Zierer from Pixabay.

Click here to learn how you can you accelerate your tech career

A week ago, I delivered a virtual keynote to a group of women in tech. The title was “Breaking Models: The Three Keys to Success That You Already Possess”. I wanted to inspire them to rely on themselves — rather than on external role models — to achieve their goals.

During the talk I shared

The contrast between my career in 2017 and now.
How the process of launching my website on diversity and inclusion in tech in 2018 became a pivotal moment in my professional career.
How the emphasis on “role models” and the mantra “You cannot be what you don’t see” hindered my professional progression.
Three tools that can accelerate our career advancement and that we already have in ourselves.

The feedback from the attendees was so positive that I decided to share the highlights more broadly.

Let’s start with some context about the attendees.

The audience

Venezolanas in Tech (ViT) is a nonprofit organisation aiming to give Venezuelan women and young girls the opportunity to develop their professional skills, gain exposure to job opportunities in tech, and find a safe space where they can meet others who are facing similar challenges.

Last January, I was approached by the organiser of their mentoring program to give a talk. She shared

The ask — To be their keynote speaker for the last session of the mentoring program.
The audience — Many of the women in this mentoring cohort were in the process of transitioning, either between different tech roles, arriving from a different sector into tech, or coming back to tech after a hiatus working in another industry.
The topic —As the common denominator among the audience was reinvention, the organisers believed that many of the mentees might be wondering what to do after the program ended. They wanted the talk to inspire them to continue on the path they’d started.

As a native Spaniard who also holds a Venezuelan passport and a woman in tech, I couldn’t say no to them.

The transformation: From Patricia v.2017 to v.2024

My LinkedIn profile portrays me as a successful tech professional with a reasonably straightforward corporate career.

It didn’t feel like that seven years ago.

Patricia v.2017

I shared with the audience a photo of myself smiling in Paris, more precisely, in front of the Arc de Triomphe, in 2017. I was there for a company meeting.

The image was of a “happy” Patricia but underneath I was very disappointed with my career progress.

At the time, I had been Senior Manager of Scientific Support for 5 years. I had learned that I was considered a high performer with low potential. I had reached my career ceiling.

I was also stuck regarding my diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) impact.

In 2016, I founded the first gender employee resource group in my workplace. A year later, I was eager to participate in the public debate about the role of diversity and inclusion in organisations. However, I kept postponing it month after month, preferring to reserve those conversations for discussions with like-minded work colleagues.

Patricia v.2024

Today, I have a fulfilling — even if somehow unusual— portfolio career

I’m a Global Director of Scientific Support and Customer Operations for a Fortune Future 50 corporation.
I have a business as an inclusion strategist where I help tech leaders leverage diversity in their business strategy to boost innovation, protect their reputation, and attract and retain talent. I also help non-tech C-suit and board members seize responsibly AI opportunities.
I’m a certified work-life coach who helps ambitious women in tech make more impact, work less, and design a life that they love.
I volunteer for European Women on Boards, an NGO with the mission to increase gender equality in decision-making; We and AI, a British NGO that aims to increase public awareness about the benefits and challenges of AI; and I’m a trustee of the Booth Centre, a community centre run with people affected by homelessness.
I’m a writer and a keynote speaker. I’ve published research on the effect of covid-19 on the unpaid work of professional women and I’m writing a book about how women succeed worldwide based on feedback from over 400 women in tech living in 60+ countries.

But I’d lie if I said the transition was seamless.

The path to launching my website

I first thought about launching a website dedicated to the intersection of DEI and tech in 2016. But I became a master at talking myself out of it.

I told myself that

I was not a DEI expert — I compared myself to people who had the title of Head of DEI or who had written books about unconscious bias. Without a diploma in Human Resources, who I was to be vocal about diversity and inclusion in public?
My “Good Girl” manual — I had been socialised to believe that it was not serious for a woman with engineering and Ph.D. diplomas to take a 90-degree turn and “waste time” focusing on DEI.
Perfectionism — As Brené Brown says in Men, Women and Worthiness, many women are raised with the expectation of perfection. I never had a blog on DEI or any other topic. Still, I had decided that if my blog ever had a typo, it would have catastrophic consequences for my reputation. It was either perfection or nothing.

What I discovered through a journey of deep introspection and coaching was that

I was protecting myself from criticism — Starting a public blog in DEI exposed me to others questioning both my views and the relevance of my background to speak about the topic.
I was hooked on praise —My worth was tied to others’ appreciation of my work. I was concerned about what my professional and personal network would think of me if I started a blog about DEI.
I thought I needed to find a role model —At the time, the only people working in tech that I knew were interested in DEI were those on the HR team. As I didn’t know anybody who worked in tech and had a blog on diversity and inclusion, I repeated to myself that “I couldn’t be what I couldn’t see.”

From the three, let’s focus the “need” to find a role model as a prerequisite to stretch ourselves out of our comfort zone.

The myth of the “role model”

There are three top reasons why focusing on finding a role model didn’t help me

I fell into productive procrastination — Whilst searching for my “elusive” role model, I would spend my time busy with further certifications, courses, and workshops creating the illusion that I was working towards building my website. It was a lie, I was procrastinating.
I used comparison against myself — Once I found my unicorn — aka “role model” —I proceeded to dissect how great they were and find shortcomings in myself. I am the same age as Sheryl Sandberg. When I read Lean In in 2017, the gap was obvious. She had been a student at Harvard University, VP at Google, and at that time she was already a millionaire and COO at Facebook. I felt like a failure.
I missed my uniqueness — By trying to find and imitate a role model, I discarded what made me distinctive: the combination of having a strong scientific and technical background, a career in services in tech, and experience living in 6 countries on 3 continents.

Luckily, there was another way. What if I already had the role models I needed? What if you already have them too?

The three tools we all possess

Our past self

We use our past to berate ourselves.

My blog and my promotion to director have brought me joy and recognition. It’s easy to look back at Patricia v.2017 and recriminate her for neither getting the director role after five years as a senior manager nor being bold enough to start her blog until 2018. She used to be my punching ball.

Instead, what if we flipped the script and took the time to thank our past selves for believing in our potential?

For example, I’ve learned that I can access the memories of Patricia v.2017 to give me confidence when things don’t go as planned or take longer than expected.

In those moments, I pause and thank her for believing that Patricia v.2024 was possible. For not giving up on me — her future self — when people around her told her to put her head down and continue to do what she was doing.

IN PRACTICE: What relation do you have with your past self? Do you use it to reprimand yourself or to energise you?

Our present self

Sometimes, I use “time” as a tactic to talk myself out of what I want to do but I’m not doing. For example, I tell myself

Writing an article takes a lot of time.
I don’t have enough time to network.
It’s impossible to manage my corporate career, my volunteering work, and my business.

In those moments, I also default to using verbs like “should”, “have to”, or “need” to catastrophise about my stretch goals.

I should be posting every day on social media to grow my business.
I must write a new article every week to show I’m serious.
I need to network to be a successful businesswoman.

Notice a pattern? In those moments, I talk to myself like a victim of my business, my writing, and my time management skills.

Alternatively, I can stop being a martyr of my stretch goals and become a strategist of my life. In those moments, that’s how I talk to myself

I decide to spend one hour per day on social media to build my brand as an inclusion strategist and technologist.
I choose to spend my Sunday writing articles because I want to share my point of view about tech, DEI, careers, and feminism with others.
I prioritise networking in my business because it helps me to find clients, connect with interesting people, and explore synergies.

In summary, I talk to myself as the person who has authority over my life.

IN PRACTICE: Which kind of language do you use to prompt yourself into action? Do you treat yourself as a victim or as a decision-maker?

Our future self

We talk endlessly about SMART goals — objectives that are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound.

SMART goals are great when we want to play it safe and have a plan in place to reach our objective.

But what if you are a trailblazer? What if you want to escape a cookie-cutter life?

If you’re not convinced yet, can you imagine Mahatma Gandhi, Emmeline Pankhurst, Nelson Mandela, and Florence Nightingale accomplishing their bold vision by using SMART goals?

Let me introduce you to impossible goals. Those are goals that are so bold that you don’t know how to achieve them. Yet.

There are four key benefits of setting impossible goals

They remove limiting beliefs you didn’t know you had about what’s possible for you.
They teach you to embrace uncertainty.
You discover that you can trust yourself to learn what you need to know to achieve your objective.
You transform yourself through the journey to attain an impossible goal.

Tempted? This is how it works.

In 2022, I coached 5 women and they got the promotion they wanted. In 2023, my impossible goal was to coach 50 women and people from underrepresented groups to get the promotion they deserved.

I’m happy to report that I coached 58.

Was it easy? No. Did I know how to do it when I set the impossible goal? No. But by trusting my future self — that version of Patricia that would have already succeeded — and using it to help me focus when I wanted to give up, I exceeded my impossible goal.

IN PRACTICE: What outrageous goal do you want to achieve? Now, imagine who you’ll be once you reach that goal. How does that feel?

How to use your three role models at a juncture

In June 2018, I finally launched my website. It was not perfect then and still isn’t today. But it has been an incredible laboratory to learn about myself and show me what I’m capable of when I rely on my own role models rather than wait for external inspiration.

How can we use those three tools when we are at a crossroads, like ending a mentoring scheme, completing a degree, or feeling that we’ve outgrown our current role?

In those moments, there are three typical traps where our past, present, and future selves can help us.

Ruminating about the past

When we complete a chapter in our personal or professional career, we may look backward and reprimand ourselves for the things we did and didn’t do.

For example, we may scold ourselves because we missed the opportunity to connect more often with our mentor, regret the classes we missed at the university, or lament that we didn’t invest more time in broadening our network.

Instead of having a pity party, go back in time and remember that version of yourself that signed up for the mentoring scheme, started the degree, or applied for the job you have. And then, thank your past self because they made a decision from which you’re benefiting today.

The upside? Reminding your brain that you’re a person who makes sound decisions.

Trapped in analysis-paralysis

We may be fretting about what road to take as we feel “on our own” after reaching a milestone – worrying about wasting our time, making the wrong decision, or missing out on the opportunity of a lifetime.

Don’t let your brain make you a victim of the present. Be your own ally.

Rather than stressing out about the “right choice” and “the lack of time”, I dare you to believe that

All alternatives are valid — Your job is to pick one and then tell your brain the reasons why you like your choice.
It’s possible to timebox tasks — You can decide in advance how much time you want to dedicate to an activity rather than working on the assumption that tasks “take the time that they take”.
Done is better than perfect.

Feeling uncertainty about the future

When we complete a phase in our career, it may be hard to get past the obstacles we foresee in our future: Our first job application, asking for a promotion, or starting our own company.

Here is where your future self can be priceless as your mentor and guide.

Imagine the version of you who already got the job you want, was promoted, or is a successful entrepreneur. Then, use it as your mentor and guide.

What advice can they give you about your next steps?
How can they inspire you to continue working on your goals?
How can you use them as accountability partners when you are tempted to give up on your objectives?

I want to thank me — for believing in me and doing what they said I could not do. And I want to say to myself in front of all you beautiful people, “Go on girl with your bad self. You did that.”
Niecy Nash-Betts, Acceptance speech after winning the 2023 Emmy Best Supporting Actress Award

Stop searching for external role models.

Instead, learn to appreciate your uniqueness and talk to yourself — past, present, and future versions — like your friend, mentor, and coach, rather than your most hated enemy.

Ready to become your own role model? Let me know what you think in the comments!

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Code Breakthrough: Insights for High-Performers Transitioning to Tech Management

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Hand of a woman in black holding white ceramic mug with the text "World's Best Boss". — Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash.

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My career as a people manager in tech started about 17 years ago. At the time, I was sent to a two-day course that was supposed to tell me everything I needed to know to manage people. Unfortunately, all that course told me was that my direct reports wanted to take advantage of me and that I needed to demonstrate “I was the boss”.

Since the course, I found the opposite to be true.

All my years of experience managing employees located around the world, discussing challenges with other managers, and mentoring and coaching those starting their management careers have demonstrated to me that there is much more important information to learn as a manager.

It’s not that underperformance is not a challenge but when it happens, typically Human Resources can help. On the flip side, you may have little support as a manager to get the most out of a team of smart people.

What would I have loved to know in that management workshop 17 years ago?

Being a good person is not the same as being a good manager

I was promoted within my team. Without transition, I moved from being their colleague to managing them.

As contract research consultants, we were working in a high-pressure environment all the time so I felt my role was to assuage the team’s stress. I endeavoured to be the group’s cheerleader and make sure all decisions were made by consensus.

That didn’t make me a great manager.

Good people management involves adapting your style to the context. Indeed, sometimes you need to be the one uplifting the team’s mood and some decisions are better to be taken as a group. But other situations need you to be the one grounding the team or taking an unpopular — but necessary — decision.

Takeaway: People management is not a moral trait — being a “good person” — but a profession. Create your scorecard about what good management looks like, identify your gaps, get mentors, and invest in learning and perfecting your skills.

Don’t treat everybody the same

I remember a conversation with an experienced manager many years ago. We were talking about biases and he shared with me that his rule of thumb was to treat everybody the same. My answer? That I strived to treat everybody differently because each member of my team was unique.

My rationale is that each of your direct reports is different and they come with their unique strengths and challenges. Why would you treat an employee who is a single father in his first professional role the same as an experienced non-binary employee caring for a family member with Alzheimer’s?

Takeaway: You may be familiar with the Golden Rule: Treat others as you wish to be treated. All my years as a customer support leader and inclusion strategist is that what works is the Platinum rule: Treat others as they wish to be treated. Invest time in knowing your team members.

Don’t compete

I was a high-performing team contributor before my promotion to manager. In the first years after the transition, I felt I needed to do my “old” job as well as my new job as a manager and I needed to demonstrate to my team that I hadn’t lost my “edge”.

The result? Work constantly overspilling to long evenings and weekends that got me almost to burnout several times.

Takeaway: You need to let go of your former identity. As a manager, your value is to enable the team to deliver the objectives they are assigned to and remove obstacles in their way. Trying to get into a competition with them is simply a waste of everybody’s time and energy.

Keep for yourself your 2 cents

The hierarchical view of management that was instilled in me implied that my obligation was always to provide positive and negative feedback to my team. Simply saying that the work was of good quality felt like I was a slacker — as a “good manager” I should be providing detailed feedback.

As a consequence, I spent useless time and effort at the beginning on tasks such as going slide by slide through very good presentations from my direct reports and commenting on small stuff to show them that I was doing my work as a manager. I not only wasted my time but I’m sure I tested their patience too.

Takeaway: If the work is of good quality, simply acknowledge it. Don’t feel the need to provide suggestions when they don’t add value.

Let your cape at home

Working with smart people is a privilege but it doesn’t come without drawbacks. One of them is their capacity to outsmart you if you let them. Let me explain.

I remember clearly some of my very smart and experienced reports coming “helpless” to me about a difficult customer or task. Of course, I would fall for the trick and “offer” to step in and tackle the issue myself. Or come up with a solution to their problem.

The ruse worked for a while because, from my side, it was making me feel “valued”, and from theirs, it meant that they outsourced the problem to me. What could be wrong with that?

That resulted in more work for me and hindered their growth.

So I learned the hard way that I had to resist the urge to save the day every time an employee would come with a problem. That didn’t mean that I wouldn’t engage in collaborative discussions about how to approach complex issues — or remove barriers blocking them from doing their job — but that my role was not to do their job.

Takeaway: They are smart people and you pay them to solve problems. Don’t be the manager that needs to be the superhero-ine in each situation. Your job is to coach your direct reports towards solutions and offer them challenges at their level that enable them to grow.

Be prepared to eat humble pie

In the “command and control” version of management, the boss talks and the team members do as instructed without asking for context, highlighting contradictions, or questioning assumptions.

The reality is that I’ve never been that kind of employee myself. I’ve always thrived in work environments where constructive challenge is welcome and seen as a sign of engagement.

On the other hand, as a manager, I have to admit that sometimes it can be exhausting to have such passionate, clever, and demanding discussion partners. All the time.

The remedy? In the few instances I’ve longed for quieter 1:1 and group meetings, I’ve reminded myself that the alternative is boredom and conformism. That has been enough to bring me back to appreciate the team I have.

Takeaway: When you manage top performers, it’s a given that they will challenge the status quo and come up with better alternatives to the solutions you present. Remember that this is the reason you’re paying them.

Your reports are not your friends

When I took my first job as a people manager, I didn’t consciously think about the necessary change in the dynamics with my coworkers.

In retrospect, it was inevitable but maybe my brain was not ready to contemplate that change yet. Paradoxically, none of the books I’d read about management appeared to care enough to mention it.

It took awkward conversations, light jokes not laughed at, and some of my direct reports’ kind comments for me to understand that I couldn’t close my eyes anymore. Things had changed forever.

Later on, when through my DEI work I began to dig deep into biases, I realised the importance of separating personal affinity from the manager-employee relationship. For example, I’ve learned how easy it’s to overburden the employee that we find the easiest to work with.

Takeaway: By seeing your team as friends, you’re short-changing them. Regardless of whether you like them or not as a person, your job as a manager is to ensure they progress in their career and deliver on their objectives.

Take care of yourself

During the pandemic, somebody on my team passed away after a long illness. I felt the loss deeply — he was an amazing human being and professional.

If that was not enough, due to the restrictions on movement and direct contact with people, it fell on me alone to inform all the relevant stakeholders in the company and file the necessary paperwork. I felt both drained and devastated.

In a moment of clarity, I realised that I needed to put my oxygen mask first and reluctantly took some time off to process the events. It was the best decision for me, my team, and the company.

Takeaway: Take care of your mental and physical health. It’s no fun to be part of a team where the boss is always stressed and deprioritizes their own health. Don’t underestimate the toll on you of both onboarding and losing employees, reorganisations, and other major events.

Managing clever people can be very rewarding provided that you understand that the way you deliver business value has shifted and you act accordingly.

Your role is not anymore to be the smartest person in the room but to coach, mentor, and sponsor a high-performing group of people so you can become a winning team.

BACK TO YOU: What do you think people managers need to learn — or unlearn — when managing smart tech workers?

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Inside the Digital Underbelly: The Lucrative World of Deepfake Porn

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A brightly coloured illustration which can be viewed in any direction. It has many elements to it working together: men in suits around a table, someone in a data centre, big hands controlling the scenes and holding a phone, people in a production line. Motifs such as network diagrams and melting emojis are placed throughout the busy vignettes. — Clarote & AI4Media / Better Images of AI / Power/Profit / Licenced by CC-BY 4.0.

Two weeks ago, deepfake pornographic images of Taylor Swift spread like fire through X. It took the platform 19 hours to suspend the account that posted the content after they amassed over 27 million views and more than 260,000 likes.

That gave me pause. 260,000 people watched the content, knew it was fake, and felt no shame in sharing their delight publicly. Wow…

I’ve written before about our misconceptions regarding deepfake technology. For example, we’re told that most deepfakes target politicians but the reality is that 96% of deepfakes are of non-consensual sexual nature and 99% of them are from women. I’ve also talked about the legal vacuum regulating the use of this technology.

However, until now I hadn’t delved into the ecosystem underpinning the porn deepfakes: the industry and the viewers themselves.

Let’s rectify this gap and get to know the key players.

Why is so easy to access porn deepfakes?

We may be led to believe that porn deepfakes are hard to create or find.

False and false.

It takes less than 25 minutes and costs $0 to create a 60-second deepfake pornographic video. You only need one clear face image.
I can confirm that when searching on Google “deepfakes porn,” the first hit was MrDeepFake’s website — one of the most famous websites in the world of deepfake porn.

Moreover, the risk of hosting the content is minimal.

Section 230, which passed in 1996, is a part of the US Communications Decency Act. It was meant to serve as protection for private blocking and screening of offensive material.

However, it has become an ally of porn deepfakes as it provides immunity to online platforms from civil liability on third-party content — they are not responsible for the content they host and they can remove it in certain circumstances, e.g. material that the provider or user considers being obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable.

So whilst Section 230 does not protect platforms that create illegal or harmful content, it exempts them from any responsibility for third-party content.

Who’s making money from porn deepfakes?

Many are profiting from this nascent industry: Creators, deepfake porn websites, software manufacturers, infrastructure providers, marketplaces, and payment processors.

Creators

They get revenue from two main sources:

Creating porn deepfakes on demand.
Selling access to “libraries with thousands of videos for subscription fees as low as $5 a month.”

Deepfake porn websites

Let’s have a look at three deepfake porn websites, each with a different business model.

MrDeepFakes

Some highlights of how this platform operates

Videos are a few minutes long.
Generates revenue through advertisement.
Relies on the large audience that has been boosted by its positioning in Google search results.
Its forums act as a marketplace for creators and clients can make requests.

Fan-Topia

Their business model

It bills itself on Instagram as “the highest paying adult content creator platform.”
Paywalled.
Clients may be redirected from sites such as MrDeepFakes afters clicking on the deepfake creators’ profiles. Once in Fan-Topia, they can pay for access to libraries of deepfake videos with their credit cards.

Pornhub

In 2018, the internet pornography giant Pornhub banned deepfake porn from their site. However, that’s not the whole truth

When Pornhub removes deepfake porn videos from their site, they leave the inactive links as breadcrumbs that act as clickbait to drive traffic to the site.
Users can advertise the creation and monetisation of porn deepfakes on the site.
They advertise deepfakes through TrafficJunky, the advertising portal through which Pornhub makes all their ad revenue.
Pornhub provides a database of abusive content that facilitates the creation of porn deepfakes.

Software manufacturers

A couple of examples

Stability AI has made their model Stable Diffusion — a deep learning, text-to-image model— open-source, so any developer can modify it for purposes such as creating porn deepfakes. And there are plenty of tips about how to use the models in forums where deepfake porn creators swarm.
Taylor Swift’s porn deepfake was created using Microsoft Designer, Microsoft’s graphic design app that leverages DALLE-3 — another text-to-image model— to generate realistic images. Users found loopholes in the guardrails that prevented inappropriate prompts that explicitly mentioned nudity or public figures.

Infraestructure providers

Repositories

GitHub is a Microsoft-owned developer platform that allows developers to create, store, manage, and share their code. It’s also

One of the top 10 referral sites for Mr.DeepFakes.
A host of guides and hyperlinks to (a) sexual deepfake community forums dedicated to the creation, collaboration, and commodification of synthetic media technologies, and (b) AI-leveraged ‘nudifiying’ websites and applications that take women’s images and “strip them” of clothing.
A repository of the source code of the software used to create 95% of deepfakes, DeepFaceLab, as well as other similar codes such as DeepNude and Unstable Diffusion.
A gateway for minors to deepfake source codes and related content, given Github’s worldwide partnership program with schools and universities and its terms of service stating that users can be as young as 13.

Web hosting

According to a Bloomberg review, 13 of the top 20 deepfake websites are currently using web hosting services from Cloudflare Inc. Amazon.com Inc. provides web hosting services for three popular deepfaking tools listed on several websites, including Deepswap.ai.

Marketplaces

Etsy

As of December 2023, AI-generated pornographic images of at least 55 well-known celebrities were available for purchase on Etsy, an American e-commerce company focused on handmade or vintage items and craft supplies.

Moreover, a search for “deepfake porn” on the website returned about 1,500 results. Some of these results were porn and others offers non-explicit services to “make your own deepfake video.”

Apps stores

Apple’s App Store and Google Play host apps that can be used to create deepfake porn. Some of them are available to anyone over 12.

Payment processors

On the Fan-Topia payment page, the logos for Visa and Mastercard appear alongside the fields where users can enter credit card information. The purchases are made through an internet payment service provider called Verotel, which is based in the Netherlands and advertises to what it calls “high-risk” webmasters running adult services.
The MakeNude.ai web app — which lets users “view any girl without clothing” in “just a single click” — has partnered with Ukraine-based Monobank and Dublin’s Beta Transfer Kassa which operates in “high-risk markets”.
Deepfake creators also use PayPal and crypto wallets to accept payments. Until Bloomberg reached out to Patreon last August, they supported payment for one of the largest nudifying tools, which accepted over $12,500 per month.

Other enablers

Search engines

Between 50 to 80 percent of people searching for porn deepfakes find their way to the websites and tools to create the videos or images via search. For example, in July 2023, around 44% of visits to Mrdeepfakes.com were via Google.

NBC News searched the combination of a name and the word “deepfakes” with 36 popular female celebrities on Google and Bing. A review of the results found nonconsensual deepfake images and links to deepfake videos in the top Google results for 34 of those searches and the top Bing results for 35 of them.

As for the victims, both Google and Microsoft services require in their content removal requests that people manually submit the URLs.

Social media

More than 230 sexual deepfake ads using Emma Watson and Scarlett Johansson’s faces ran on Facebook and Instagram in March 2023. It took 2 days for Meta to remove the ads, once they were contacted by NBC.

Users of X, formerly known as Twitter, regularly circulate deepfaked content. Whilst the platform has policies that prohibit manipulated media, between the first and second quarter of 2023, the number of tweets from eight hashtags associated with this content increased by 25% to 31,400 tweets.

Who’s watching porn deepfakes?

In their report “2023 State of Deepfakes”, Home Security Heroes state

There were a total of 95,820 deepfake videos online in 2023.
The ten-leading dedicated deepfake porn sites had monthly traffic of 35 million in 2023.

What about the deepfake porn consumers?

They surveyed 1522 American males who had viewed pornography at least once in the past six months. Some highlights:

48% of respondents reported having viewed deepfake pornography at least once.
74% of deepfake pornography users didn’t feel guilty about it. Top reasons they didn’t feel remorse? 36% didn’t know the person, 30% didn’t think it hurt anybody, 29% thought of it as a realistic version of imagination, and 28% thought that it’s not much different than regular porn.

That may lead us to believe that indeed those “watchers” felt porn deepfakes were innocuous. That’s until we learn that

73% of survey participants would want to report to the authorities if someone close to them became a victim of deepfake porn.
68% indicated that they would feel shocked and outraged by the violation of someone’s privacy and consent in the creation of deepfake pornographic content.

In summary, non-consensual deepfakes are harmless until your mother and daughter are starring on them.

if they don’t portray your loved ones.

What’s next?

As with other forms of misogynistic behaviour — rape, gender violence, sexual discrimination — when we talk about deepfake pornography, we focus on the aftermath: the victims and the punishment.

What if we instead focused on the bottom of the pyramid — the consumers?

Can we imagine a society where the deepfake porn videos from Taylor Swift would have had 0 views and no likes?
What will take to raise boys that feel outrage — rather than unhealthy curiosity, lust, and desire for revenge — at the opportunity to watch and purchase deepfake porn?
How about believing that porn deepfakes are harmful even if they don’t portray your sister, mum, or wife?

As with physical goods, consumers have the power to transform the offer. Can we collectively lead the way towards a responsible digital future?

PS. You and AI

Are you worried about the impact of AI impact on your job, your organisation, and the future of the planet but you feel it’d take you years to ramp up your AI literacy?
Do you want to explore how to responsibly leverage AI in your organisation to boost innovation, productivity, and revenue but feel overwhelmed by the quantity and breadth of information available?
Are you concerned because your clients are prioritising AI but you keep procrastinating on learning about it because you think you’re not “smart enough”?

I’ve got you covered.

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“Fixing” Women: The Profitable Tricks of the Beauty Industrial Complex

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A very thin woman with a serious face and a measuring tape in front of her eyes. — Photo by SHVETS production.

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Last week, an article caught my attention.

The title referred to the weird ways in which women have tried to lose weight. The subtitle pointed out that the culprit was our quest for beauty.

That stopped me in my tracks. A flood of memories of nonstop dieting and judgment — from myself and others — came back.

I repeated to myself, “Our quest for beauty”.

This time, my brain consciously rebelled. I was not buying that argument.

Still, I was intrigued because I know and respect the author, so I decided to keep reading.

The theory

The piece discussed how companies had advertised to women dieting methods such as eating tapeworms, smoking, and even wiring their jaws shut. All with the promise of losing weight.

The writer also shared her journey with diets and weight. A lot of themes resonated with me. The judgment of others about my weight when I was a child, the crazy dieting when I was a teenager, and the feeling of letting the scale become the supreme ruler of whether it was going to be a good or a bad day.

However, the article didn’t manage to convince me that it’s the quest for beauty that sends women to that rollercoaster.

The reality

What does make women embark on this perennial self-improvement project?

It’s the quest for acceptance and appreciation.

We’ve been educated that our worth is in the eye of the beholder. And depending on the year and context, this can be as thin as Twiggy, athletic as Cindy Naomi Campbell, or super-curvy as Kim Kardashian, to mention a handful of the many beauty standards we’re bombarded with.

And whilst we get depressed, feel shame, and spend tons of money trying to fit in the ever-changing cannons of beauty, many others get rich in the process.

I call it the industrial complex of “fixing women”.

And it’s not only about our weight. It’s the same industry that

Shames our wrinkles and white hair and wants to fix us with “anti-aging” products.
Finds disgusting our body hair and pledges to make us “hairless” like babies.
Execrates our stretching marks and promises to erase them.

And the list goes on…

Blame it on the algorithm

I’d love to believe that this obsession with fixing women stems from social media, that it’s the fault of Instagram’ and TikTok.

But it isn’t.

Unfortunately, the algorithm only automates and amplifies what’s already there — patriarchy and its contempt for female human beings.

However, that doesn’t mean that social media is harmless or innocent. All the opposite. It’s a constant reminder of how “inadequate” girls and women are and how urgent is for them to fix themselves. All for a profit.

Beyond fixing the body

If “fixing” women’s bodies is so profitable, why should we stop there? Let’s profit from fixing all aspects of women’s lives

Women leadership workshops and courses that “teach” us how to “sound strategic” and display overconfidence.
“Experts” promise to help us find the elusive — but somehow 100% attainable — work-life balance.
We’re told that the gender pay gap is our fault and that the fix is to learn to negotiate better.

And of course, there is motherhood. Being the “perfect” mother is at our reach provided that we buy every book, workshop, course, and gadget about parenthood.

The alternative

Women are a neverending work-in-progress because “fixing” them is the gift that keeps on giving. Simply put, there is no incentive to stop it.

It’s also embedded in every aspect of our lives.

What would the world look like if we dared to extricate it?

That would be a world where

I’ve unlearned the reflex of comparing myself to other women.
I believe that my worth is independent of how I look.
I’m not penalised for getting older.

Moreover, a world where

The term “beauty standards” is considered an oxymoron because it’s impossible to set “standards” if we’re all considered unique and valuable.
We talk about women from a place of abundance — she has, she is, she possesses — rather than scarcity — she lacks, she should, she needs.
We expect women to prioritise themselves — their body, their mental wellbeing, their dreams, and their callings.

BACK TO YOU: How do you imagine a world where we don’t feel compelled to “fix” women anymore?

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How to be a Better Coach: 7 Best Practices to Deliver Inclusive Coaching Experiences

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Two women sit at a table facing each other. One is a young Asian woman talking to another woman who we can only see from the back. Her black curly hair hints that she's African-American. The picture suggests a coaching relationship. — Photo by Christina @ wocintechchat.com on Unsplash.

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Since 2015, I’ve spearheaded several initiatives to promote diversity and inclusion in tech products and the workplace that were recognized with the UK 2020 Women in Tech Changemakers award.

An inflection point in that trajectory was when, in June 2018, I launched my website focused on diversity and inclusion to broaden my audience as a DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) advocate, a role I’d been actively playing alongside my corporate job as Head of Customer Support.

Six months later, I shared my website with an assistive technology expert whom I met during a MOOC. She asked me if my site was accessible and shared a post from The Life of a Blind Girl blog where the author — a blind woman who uses a screen reader — shared her frustration about people making their websites inaccessible and ten tips easy tips to mitigate the problem.

As I was reading her accessibility tips, I realised my website was inaccessible. I was floored and disappointed with myself because I hadn’t thought about it. I had assumed that because I considered inclusion one of my values, the result of my actions would automatically reflect it. At that moment, I realized the gap between intention and impact.

Moreover, when I broadened my focus beyond women’s equity to other aspects of identity — ethnicity, disability, age — and began understanding intersectionality’s role in exacerbating the oppression some individuals or groups experience, I discovered two things.

First, “Inclusion is a practice, not a certificate.” You need to continuously update your knowledge about diversity and inclusive and equitable practices.

Second, DEI is at play in every interaction that involves two or more persons. And that includes coaching.

In this article, I distill seven practices you can incorporate as a coach to deliver more inclusive experiences to your coachees. Many of them are transferable to other activities, such as mentoring and consulting. They can also help managers to create better experiences for hiring candidates and direct reports.

Why you should care

Coaching is a partnership between the coach and the client, meaning that the rapport between coach and coachee is non-hierarchical — the client is an expert on their life, and the coach is an expert on the coaching process.

However, the client and the coach live in the real world, where biases, stereotypes, and privileges exist. Therefore, the coach must intentionally address the impact of differences with the coachee that may create power asymmetry and exacerbate the systems of oppression the client already endures. Some of those characteristics are gender, social level, sexual preference, ethnicity, (dis)ability, and age, to mention a few.

As Trudi Lebron states in The Antiracist Business Book,

“The more diversity you have, the more inclusion you need to facilitate to achieve equitable outcomes.”

How coaches can facilitate inclusion

Let’s look at several best practices you can implement to offer clients an inclusive coaching experience.

Onboarding

We must ensure our clients feel welcome when they start working with us. In coaching, we may be tempted to focus only on the onboarding of a new client on explaining our coaching approach and program— how many sessions, the frequency, and pricing — as well as ensuring that there is a good alignment with the client about the kind of transformation they want out of coaching.

However, DEI is at play in every interaction that involves two or more persons. And that includes coaching.

One often overlooked consideration in onboarding is creating a welcoming atmosphere for the client’s physical body and mind. This could be through a conversation or by creating an onboarding form where you ask your client about the following:

Their pronouns
Special requirements (e.g. captions, avoiding using specific colours, etc.)
If they have been coached or mentored before
What approaches have motivated them to achieve a goal
What approaches have discouraged them from taking action
What activities help them to think? Some examples are journaling, listening to music, drawing, creating mind maps, and walking.

I prefer to use an onboarding form and follow up with a conversation as needed. One advantage of the form is that it allows clients to decide what they want to disclose before you meet them.

Also, establishing certain reciprocal disclosures may help to level the playing field. This is how it works in my case

My email signature has my pronouns
I inform clients that, as a non-native English speaker, automated captioning may not work as well for English speakers
I share that my coaching practice is anchored in feminist theory, specifically on acknowledging the effects of intersectionality, systemic oppression, and lived experiences.

Logistics

As with all professionals, coaches have their preferences — virtual versus in-person coaching, phone versus video, etc. But what about our clients’ preferences and needs?

If your client is Deaf or hard of hearing, coaching them over the phone may not be an option. Chances are that they prefer to meet in person or use a video meeting application that provides on-the-fly captioning.

What about a dyslexic client? Maybe your lengthy emails and requests for daily journaling are a deterrent rather than an enabler of their transformation. A client in the autism spectrum may prefer to keep the video off to reduce the sensory stimulus or feel more at ease with asynchronous communication such as email.

And what about the role of technology? Especially after the pandemic, we assume everybody is comfortable jumping into a Zoom meeting, sending emails, or using PayPal. That’s not always the case, and it’s on the coach to ensure their clients feel at ease with the tech applications that underpin their coachees’ partnership.

Your preparation as a coach

How do you prepare for a new client? Maybe you review your notes about how you coached “similar” clients. Maybe you realize you’ve never coached a client with that goal or background, which triggers feelings of inadequacy and anxiety.

The reality is that, consciously or unconsciously, your brain has already made a “picture” of your client before the coaching engagement starts.

From the first interaction, even if it’s an email from a person with a non-gendered name — Alex, Rowan, Courtney — your mind is already filling in the gaps about characteristics such as gender, ethnicity, sexual preferences, age, etc. And what your brain “decides” is not random but informed by your biases — conscious and unconscious — cultural stereotypes, and even your mood.

How do we counter those rules of thumb? Being intentional. Here are some ways to bring consciousness to your practice:

Understanding your triggers. Maybe you have strong views on politics or religion that, left unchecked, may bias the kind of questions you ask.
Knowing your limitations. If you feel uncomfortable around people with different backgrounds to yours, don’t use your client as your resource to learn about their ethnicity, country of birth, or disability. Instead, refer your client to another coach and increase your knowledge in that area of diversity.
Anticipating your reaction. How would you react if, during an executive coaching session, your client shared that they have been cheating on their partner? Or that they’ve learned they have a terminal condition? Your brain may default to a flight, fly, or freeze response when faced with an unexpected situation. One of the best ways to mitigate an unwanted reaction is to think about how you would respond to it.

Finally, when preparing to meet a new client, I invite you to reflect on the following prompts and welcome the answers with curiosity:

What do you expect them to look like?
What do you expect their problems to be like?
What can you do to prepare?

Be willing to ask for help

Certifications, continuous education, and years of experience practicing coaching are invaluable assets, but they can also make you feel overconfident. For example, your long list of curated coaching questions is enough to tackle anything your thinking partner may bring to the session.

Unfortunately, that’s not true.

In many cases, providing ongoing inclusive coaching experiences to disabled people, those with a history of trauma, or people weighing the decision to come out as LBTQAI+ employees at work requires specific practices.

It’s your duty to search for support through supervision, peer groups, and training to fill in those gaps. Moreover, you should be willing to refer the client to another colleague or service if you anticipate that you won’t be able to minimize those gaps in your coaching practice fast enough that they don’t hinder your client’s transformation.

Factor systems of oppression

Most coaching approaches rely heavily on the power of our minds to shape our reality.

However, helping your client to gain awareness about their limiting beliefs, strengths, and internal resources doesn’t mean assuming that privilege and opportunity are equally distributed.

When a client shares experiences of sexism, racism, or ageism in the workplace and you offer them that “it’s all a thought,” you’re not helping them to access their inner wisdom but instead you’re gaslighting them. More precisely, you’re denying your client’s lived experience and the systems of oppression at play.

Instead, coaching can be a great tool to explore those systemic imbalances, more precisely, an opportunity to help your client to uncover epistemic injustice, a term coined by Dr. Miranda Fricker that describes injustices done against someone “specifically in their capacity as a knower.”

Examples of epistemic injustice are when somebody is not believed because of their identity — testimonial injustice — or when their experiences are not understood, so they are minimized or diminished — hermeneutical injustice.

What if coaching could help your client to get insights into the role biases, patriarchal structures, and privilege play in their life?

Overreliance on training within your coaching program

The coaching spectrum of Miles Downer invites us to consider how different activities are more directive than others. Some, like telling, instructing, and giving advice, are more hierarchical, whereas paraphrasing, reflecting, and listening to understand are less directive. Hence, a more directive style can further inequity if left unchecked.

By monitoring your usage of directive activities and understanding the reasons behind your chosen techniques, you’ll ensure they align with your values around equity rather than come from a place of perceiving your client as “helpless.”

Inclusive pricing

You may rely on coaching as your main and only source of revenue. As such, it may be difficult to consider reviewing your pricing scheme to offer your skills at a lower price or for free.

However, you may be fortunate enough to have some spare cycles to make coaching accessible to those who are less financially privileged. If that’s the case, you could consider the following ideas:

Volunteering with an association that provides free coaching to a certain group that may have limited access to paid coaching.
Providing a certain number of scholarships to your programs to people from underrepresented groups.
Offering coaching at a reduced price to those with less financial means. You can also use pricing scales for your offering. This episode of the “I Am Your Korean Mum” podcast discusses ways to incorporate more equity into your pricing when serving people with diverse financial circumstances.
Creating free content such as podcasts and articles.

Final thoughts

Once you go through this list, I invite you to apply an inclusion lens to other areas of your coaching practice. For example

How well does your website comply with web accessibility guidelines?
What about your social media?
How can you embed inclusion, diversity, and equity into your continuous professional development?

And remember, “Inclusion is a practice, not a certificate.”

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Dyslexia’s Prison Paradox: A Closer Look at the Numbers

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Close-up of a pile of scrabble letters. — Image by Okan AKGÜL from Pixabay.

Sometimes we come across a piece of information that fundamentally changes our understanding of a problem, adding a dimension that we’ve missed completely.

Recently, I read the article Incarcerating Illiteracy — The Prison Pipeline of Dyslexia that made exactly that. More precisely, the sentence

“In America, an estimated 50% of the prison population is dyslexic. […] A population of which 80% is functionally illiterate.”

The author pointed to peer-reviewed research from 2000 performed in the US — specifically in Texas — to back up those statistics.

This prompted three questions:

Is the connection between incarceration and dyslexia still holding in the 2020s? If yes, is it an “American thing” or is it also applicable to other countries?
Can technology upend what appears to be a prison pipeline of dyslexia?
What’s the forecast for tackling this issue?

But let’s first start with a primer on dyslexia.

What’s dyslexia?

Dyslexia “is a specific learning difficulty which primarily affects reading and writing skills. However, it does not only affect these skills. Dyslexia is actually about information processing. Dyslexic people may have difficulty processing and remembering information they see and hear, which can affect learning and the acquisition of literacy skills.“

You can watch a non-comprehensive simulation of dyslexia below.

Some facts about dyslexia

Dyslexia can have an impact on everyday life. It may also affect memory, organisational skills, time management, concentration, multi-tasking, and communication.
Dyslexia is a complex phenomenon. This article describes the 10 distinct categories of dyslexia in the Friedmann-Gvion taxonomy.
There is no correlation between dyslexia and intelligence.
About 1 in 10 people in the world — 800 million — are dyslexic.
Some studies have found a strong correlation between being dyslexic and the likelihood of becoming a successful entrepreneur. Sir Richard Branson, Walt Disney, Steven Spielberg, and Steve Jobs are among the successful entrepreneurs who are dyslexic.

Unfortunately, not everybody with dyslexia gets to be a famous businessperson.

The prison pipeline of dyslexia viewed from 2024

The US

The US First Step Act of 2018 — which looked to reduce the size of the federal prison population while also creating mechanisms to maintain public safety — stated that

“The Attorney General shall incorporate programs designed to treat dyslexia into the evidence-based recidivism reduction programs”

“the Attorney G“the Attorney General shall consider the prevalence and mitigation of dyslexia in prisons, including by reviewing statistics on the prevalence of dyslexia, and the effectiveness of any programs implemented to mitigate the effects of dyslexia, in Prisons and State-operated prisons throughout the United States.”

The First Step Act Annual Report from April 2022 has a chapter on “Statistics on Inmates with Dyslexia”. The summary is more encouraging than the statistics mentioned at the beginning of this article

“As of January 28, 2022, more than 115,129 inmates have been screened to determine if they need further assessment for the characteristics of dyslexia.

Based on the results of the screenings, nearly 2,700 inmates were referred to Special Education for further assessment, which includes the administration of standardized, norm-referenced assessments. As of January 28, 2022, 506 inmates have been determined to display characteristics of dyslexia and referred for intensive, individualized instruction in a reading and spelling program.”

That takes us to only 0.4% of dyslexics among the population sampled. That’s until you peruse the table with the data on the last page of the report and you realise that 6,254 of the 115,129 inmates refused “either the screening or formal testing”.

Moreover, the prison population of the US prison population by the end of 2022 was 1,230,100, that is, about 10 times larger than the number of inmates screened for dyslexia.

What’s the landscape beyond the US?

No One Knows was a UK-wide programme led by the Prison Reform Trust that ended in 2008. Their findings about the correlation between dyslexia and imprisonment rates were discouraging

With regard to dyslexia, for example, estimates of prevalence amongst offenders range from 4–56%. […] Rack found that 40–50% of prisoners were at or below the level of literacy and numeracy expected of an 11-year old (Level 1), 40% of whom required specialist support for dyslexia. He concluded that dyslexia is three to four times more common amongst offenders than amongst the general population, with an incidence of 14–31%.

The general agreement in prison-based studies is a rate of about 30% dyslexia, though rates of serious deficits in literacy and numeracy in general reach up to 60%.

The women’s prison held a higher proportion of women assessed either as learning disabled or borderline learning disabled (with 40% of prisoners scoring within this range) than either of the other prisons (with 30% and 27% within this range).

The British Dyslexia Association’s research into young offenders in Bradford (2004) showed that problem behaviour amongst young people with dyslexia was evident early but was often identified before — or indeed instead of — the dyslexia.

Over a third (37%) of the young people the BDA identified as dyslexic had a statement of Special Educational Need, but all of these were for behavioural problems rather than for the dyslexia. School exclusions are common for young offenders generally, which may further reduce the likelihood of any learning difficulties being identified.

Prison staff expressed a need for training and for defined policies about how to address the needs of people with learning disabilities or learning difficulties.

The 2021 review of the UK Neurodiversity in the Criminal Justice System (CJS) suggests that the prevalence of dyslexia could be as much as five times greater amongst the adult prison population (50%). Again, they also point to studies where the average number of women in prisons with learning a learning difficulty and/or disability is higher for women than for men.

Based on 2019 data held on NOMIS (the prison National Offender Management Information System) and OASys (the Offender Assessment System for assessing the risks and needs of an offender), 29% of the offender population had a learning disability or challenge and in custody the rates were 36% for men and 39% for women.

The same report shares a chilling light on why, in general, neurodivergent people (dyslexia is considered within the neurodivergence umbrella) may be more prevalent in the Criminal Justice System than in the wider community.

• At arrest: the behaviour of neurodivergent people may not be recognised
as a manifestation of their condition, or may be misinterpreted. Elements of police custody processes (for example, booking in and searches) and the custody environment could also be unsettling to a neurodivergent person. This could lead them to exhibit behaviours which are interpreted as noncompliant and may mean they do not receive the support they need. Neurodivergent people may also struggle with elements of police custody […] and without appropriate support they may not be able to effectively engage with the investigation or have someone to advocate on their behalf.

• At court: neurodivergent people may be more likely to be held on remand
before trial. At trial they may plead guilty inappropriately (based on their
neurodivergent thinking or compliant behaviour, for example), and their
neurodivergence may not be considered in sentencing decisions.

• On community supervision: neurodivergent people may be less likely to
understand or comply with the requirements of their community order, and again be less likely to adequately address their offending behaviour and engage in programmes.

• In prison: there are many elements of the prison environment that can
cause neurodivergent people distress, including busy and noisy wings, cell
sharing and changes to the daily routine. Responses to the environment
can lead to neurodivergent people exhibiting challenging behaviour that
could result in them being disciplined or sanctioned. A lack of suitable
programmes for neurodivergent prisoners can also mean that they fail to
adequately address their offending behaviour and receive poor
preparation for release.

Not surprisingly, the report also mentions the lack of research on the particularities of neurodivergence in women.

Responses to the call for evidence highlighted that various neurodivergent conditions present differently in women and referred to the lack of screening and diagnostic tools which have been validated for use with women. This was attributed to a lack of research and prevalence data in relation to women, and a paucity of interventions for women who are neurodivergent.

Finally, is this a problem only in English-speaking countries?

A review from 2021 of 18 studies over 20 years about language and literacy among the adult population in prison is rather unsatisfying. The studies were carried out in Sweden, the US, Norway, the UK, Israel, Australia, and Finland.

the etiology [cause] of the observed difficulties in reading and writing is uncertain. Some studies suggested that the observed difficulties were mainly explained by experiential and environmental factors, whereas others found that the incidence of difficulties that could be attributed to dyslexia was also elevated.

Can technology upend the dyslexia-prison connection?

Virtual Reality (VR) for training

Virtual reality (VR): the use of computer modeling and simulation that enables a person to interact with an artificial three-dimensional (3-D) visual or other sensory environment.

Virtual Reality training has been reported to provide

Up to 4x faster learning
Learners are up to 4x more focused, increasing engagement
16x users are more likely to recall information, improving retention
Studies have shown that overall VR training can save between 30 to 70% in training compared to traditional methods.

VR to tackle recidivism

The Institute of the Future (IFTF) recently published an article where they shared a case study on using VR (virtual reality) to reduce reentry in California.

The context of their study is the high recidivism rates, “more than 65 percent of those released from California’s prison system return within three years. Seventy-three percent of the recidivists committed a new crime or violated parole within the first year.”

The goal of the project was to “develop virtual reality enabled interventions to help ACPD support the success of their reentry clients on their release from incarceration.”

They developed a pilot consisting of “an interactive VR scenario that would help reentry clients prepare for a critical obstacle that many clients face: obtaining their state ID from the Department of Motor Vehicles.”

Whilst an official evaluation is yet the be conducted, it was enough to prompt me to search for examples of VR used in the context of dyslexia. And I found plenty!

VR and dyslexia

Many studies have explored the use of VR for people with dyslexia. One that I found especially interesting was an article summarising a reverse experience, more precisely, how VR can enhance teachers’ knowledge and awareness of dyslexia.

Overall, the results showed that a small cohort of teachers reported having a much better understanding of dyslexia and its impact on dyslexic children when going through a VR experience than when watching a movie about how students with dyslexia.

all the teachers said that the Virtual Reality experience contributed to their understanding of the cognitive experiences encountered by the dyslexic child (“I didn’t know how complex the problem was…It’s good that I experienced dyslexia from different angles…I didn’t know that there were so many kinds of dyslexia, and some of them surprised me.”).

[…] They were enthusiastic about being introduced to a technology that seems to be able to bring to light unfamiliar cognitive territories. Many of them stressed that “it is so different from any media we have ever used.”

Why did I find this article especially impactful?

Because rather than putting the onus on dyslexics, it explored making their surroundings — the teachers — more inclusive by increasing their knowledge of dyslexia.

A moonshot

The Neurodiversity in the Criminal Justice System UK report cited in the previous section mentions that “just 28% of respondents from police and probation services, and 24% of those from prisons, said that they had received any training about neurodiversity”.

What could change if those providing services to people going through the prison pipeline of dyslexia were trained using VR?

For example

Teachers
Nurses
Doctors
Police officers
Lawyers
Judges
Prison officers
Prison wardens
Probation officers…

In other words, what if, for a change, we would shift the burden from dyslexics to non-dyslexics?

My forecast for the prison pipeline of dyslexia

Unfortunately, what I learned from reading those articles and reports didn’t make me feel any better. All the opposite:

Politics: 2024 is a presidential election year and we have plenty of indications that it’ll be one for the UK too. Systemic solutions are not politically appealing because they take time and mean starting work that won’t crystalise during an election term. If in doubt, look at the disappointing progress toward policies slowing down climate change.
Economy: Given the general condition of the economy — the forecasts about inflation and the impact of AI on the future of work — and leaders’ priorities regarding the perceived most important challenges — wars, energy hikes, supply chain disruptions — chances are that budgets for education will remain the same — or be reduced — and there will be very little appetite to invest on exploring alternatives for complex issues such as this one.
Justice: Recently, miscarriages of justice and police misconduct have become more salient in the UK and the US. This has prompted an outcry — people feel insecure. The perceived remedy? More police, more arrests, more and tougher convictions, more prisons.

In summary, a systemic approach to breaking the prison pipeline of dyslexia approach appears highly unlikely.

Unless we decide it’s a priority.

Reframing the prison pipeline of dyslexia

As a trained futurist, I know that one of the major blockers to imagining alternative futures is our attachment to our beliefs and our biases.

In this case

Beliefs that the feeling of safety of some legitimises injustice upon others.
The Dunning-Kruger effect can make us overconfident, leading us to overestimate our own ability and understanding of this systemic issue.
The sunk-cost bias may reinforce the idea that we’ve already invested so much in the prison system that we cannot get rid of it. Instead, we keep feeding it, hoping that eventually, the current problems disappear.

And here are three ways to mitigate them:

I’ve started to educate myself on the abolitionist movement. For example, by reading Abolition. Feminism. Now by Angela Davis and co-authors or the thought-provoking Why Feminists Should Oppose Capital Punishment by Silvia Federici.
The worst kind of ignorance is when we don’t know what we don’t know. Now you know. I hope you pay it forward by sharing what you’ve learned with others who also must know.
As a feminist, I’m convinced that communities and not “enlightened leaders” are the key to upending systemic issues. I’ll be indebted for pointers to resources, groups, and best practices that address how to disrupt this prison pipeline of dyslexia.

I acknowledge that this is an uncomfortable journey — my brain is having a little tantrum upending long-held beliefs about justice and punishment.

But curiosity is winning and that’s always exciting.

PS. You and AI

Are you worried about the impact of AI impact on your job, your organisation, and the future of the planet but you feel it’d take you years to ramp up your AI literacy?
Do you want to explore how to responsibly leverage AI in your organisation to boost innovation, productivity, and revenue but feel overwhelmed by the quantity and breadth of information available?
Are you concerned because your clients are prioritising AI but you keep procrastinating on learning about it because you think you’re not “smart enough”?

I’ve got you covered.

AI Readiness Checklist

Techno-Patriarchy: How AI is Misogyny’s New Clothes

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The cartoon of a woman looks up at a large hazard symbol, which has a character representing data science and AI 'standing' next to it. The AI character is made up of nodes and edges (like a network diagram). The hazard symbol is a large exclamation mark made up of binary code. — Yasmin Dwiputri & Data Hazards Project / Better Images of AI / Managing Data Hazards / Licenced by CC-BY 4.0

In the discussions around gender bias in artificial intelligence (AI), intentionality is left out of the conversation.

We talk about discriminatory datasets and algorithms but avoid mentioning that humans — software developers — select those databases or code the algorithms. Any attempts to demand accountability are crushed under exculpating narratives such as programmers’ “unconscious bias” or the “unavoidable” opacity of AI tools, often referred to as “black boxes”.

Moreover, the media has played a vital role in infantilising tech bros as a means of exculpating them of any harm. They are often portrayed as naughty young prodigies unaware of the unintended consequences of the tools they develop rather than as astute executives who have had notorious encounters with justice for data breaches, antitrust violations, or discrimination at work. There is, however, nothing unintentional or fortuitous.

Patriarchy is much older than capitalism; hence, it has shaped our beliefs about those who have purchasing power and how they use it. So patriarchy wants us to believe that women don’t have money or power, and that if they do, they’ll spend it on make-up and babies and put up with services and products designed for men. Moreover, that women are expendable in the name of profits. All this while in 2009 women controlled $20tr in annual consumer spending and in 2023 they owned 42% of all US businesses.

Tech, where testosterone runs rampant, has completely bought into this mantra and is using artificial intelligence to implement it at scale and help others to do the same. That’s the reason it disregards women’s needs and experiences when developing AI solutions, deflects its accountability on automating and increasing online harassment, purposely reinforces gender stereotypes, operationalises menstrual surveillance, and sabotages women’s businesses and activism.

Techno-optimism

Tech solutionism is predicated on the conviction that there is no problem tough enough that digital technology cannot solve and, when you plan to save the world, AI is the ultimate godsend.

It’s only through understanding the pervasiveness of patriarchy, meritocracy, and exceptionalism in tech that we can explain that the sector dares to brag about its limitless ability to tackle complex issues at a planetary scale with an extremely homogenous workforce, mainly comprising white able wealthy heterosexual cisgender men.

For instance, recruiting AI tools have been regularly portrayed as the end of biased human hiring. The results say otherwise. Notably, Amazon had to scrap their AI recruiting tool because it consistently ranked male candidates over women. The application had been trained on the company’s 10-year hiring history, which was a reflection of the male prevalence across the tech sector.

Another example is the assumption of manufacturers of smart, internet-connected devices that the danger typically comes from the outside; hence, the need to use cameras, VPNs, and passwords to preserve the integrity of the households. But if you’re a woman, the enemy may be indoors.

One in four women experience domestic violence in their lifetime; however, tech companies are oblivious to it. One way perpetrators control, harass and intimidate their victims is by taking advantage of artificial intelligence to manipulate their victims’ wearable and smart home devices. Faced with this design glitch, women don’t have another option than to become their own cybersecurity experts.

Deflecting accountability

Tech is also a master at deflecting their responsibility on how AI enables bullying and aggression towards women. For example, we’re told that we must worry about deepfakes threatening democracies around the world based on their ability to reproduce voices and images from politicians and world leaders. The reality is that women bear the brunt of this form of AI.

A 2019 study found that 96% of deepfakes are of non-consensual sexual nature, and of those, 99% are made of women. This is content aimed to silence, shame, and objectify women. And tech defers to the victims to uncover and report the material. For example, it’s on women to proactively request the removal of harmful pages from Google Search.

Then, we have the online harassment of female journalists, activists, and politicians fostered by algorithms that promote misogynistic content to users prone to engage with it, noting that Black women are 84% more likely than white women to be the target. Research by the Inter-Parliamentary Union about online abuse of women parliamentarians worldwide found that 42% of them have experienced extremely humiliating or sexually charged images of themselves spread through social media.

When tech bros are asked to take responsibility for online harassment, they hide behind the freedom of speech or their powerlessness to police their creations, whilst financially benefiting from the online abuse of women.

Reinforcing gender stereotypes

How do machines know what a woman looks like? The Gender Shades study showed that face recognition algorithms used to predict race and gender were biased against darker females, which showed up to a 35% error compared to 1% for lighter-skinned males. Whilst Microsoft and IBM acknowledged the problem and improved the algorithms subsequently, Amazon blamed the auditor’s methodology.

Tech has a long tradition of capitalising on women and gender stereotypes to anthropomorphise its chatbots. The first one was created in 1966 and played the role of a psychotherapist. Its name was not that of a famous psychotherapist such as Sigmund Freud or Carl Jung, but Eliza, after Eliza Doolittle in the play Pygmalion. The rationale was that through changing how she spoke, the fictional character created the illusion that she was a duchess.

Following suit, tech companies have intentionally designed their virtual home assistants to perpetuate societal gender biases around feminine obedience and the “good housewife”. Their default female voice, womanly names — Alexa, Siri, and Cortana — and subservient manners are calculated to make users connect to those technologies by reproducing patriarchal stereotypes. Historically, this has included a submissive attitude towards verbal sexual harassment, flirting with their aggressors, and thanking offenders for their abusive comments.

Surveillance

Tech has also profited from helping to automate and scale control and influence over women’s reproductive decisions. Whilst society depriving women of their bodily autonomy is nothing new — there are myriad examples of government-sanctioned initiatives forcing women’s sterilisation and reproduction — what’s frightening is that the use of AI brings us closer to a future where Minority Report meets The Handmaid’s Tale.

Microsoft has developed applications used across Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, and Chile with the promise to forecast the likelihood of teenage pregnancy based on data such as age, ethnicity, and disability.

AI is an ally of “pro-life” groups too. An analysis of the results shown to women searching for online guidance about abortions revealed that a substantial number of hits produced by the algorithm were adverts styled as advice services run by anti-abortion campaigners. Google’s defence? The adverts had an “ad” tag.

Censorship

Tech actively sabotages women in areas such as self-expression, healthcare, business, finances, and activism.

AI tools developed by Google, Amazon, and Microsoft rate images of women’s bodies as more sexually suggestive than those of men. Medical pictures of women, photos of pregnant bellies, and images depicting breastfeeding are all at high risk of being classified as representing “explicit nudity” and removed from social media platforms.

It can escalate too. It’s not uncommon that women’s businesses relying on portraying women’s bodies report being shadow-banned — their content is either hidden or made less prominent by social media platforms without their knowledge. This practice decimates female businesses and promotes self-censoring to avoid demotion on the platforms.

Algorithms also flag women as higher-risk borrowers. In 2019, tech founders Steve Wozniak and David Heinemeier Hansson disclosed in a viral Twitter thread that the Apple Card had offered them a credit limit ten and twenty times higher than to their wives in spite of the couples sharing their assets.

Tech doesn’t appear to think that female activism is good for business either. For years, digital campaigns have highlighted that Meta’s hate speech policies result in the removal of posts calling attention to gender-based violence and harassment. The company continues to consider those posts against their policies — despite their Oversight Board overturning their decisions — and suspending the accounts of Black women activists who have reported racial abuse.

The other women in tech

While AI is naturally associated with the virtual world, it is rooted in material objects. Moreover, most tech software and platform giants — Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta (aka Facebook) — are hardware providers as well. Datacentres, smartphones, laptops, and batteries rely heavily on metals such as cobalt and women often play a key role in their extraction and recycling.

For example, the Democratic Republic of Congo supplies 60% of the world’s cobalt. The mineral is extracted via artisanal and industrial mines. Some sectors welcome the integration of women into the artisanal mines as a means to empower them financially and as a substitute for children’s labour.

However, the specific activities females perform in the mines are the most toxic as they involve direct contact with the minerals, leading to cancer, respiratory conditions, miscarriage, and menstrual disruption. Women working in some of those artisanal mining sites report daily violence and blackmail. Still, adult females earn half of what adult males make (an average of $2.04 per day).

What tech has done about this? Software-only companies continue to look the other way while those manufacturing hardware avoided their responsibility as much as they could.

Most companies have taken moderate or minimal action whilst in some cases they have denied knowledge of breaches in human rights. Still, it’s clear that the bulk of the action is directed toward eradicating child labour and that the particular challenges that women miners face are left unaddressed.

There is also a gendered division of labour in electronic waste, a €55 billion business. Women frequently have the lowest-tier jobs in the e-waste sector. They are exposed to harmful materials, chemicals, and acids as they pick and separate the electronic equipment into their components, which in turn negatively affect their morbidity, mortality, and fertility.

Again, the focus of the efforts goes to reducing child labour and women’s work conditions are lumped with those of “adult” workers. An additional challenge compared to mining work, it’s that hardware manufacturers control the narrative, highlighting their commitment to recycling materials across their products for PR purposes.

AI-powered misogyny beyond tech

Last but not least, not only tech companies use AI as a misogyny tool. Organisations and individuals around the world are ramping up quickly.

For example, Iran has announced the use of facial recognition algorithms to identify women breaking hijab laws.

The baby-on-board market is a goldmine and technology is instrumental in helping vendors to exploit it. It has become habitual that retailers use AI algorithms to uncover and target pregnant girls and women.

Then, there is sexual exploitation. According to the United Nations, for every 10 victims of human trafficking detected globally, five are adult women and two are girls. Overall, 50 per cent of victims are trafficked for sexual exploitation (72% in the case of girls). Traffickers use online advertisements, social media platforms, and dating apps — all powered by AI — to facilitate the recruitment, exploitation, and exertion of control and pressure over the victims.

And thanks to generative AI, it has never been easier for individuals to create misogynistic content, even accidentally. Examples include:

ChatGPT replicating gender stereotypes when writing professional profiles, stressing communal skills for women while highlighting financial achievements for men.
Playground AI making women’s headshots look “more professional” by altering facial features to conform to Caucasian ideals of beauty
Stable Diffusion generating 94% of the time images of male CEOs and engineers.

The answer from tech leaders to their responsibility about generative AI fostering biases has been to issue letters focusing on a dystopian future rather than addressing the present harms. Even better, they have perfected the skill of putting the onus on governments to regulate AI whilst in parallel lobbying to shape those same regulations.

What’s the fix?

Tech has embraced the patriarchal playbook in its adoption and deployment of artificial intelligence tools. Hoping to reap massive financial returns, the sector is unapologetically fostering gender inequity and stereotypes.

As Black feminist Audre Lorde wrote, “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” Whilst tech continues to be run by wealthy white men who see themselves as the next Messiah, misogyny and patriarchy will be a feature and not a bug of artificial intelligence applications.

We need a diverse leadership in tech that sees women as an underserved market with growing purchasing and executive power. Tech also needs investors to understand that outdated patriarchal beliefs about women being a “niche” don’t serve them well.

On the bright side, it’s encouraging to see categories such as Femtech, which focuses on female healthcare innovation, reaching $16 billion in investment and is projected to be $1.2 trillion by 2027.

Finally, Tech needs to assume responsibility for the tools it creates and that goes beyond monitoring apps performance. It starts at the ideation stage by asking uncomfortable ethical questions such as “Should we build that?”

Because not all speed is progress.

NOTE: This article is based on a piece that I wrote previously for The Mint.

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Breaking Free: Dispelling 6 Myths About the Gender Pay Gap

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Closeup of woman hand putting a coin into a piggy bank. — Photo by Sasun Bughdaryan on Unsplash.

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More than 20 years ago, I negotiated my first salary. I could have done much better.

At the time, my future employer asked for my previous salary and offered exactly the same amount. Their bargaining chip was that they knew I was without a job and that I was obviously quite inexperienced in negotiating my compensation package.

My gut feeling was they were taking advantage of me, but I didn’t have proof. I asked my friends for advice, but none of them had much more experience than I did. Still, I negotiated a £3,000 increase, which I got.

To make a long story short, I learned I was severely underpaid a year later. That had three consequences

Feeling betrayed by the organization, I decided to search for another job, which I landed about a year later.
As bonuses, promotions, and pension schemes depended on my salary, that initial negotiation mishap penalized my earnings — and retirement “pot” — for many years.
Given the pervasive practice of asking candidates for their previous salaries several times, it compromised any leverage I may have when negotiating a new role.

Unfortunately, I’m not alone.

In this article, I share why we must keep talking about the effect of gender on compensation. I also dispel some of the most damaging myths surrounding

The impact of gender on workers’ salaries — including those about differences between how men and women approach salary discussions.
How policies may help to bridge the gender pay gap.
What leverage is available during salary negotiations.

Why addressing the impact of gender on salaries is both urgent and important

I’ve been talking about women and money extensively since I started blogging. For example, I’ve discussed

The UN findings showing that women invest 90 percent of their income back into their families, compared with 35 percent of men.
How society profits from women’s unpaid work and how we should rethink it for a better tomorrow.
The way salary increases are one of the ways my clients reap the benefits of my coaching and mentoring program.

Three reasons made me decide to revisit the topic

Not long ago, a client — a woman in tech — shared that she was expecting a job offer from her dream employer — her first job outside academia. After telling her I was “removing my coaching hat and putting my mentoring hat on,” I exhorted her to negotiate her salary. I offered my availability to provide feedback on the compensation package. Her reply clearly showed me that she wasn’t aware salaries were negotiable.
I read the article from Ronke Babajide, “The Sad Truth Is That the Bigger Your Pay Check, the Bigger the Pay Gap.” In the piece, she shares a personal story about how she was paid substantially less than her male counterparts. I was surprised by how many comments she got from women sharing similar heartbreaking stories. It also made me realize that when we talk about how gender influences salaries, often many things get conflated — for example, equal salary and the gender pay gap.
Claudia Goldin was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for her work towards the first comprehensive account of women’s earnings and labour market participation through the centuries. Her research reveals the causes of change and the main sources of the remaining gender gap.

And now, let’s debunk the myths.

Myth #1: Equal pay is the same as the gender pay gap

Equal pay

Equal pay is being paid the same salary for the same work. The right to equal pay has been recognized by EU law since 1957. More precisely, Article 157 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the EU (TFEU) states

Each Member State shall ensure that the principle of equal pay for male and female workers for equal work or work of equal value is applied.

2.For the purpose of this Article, ‘pay’ means the ordinary basic or minimum wage or salary and any other consideration, whether in cash or in kind, which the worker receives directly or indirectly, in respect of his employment, from his employer.

Equal pay without discrimination based on sex means:

(a)that pay for the same work at piece rates shall be calculated on the basis of the same unit of measurement;

(b)that pay for work at time rates shall be the same for the same job.

Although the UK is not a member of the EU anymore, the Equal Pay Act 1970 established that

(a)for men and women employed on like work the terms and conditions of one sex are not in any respect less favourable than those of the other; and

(b)for men and women employed on work rated as equivalent the terms and conditions of one sex are not less favourable than those of the other in any respect in which the terms and conditions of both are determined by the rating of their work.

It has since been repealed and replaced by the Equality Act 2010.

Sex equality rule

(1)If an occupational pension scheme does not include a sex equality rule, it is to be treated as including one.

(2)A sex equality rule is a provision that has the following effect —

(a)if a relevant term is less favourable to A than it is to B, the term is modified so as not to be less favourable;

(b)if a term confers a relevant discretion capable of being exercised in a way that would be less favourable to A than to B, the term is modified so as to prevent the exercise of the discretion in that way.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that there are employers that break the law upfront — pay women less than men for the same work — or use subterfuges to pay them less. Two examples:

In 2020, the Guardian reported that since the 2007–08 financial year, employment tribunals in England and Wales had received an average of almost 29,000 complaints a year.

Across the whole period, equal pay claims made up 12% of all cases, which include other complaints such as unfair dismissal, discrimination, and unlawful deductions from pay. Equal pay claims made up 21% of all cases in 2017–18, 14% in 2018–19 and 14% in the first three quarters of 2019–20.

Shop floor Tesco staff, who are predominantly female, launched a claim in 2018 on the basis that “Tesco breached its duty under section 66 of the Equality Act 2010 to pay them equally to men in comparable roles, namely warehouse staff who are predominantly male. The claimants argue that they have been paid up to £3 an hour less than a warehouse and distribution centre staff.” Through the years, several similar claims at other UK supermarkets including Asda, Sainsbury’s Morrisons, and the Co-op have been working their way through the courts.

In the US, the Equal Pay Act of 1963 protects against wage discrimination based on sex. However, as in Europe, that doesn’t mean that discrimination is eradicated. For example

By 1969, the median salary for female computer specialists was $7,763. In contrast, men earned a median of $11,193 as computer specialists and $13,149 as engineers.

Gender pay gap

The gender pay gap measures the difference in the average hourly wage of all men and women in work. Unlike unequal gender pay, the gender gap pay is not unlawful although countries such as the UK have regulations and laws making its reporting recommended or even mandatory.

In 2016, the Women and Equalities Committee published a report outlining some of the main causes of the gender pay gap:

The part-time pay penalty — Women are more likely to work part-time, and part-time workers are paid less.
Occupation segregation — Women tend to work in lower-paid occupations and sectors.

I’ll add two more:

Women are assessed on performance and men on potential. As a result, they are seen as less “promotable material”.
Managers holding “benevolent sexism” beliefs may block women’s professional progression under the premise that they are “protecting” them. For example, not offering a more senior role that involves traveling to a woman with small children under the assumption that she won’t be interested.

Finally, it’s very important to highlight that the gender pay gap is an intersectional issue.

As this report from the Fawcett Society showed, the ethnic gender pay gap is extremely complex. For example, it can range from a reversed gender pay gap of -5.6% for Chinese women in Great Britain to 19.6% for Black African women.
The UK Trades Union Congress published a new analysis in November showing that non-disabled men are paid on average 30% more than disabled women.

Myth #2: Transparency in salaries will eliminate the gender pay gap

I’ve been an advocate of salary transparency since in 2018 I attended a talk by Åsa Nyström, at the time Director of Customer Advocacy at Buffer. She discussed Buffer’s value of “Default to Transparency” which consisted of sharing via their website all their employees’ salaries as well as the formula used to calculate them.

The benefits of salary transparency are multiple

For companies— It increases performance as it promotes trust between employees and employers. A study showed that people at high-trust companies report 74% less stress, 106% more energy at work, 50% higher productivity, 13% fewer sick days, 76% more engagement, 29% more satisfaction with their lives, and 40% less burnout.
For women — Research has shown that women are more prone to negotiate the compensation package when the job description includes the salary ranges.
For governments – Salary transparency makes it less likely for unequal pay to occur, increase wages among women and other low-power groups which in turn will reduce their demands for state benefits.

However, it’s not the magic bullet for the gender pay gap. We need to remember that the gender pay gap is about career progression and gendered careers, so transparency won’t eliminate entrenched conscious and unconscious biases.

Still, transparency is a step in the right direction and there is some good news to celebrate.

That EU pay transparency directive, adopted in April 2023, is expected to

help workers or jobseekers better understand their position in the wider pay structure of a company or industry. It also includes collective measures to ensure employers share aggregated pay data broken down by gender, both internally and publicly.

Some of its key points are:

The right for workers to obtain pay information about other workers doing equal work from an employer.
During recruitment, job candidates also have a right to be informed about the pay levels they can expect at the position they are applying for.
Candidates have the right not to be asked about their pay history.
Organisations with more than 100 employees will have to publish their gender gaps regarding total pay and variable pay (such as bonuses), including their internal gender pay gap by job category.

EU Member States are required to implement legislation giving effect to it by 7 June 2026, the date on which the general obligations in relation to pay transparency and information provision come into force. The gender pay gap reporting obligations will come into effect on a phased basis starting on 7 June 2027.

Myth #3: Women earn less because they don’t negotiate

Year after year, I keep hearing that the gender pay gap is due to women not asking for raises or underselling their skills.

Whilst some women may indeed be reluctant to negotiate, either because they don’t know that salaries are negotiable or they don’t know how to negotiate them, there are also other four important reasons:

Many women are actively discouraged by their entourage to have salary negotiations. Over and over, women tell me that they’ve been advised by their mentors and network to “not rock the boat”.
Some studies show that when women negotiate their salaries, they receive backlash: They are seen as greedy whilst men who do the same are deemed assertive. Women know that they need to be perceived as “likable” so they don’t negotiate.
Society tells women how important is their work as family “pillars”. But does society monetarily recognize the kind of work women typically perform in that role — household chores, breastfeeding, child rearing, family caregiving? No. Hence, we’re used to our work being simultaneously praised and not recognized monetarily.
Women have been trained by society that our judgment is not trustworthy and that we need external validation before making decisions. Hence, we’re expected to talk ourselves out of our gut feeling that we’re underpaid and trust the organisations we work for about the monetary value of our work.

Finally, some studies show that women are more likely to negotiate salaries than men. However, while women are more likely to ask for higher salaries, men still receive greater compensation.

Myth #4: I will negotiate my salary once I prove my value to the organisation

You’ll never be in a better position to negotiate your salary than when you join an organisation. Please don’t count on being able to renegotiate your salary later on or at the next promotion — it’s extremely unlikely you have that leverage.

Moreover, by not negotiating your salary, you risk

Feeling regret when thinking about how much you could have asked for.
Fostering resentment against the organisation — if you learn others with similar background and skills are been paid more.

Myth #5: I may lose the job offer if I negotiate the salary

Scoop: You’re expected to negotiate your compensation package. So do it!

Research demonstrates that it’s extremely unlikely that a company withdraws a job offer only because you want to negotiate the salary. Worst case scenario? You get what you got offered in the first place, but at least you know you reached the maximum on the table.

And if you don’t know how much you should negotiate for, ask mentors, sponsors, professional communities, and friends.

Myth #6: I need to be mindful of the ongoing economic situation and settle for less

If you still feel reluctant to negotiate your salary, think about your future self.

For example, an increase of £2,000 in 2024 will translate into £40,000 in 20 years. Moreover, promotions, bonuses, and contributions to your pension scheme are typically calculated as a percentage of your salary, so they’ll increase as your base salary increases.

In summary, those £2,000 will be the gift that keeps on giving!

Call to action

I have two asks for you

1.- Share this article with a woman who will benefit from negotiating her salary in 2025.

2.- Set a salary increase goal for 2025.

WORK WITH ME

I’m a technologist with 20+ years of experience in digital transformation. I’m also an award-winning inclusion strategist and certified life and career coach.

I help ambitious women in tech who are overwhelmed to break the glass ceiling and achieve success without burnout through bespoke coaching and mentoring.
I’m a sought-after international keynote speaker on strategies to empower women and underrepresented groups in tech, sustainable and ethical artificial intelligence, and inclusive workplaces and products.
I empower non-tech leaders to harness the potential of AI for sustainable growth and responsible innovation through consulting and facilitation programs.

Defying Patriarchy: Strategies for a Joyous New Year’s Celebration

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Christmas dinner table with a white millennial man sat at the top of the table flanked by an old white couple on his right and two brown children on his left. On the other side of the chlidren there is a millennial brown woman lighting the candles on the table. The millennial man and woman smile. — Let’s guess who prepared the Christmas dinner. Photo by cottonbro studio.

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The period between Christmas and New Year is supposed to be a moment for families to reunite, share traditions, and celebrate.

Under that benevolent facade, patriarchy and its ally misogyny are plotting in plain sight.

Let’s revisit three patriarchy’s ghosts of Christmas past and discover three strategies to break free from their grip in time for New Year’s celebration.

Three patriarchal principles that underpin this holiday season

There are many ways this time of the year enforces patriarchal norms and processes.

Note that I’m not talking only about sexism — the division of labour based on gender, e.g. women shop, cook, and care for others whilst men converse with the visits — but it’s how we do it.

It’s in the “how” that patriarchy has a field party. Three of its principles particularly shine during this time of the year. Each of them reinforces the others.

Let’s get cracking!

Principle #1: Women are responsible for the “perfect” holiday season

As I discussed before in this article about the patriarchal value of time and women’s unpaid work, women are perceived as “human doings”, not human beings. That means that our worth is correlated with what we “produce” for others.

And what does that mean during this time of the year? That somehow the Powers that Be have bestowed upon women the duty of creating the perfect holiday season for those around us.

BTW, no need to worry about what perfection looks like— leave it to social media, magazines, TV shows, and even ChatGPT to give us their “feedback” on

Cooking the perfect Christmas dinner
Choosing the perfect wine
Setting the perfect New Year’s Eve table
Decorating the perfect Christmas tree
Picking the perfect gift for everybody else

And the list goes on, personalised for each family member, friend, and acquaintance.

Of course, women don’t escape either to this quest for perfection. The perfect body, hairstyle, shoes, and skin complexion are dictated by our always-evolving patriarchal standards and are now reinforced by AI, as the research by The Bulimia Project has surfaced.

As that to-do list is not enough, women are also required to care for everybody else’s emotions.

And how do they achieve that? Go to the next principle.

Principle #2: Women’s job is to make others happy

Patriarchy wants us to believe that everybody depends on women for their emotions. We can magically make them happy, sad, frustrated, appreciated… and so on.

The underlying theory is that people around us are emotional children and whatever women do/don’t say or do will impact their emotional wellbeing.

As the Christmas to New Year period is marketed as “the happiest time of the year” in most of the Western world, women bear the brunt of not “screwing this up” for everybody.

As a result, we should deploy our “innate” social skills and guess when to act as

The cheerleader
The listening ear
The supporter
The clown
The role model
The confidant
The graceful host
The helpful guest
And even the self-deprecating joker.

Failure to cater to everybody’s mood and needs indicates a “lack of empathy” — a capital sin for women — and, more importantly, selfishness.

Speaking of which, let’s check the last principle.

Principle #3: Women are selfless

What happens when making other people happy conflicts with women’s happiness? That’s easy. By default, our own happiness is at the bottom of the list, buried under others’ needs.

This manifests as

Demands on women’s time and attention — who said that Christmas was a period of relaxation for everybody? The reality is that for some to be able to rest and enjoy the holiday, others — women — need to do the work.
Opinions on women — This time of the year women are supposed to shut up and stoically endure jokes and opinions about how we live our lives. Why we don’t have children, have too many children, or not enough children. Why do we have a paid job, work part-time, or don’t have paid employment. Why we’re divorced, lesbian, single, or bisexual… and the list goes on. There is no question intimate enough that’s off-limits provided that the setting involves enough people that can be “upset” if we fight back. And if in doubt, watch or read Bridget Jones’s Diary.
Entitlement to voice entrenched stereotypes and discriminatory beliefs — somehow this season appears to foster the perfect conditions for people to feel emboldened to express racist, sexist, and ableist remarks — as well as any other prejudiced statements against underrepresented groups like immigrants and trans people — expecting to get reassurance from the audience or at least no pushback. And knowing that their host or a female guest is specially engaged in DEI activities is far from a deterrent. Instead, the person should expect to be publicly named and warned that resistance is futile, e.g. “Mary, I know you’re [feminist, defendant of gay rights, DEI activist, etc..] BUT you should agree that [prejudice, stereotype, bias]”.

Women are expected to accept these additional burdens gratefully, as setting any kind of boundaries somehow will destroy the illusion of harmless banter and festive spirit.

Three strategies to fight back against a patriarchal holiday

But not all is lost. Three coaching tools can help you minimise the impact of patriarchy on your enjoyment of this holiday season.

Strategy #1: Embrace emotional adulthood

What if people’s emotions didn’t depend on you? For good or bad, others’ emotions depend on them. More precisely, on their thoughts about circumstances.

Don’t believe me? Then, remember the expression ”Is the glass half empty or half full?” The premise of this famous question is that the same fact can be framed as a positive or a negative, depending on how you look at it.

In contrast to emotional childhood explained above, emotional adulthood is when we believe that people’s emotions are dependent on them and not on us. The reality is that if Aunt Maud is sad because you didn’t invite Uncle Sam to the dinner, it’s not you that causes her sadness but it’s what she’s making it mean.

Next time you’re put on the spot as “causing” somebody’s negative feelings, I invite you to hold tight and resist the emotional blackmail from those around you and instead believe in their power to manage their own emotions.

Strategy #2: Aim for B- work

This is what I’ve learned about perfection

It’s ill-defined — what’s perfect one day, can be a mess later on.
It’s overvalued — when you look back on your life and reflect on the moments that have brought you joy, chances are that by no means they were “perfect”. For example, last summer my mother broke her hip and I remember my joy at seeing her walking after the surgery. Would the moment have been better if we both had perfect hair and makeup? The answer is no.
Makes people feel inadequate —we’re taught that perfection is a gift to others and ourselves. I disagree. It’s often poisoned candy as it leverages comparison to make some people feel like winners at the expense of others feeling like losers.
Our worth doesn’t depend on “producing” perfection — We’re already worthy as we are.

My solution to perfectionism? Aiming for B- Work.

Just to be clear, not only I’m telling you not to go for perfection or even excellence, but I’m recommending you aim for good going down to satisfactory.

If in doubt, imagine how planning for good — instead of perfect — could give you back

Time
Energy
Peace of mind

Isn’t worth a try?

Strategy #3: Decide ahead of time

I’ve talked about this strategy before in this post where I discussed the power of integrating quitting your job into your career success strategy.

Deciding ahead of time is to plan how you’ll think, feel, and act in advance of certain triggers appearing.

For example, how will you react when

Cousin Alex treats you like their personal bartender and waitress during the dinner you’re hosting.
Uncle John asks you — like every Christmas — why are you still single.
Niece Jenny complains — again — about how immigrants steal “all jobs” and also claim “all benefits” somehow forgetting to notice that you’re an immigrant too.

Note that when I say “deciding ahead of time” this includes choosing not to do anything at all, including smiling or leaving the table to make it look like you forgot something in the kitchen. Moreover, you can even come up with a list of things you won’t do!

In the end, the goal exercise is about allowing yourself to choose in advance what works for you.

Conclusion

The Christmas to New Year period is full of patriarchal dos and don’ts. It’s also ripe for disruption.

Let’s start right now.

BACK TO YOU: What patriarchal principle makes it harder for you to enjoy this holiday season?

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Upwards & Onwards: The career breakthrough gift you deserve in 2024

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Four women of different ethnicities and ages in business casual attire in an office. They are standing up and have their arms crossed. They smile.

One of the things I’m proudest of this year is the launch of my “coachering” — coaching & mentoring — program “Upwards & Onwards”.

Through this program, women and people from underrepresented groups have got

An internal promotion.
A job in another organisation more aligned with their career goals.
A more senior job in another organisation.
Applied for internal promotion and received detailed feedback on the skills and experiences needed to get the promotion next time around.
A substantial salary increase.
Both a promotion and salary increase during maternity leave.
Transitioned from a post-doctoral position at the university to a permanent role in a corporation.

What makes this program different from any other career program?

This program provides both coaching and mentoring because we need both to succeed in a career that is also integrated with our personal life.

I’m a certified career and life coach as well as an award-winning inclusion strategist and technologist with 20+ years of experience in digital transformation and people management.

My background gives me unique insights into technology, bias, inclusion, equity, management, career growth, and behavioural science to help women and people from underrepresented groups to become successful on their terms whilst embracing kindness, joy, and self-compassion.

In addition to my coaching certification, I bring to the table

18+ years mentoring and coaching women and people from underrepresented groups such as ethnic minorities, disabled people, and immigrants.
15+ years of experience as a manager (including hiring, onboarding, promoting, firing, and layoffs).
Experience spearheading numerous initiatives to promote diversity and inclusion in tech that was recognized with the UK 2020 Women in Tech Changemakers award.
Featured in the Computer Weekly 2022 and 2023 longlist of the most influential women in UK tech.
DEI advisor for We and AI, a British NGO with the mission of making artificial intelligence work for everybody.
UK Committee Member for European Partnerships & Memberships for European Women on Boards, an NGO that supports the European Union’s Directive that introduces a binding objective of at least 40% of board members of each gender by 2026.
STEM degree (B.Sc., M.SC in Chemical Engineering, Ph.D. in Computational Chemistry)
A global perspective acquired by living in 6 countries on 3 continents and building professional and personal relationships with nationals of more than 50 countries.
Trilingual: English, French, and Spanish.

Imagine yourself a year from now.

You have a new role that aligns with your definition of success.
Your work and personal lives are integrated rather than fighting each other.
You feel you’re fairly compensated for the work you do.

What between you and that future self?

Self-doubt.
Self-criticism.
Limiting beliefs.
Fear of uncertainty.
Misinformation about how to advance your career.
Unawareness about how office politics work.

In this program, you will

Examine where are you in your career
Decide on your next bold professional move and ensure that it integrates into the lifestyle you want for yourself.
Identify the gaps between where you are and where you want to be.
Create a plan.
Implement the plan.

Let’s talk

Want more details? Keep reading!

Three women on their 20-30s of different ethnicities sat around a table smiling. Two of them are high fiving each other.

Upwards & Onwards: Coaching and mentoring program

Are you tired of waiting for the Powers that Be in your organisation to recognise the amazing work you?

Do you have enough of seen less skilled people to get promoted ahead of you?

Do you feel overworked and underappreciated?

That’s my story too and this is how I changed it.

My career promotion story

The idealized version of my career path is that I started as a training scientist for a mid-size tech company and I’m now Global Director of Scientific Support and Customer Operations for a Fortune Future 50 tech corporation. Wow!

The real version is much less dreamy. To get where I am now, I changed departments twice. I was passed over for promotion several times. I wasted precious time — especially at the beginning of my career — working extremely hard and waiting for others to realise the great work I was doing.

Maybe, the most interesting fact is that despite being a person who spent many years in the university learning how to do things — I have a Chem. Eng. B.Sc, M.Sc., Ph.D. as well as a post-doc — I simply assumed I knew how to get promoted, even if nobody had taught me how to do it!

What could I have done better?

Life is not a movie or Instagram, so we should expect challenges along the way.

Still, the major problem was that I assumed I had to figure it all out by myself. Or at most, with the advice of one or two friends or peers who wanted to help me out but didn’t have more direct experience than I had.

Through the years, I discovered that whilst I confronted my share of bias in my career, I had also internalised a long list of limiting beliefs. Uncovering them and putting a plan to neutralise them took coaching, mentoring, sponsoring, and, above all, time and effort towards understanding how to showcase my strengths and value to the business.

In addition to progressing faster in my career, by knowing what to expect, I could have enjoyed more the ride and felt less frustrated.

How can you go faster and make it easier?

I know that for me it wasn’t enough to discover the career promotion myths or how to counter them. It has taken mentoring, coaching, learning about behavioural science, my experience as a manager for 15+ years, and very time-consuming trial-and-error experiments.

I wish my past self could have learned from my present self how to get the next promotion.

That’s why I’ve created the 3-month “Onwards & Upwards” Career Promotion Breakthrough Program so you claim your power back and thrive in your career in 2024.

Get in touch

Smiling Asian businesswoman working at women and making a video call.

What’ll you get from “Upwards and Onwards”?

In this program, you will

Get clarity on your career goals and your next career move.
Examine your limiting beliefs, understand how they impact your career progression, and how you can overcome them.
Learn to befriend uncertainty to embrace new challenges.
Understand how to build your professional and personal support ecosystem.
Gain awareness about your negotiation comfort zone and enrich it with complementary approaches to enhance your career prospects.
Experiment with powerful communication styles that are aligned with your strengths and values and resonate with your interlocutors.
Reframe office politics as a tool to help you get things done, build relationships, and access opportunities.
Build the habit of lifting others as you climb.
Embrace self-coaching as a tool to build resilience.

Through our 1:1 work, you’ll gain interpersonal skills and learn tools that will strengthen your professional career.

What if you’re just starting a new role?

Getting promoted is a process. The earlier you start putting in place a strategy and acting on it, the higher the chances of success once you’re ready to get that promotion.

What’s the scientific evidence that this method works?

As somebody with an engineering, master, and Ph.D. degree, in addition to my years coaching individuals in my role as manager, it was important to get a certification that accredited me. Not only for the “title” but because I wanted to add further skills to my toolkit and get supervision.

Also because of my academic background, I’m keen on scientific evidence that proves the methods I use.

That’s the reason I was delighted to learn recently that the methodology I was certified on has been backed up by two peer-reviewed articles published in 2022 and 2023

“Effect of a Novel Online Group-Coaching Program to Reduce Burnout in Female Resident Physicians A Randomized Clinical Trial” JAMA Netw Open. 2022;5(5):e2210752.

Findings: In this pilot randomized clinical trial of 101 female resident physicians, participants who were randomly assigned to a 6-month group coaching program and a follow-up survey had a statistically significant reduction in emotional exhaustion and self-doubt, and an increase in self-compassion.

“Online Well-Being Group Coaching Program for Women Physician Trainees A Randomized Clinical Trial” JAMA Netw Open. 2023;6(10):e2335541.

Findings: In this randomized clinical trial of 1,017 women trainee physicians, participants randomly assigned to a 4-month group-coaching program had a statistically significant reduction in all scales of burnout, moral injury, and impostor syndrome, as well as improved self-compassion and flourishing, compared with the control group.

Testimonials

“I am happy that I’ve met Patricia in time. I am going through a career change period, which has become less frightening and more strategic.

She helped me see the patterns of how my mind is holding me back, and by the end of the coaching program, I noticed a shift in my self-confidence and resilience. In our sessions, we uncovered the root causes of my inaction, and solutions emerged naturally from her insightful questions. She also shared her wisdom and vision when I needed it.

She is passionate about coaching and empowering women and has all the necessary expertise to help. I enjoyed every session. Thank you, Patricia!”
Alena Sheveleva, Research Fellow

“Patricia has excellent knowledge and expertise on mentoring / coaching, in particular leadership for women. I greatly benefited from working with Patricia and found the experience & learnings extremely valuable for my own personal development and overall career growth.”
Aisling Mulhall, Events Senior Manager, Software company

“Patricia knows how to ask the right questions to let you come to the right conclusion and decide on next step in the journey. Patricia dared me to step out of my comfort zone”
Jolanda Bussner, Project Manager, Software company

I had the opportunity to work with Patricia through a coaching scheme at work. I personally got a lot out of the joint coaching sessions. Patricia has the skill to come across as supportive so you feel safe but she also will challenge you about why you think that way or what made you approach it from that angle, not this. There’s no judgment from her as she questions you, you can tell she’s just trying to understand everything. I hope to have the opportunity to work with her in the future.
R.B., Senior product designer

Patricia is an extremely knowledgeable and caring coach. In my short session with Patricia, she helped me to envision a future I want for myself and create a plan for that by myself. For a senior university student, Patricia was an insightful companion who supported me in navigating my career choices and living a happy life.
T.T., 4th year Economics Honours student at the University of British Columbia

Patricia was able to look at my experience, and then where I was right now. It literally felt like she was weaving together different strands to then hone in exactly on career blocks and give me some ideas to move past them.

Her style was to ask questions rather than give me a simple a to-do list, I also liked the way I felt I could trust her professional experience. She knew what I was talking about from inside my chosen sector.
Ruth Westnidge, Software Engineer

Patricia’s empathetic approach enabled me to work through my difficulties and find new ways of approaching my work projects.

The dedication and commitment she brought to our sessions gave me the confidence and encouragement to identify what was holding me back and to find possible solutions. Her insights always kept me focused on putting into action steps that would achieve results.

I gained enormously from my sessions with Patricia. Her experienced questioning guided me through a difficult period of transition from a career in the television industry to a new phase in my working life.
Bren Simson. TV director, author, local historian and guide

For more testimonials, go here.

Questions? Get in touch.

Navigating the Digital Battlefield: Women and Deepfake Survival

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Two people are illustrated in a warm, cartoon style, one on the left and one on the right. The person on the left, who has their back to the viewer, and is typing on a laptop which is sitting on a table. The computer screen is dark with rows of coloured squares representing programming. The person on the right is wearing a white lab coat and safety goggles. They are reaching down to lift up an orange hazard label which is about the size of a book. The label is an orange square with a black exclamation mark in the middle. The person looks like they are being careful as they lift it. — Yasmin Dwiputri & Data Hazards Project / Better Images of AI / Safety Precautions / Licenced by CC-BY 4.0.

The annual campaign 16 Days of Activism against Gender-Based Violence begins on 25 November, the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, and runs through International Human Rights Day on 10 December.

Gender violence campaigns traditionally focus on physical violence: sexual harassment, rape, femicide, child marriage, or sex trafficking. The perpetrators? Partners, family members, human traffickers, soldiers, terrorists.

But that’s not all. You may be a victim of digital violence right now — in the comfort of your home.

Let’s talk about deepfakes.

The myth of political deepfakes

Deepfakes are images, audio, or video generated or manipulated using artificial intelligence technology to convincingly replace one person’s likeness with that of another.

When talking about deepfakes, most media refer to the threats they may pose to democracy. That was exemplified in the famous deepfake video of Obama in 2018, where he called Donald Trump a “total and complete dipshit”. Although that video was clearly false, it did show the potential of the technology to meddle in elections and spread disinformation.

Capitalism and deepfakes

In addition to the threat to political stability, the benefits and threats posed by deepfakes are often framed in a capitalistic context

Art — Artists use deepfakes technology to generate new content from existing media created by them or by other artists.
Caller response services — Provide tailored answers to caller requests that involve simplified tasks (e.g. triaging and call forwarding to a human).
Customer support — These services use deepfake audio to provide basic information such as an account balance.
Entertainment — Movies and video games clone actors’ voices and faces because of convenience or even for humourous purposes.
Deception — Fabricating false evidence to inculpate — or exculpate — people in a lawsuit.
Fraud — Impersonate people to gain access to confidential information (e.g. credit cards) or prompt people to act (e.g. impersonate a CEO and request a money transfer).
Stock manipulation — Deepfake content such as videos from CEOs announcing untrue news such as massive layoffs, new patents, or an imminent merger can have a massive impact on a company’s stock.

As a result of that financial focus, tech companies and governments have concentrated their efforts towards assessing if digital content is a deepfake or not. Hence, the proliferation of tools aimed to “certify” content’s provenance as well as legal requirements in some countries to label deepfakes.

And many people share the same viewpoint. It’s not uncommon that, when discussing deepfakes, my interlocutors dismiss their impact with remarks such as “It’s easy now to spot if they’re fake or not”.

But the reality is that women bear the brunt of this technology.

Women and deepfakes

Deepfakes themselves were born in 2017 when a Reddit user of the same name posted manipulated porn clips on the site. The videos swapped the faces of female celebrities — Gal Gadot, Taylor Swift, Scarlett Johansson — onto porn performers. And from there they took off.

A 2019 study found that 96% of deepfakes are of non-consensual sexual nature, of which 99% are made of women. As I mentioned in the article Misogyny’s New Clothes, they are a well-oiled misogyny tool:

They are aimed to silence and shame women. That includes women politicians. 42% of women parliamentarians worldwide have experienced extremely humiliating or sexually-charged images of themselves spread through social media.
They objectify women by dismembering their bodies — faces, heads, bodies, arms, legs — without their permission and reassembling them as virtual Frankensteins.
They may be the cheapest way to create pornography — you don’t need to pay actors and there are plenty of free tools available. Not willing to put the effort into learning how to create them yourself? You can order one for as low as $300.
They are the newest iteration of revenge porn — hate your colleagues? Tired of the women in your cohort ignoring you? You create deepfake videos from them made from their LinkedIn profile photos and university face books and plaster the internet with them.
They disempower victims — Unlike “older” misogyny tools, women cannot control the origin of deepfakes, how they spread, or how to eliminate them. Once they are created, women’s only recourse is to reach out directly to the platforms and websites hosting them and ask for removal.
As with all types of gendered violence, women are also shamed for being the target of deepfakes — they are blamed for sharing their photos on social media. I encourage you to read Adrija Bose’s excellent article that summarises her research work on the effect of deepfakes on female content creators.

What do we get wrong about deepfakes?

If 96% are non-consensual porn, why don’t we do anything about it?

We think they are not as harmful as “real” porn because the victim didn’t participate in them. What we miss it’s that we “see” the world with our minds, not with our eyes. If you want to have a taste of how that feels, you can watch the chilling 18-minute documentary My Blonde GF by The Guardian where the writer Helen Mort details her experience of being deepfaked for pornography.
Knowing that it’s fake is of little relief when you know that your family, friends, and colleagues have watched or could eventually watch them. Moreover, there is research proving that deepfake videos create false memories.
As we believe that “it’s not the real you, it’s fake”, victims receive little support from the justice system and governments in general. You can watch this 5-minute video from Youtuber and ASMR (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response) artist Gibi who has been repeatedly targeted by deepfakes and who shares the very real consequences of this practice that is perfectly legal in most countries.

Talking about governments, let’s check how countries regulate deepfakes.

Deepfakes and the law

In 2020, China made it a criminal offense to publish deepfakes or fake news without disclosure. Since January 2023

“Companies have to get consent from individuals before making a deepfake of them, and they must authenticate users’ real identities.

The service providers must establish and improve rumor refutation mechanisms.

The deepfakes created can’t be used to engage in activities prohibited by laws and administrative regulations.

Providers of deep synthesis services must add a signature or watermark to show the work is a synthetic one to avoid public confusion or misidentification.”

On Friday 8th December 2023, the European Parliament and the Council reached a political agreement on the Artificial Intelligence Act (AI Act), proposed by the Commission in April 2021. Although the full text is not available yet, the Commission published an announcement where deepfakes are categorised as specific transparency risks

“Deep fakes and other AI generated content will have to be labelled as such, and users need to be informed when biometric categorisation or emotion recognition systems are being used. In addition, providers will have to design systems in a way that synthetic audio, video, text and images content is marked in a machine-readable format, and detectable as artificially generated or manipulated.”

In the US, there are no federal regulations on deepfakes. Some states like California, New York, and Virginia have passed laws targeting deepfake pornography.

What about the UK? In September 2023, the Online Safety Bill was signed off by the Houses of Parliament which criminalises sharing deepfake porn. The offence will be punishable by up to six months in prison and it would rise to two years if intent to cause distress, alarm, or humiliation, or to obtain sexual gratification could be proved. Note that the bill doesn’t criminalise the creation of deepfakes, only sharing them.

For further details about global deepfake regulation approaches including countries such as Canada and South Korea, check this article from the Artificial Intelligence Institute.

Call to action

The remedy of our patriarchal society against physical violence towards women has been to encourage them to self-suppress their rights so that the perpetrators can roam free.

For example, we tell women that to avoid becoming a victim of violence they should stay at home at night, avoid dark places, or don’t wear miniskirts. Failure to do so and get harmed is met with remarks such as “She was looking for it”.

I hope you’re not expecting me to exhort women to disappear from Instagram, get rid of their profile photos on LinkedIn, or stop publishing videos on TikTok. All the opposite. It’s not for us to hide from deepfake predators, it’s for platforms and regulators to do their job.

My call to action to you is threefold

1.- Take space: Let’s not allow this technology to make us invisible on social media — hiding has never challenged the status quo. It’s a survival mechanism. If we hide now because we’re afraid of deepfakes, we’ll never be safe on the internet again.

2.- Amplify: Educate others about the risks and challenges of deepfakes as well as how to get support when deepfaked for pornography.

3.- Demand action: Lobby to make platforms, software development companies, and governments accountable for making us safe from non-consensual sexual deepfakes.

BACK TO YOU: What’s your take on deepfakes? Should they be fully banned? How do you believe the benefits outweigh the risks?

PS. You and AI

Are you worried about the impact of AI impact on your job, your organisation, and the future of the planet but you feel it’d take you years to ramp up your AI literacy?
Do you want to explore how to responsibly leverage AI in your organisation to boost innovation, productivity, and revenue but feel overwhelmed by the quantity and breadth of information available?
Are you concerned because your clients are prioritising AI but you keep procrastinating on learning about it because you think you’re not “smart enough”?

I’ve got you covered.

AI Readiness Checklist

Myth-Busting Women’s Careers: The Truth About Collaboration and Empathy

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A woman and a man are sitting close to each other and the woman's hand rests on the men's shoulder like providing support. — Photo by SHVETS production.

Click here to learn how you can you accelerate your tech career

This year I ran the quiz “How much is patriarchy ruling your life and career?” As I mentioned in this article, 94% of you believe that “you should be able to achieve a life-work balance.”

What was the next top patriarchal belief among the survey respondents? 67% of you answered that “Women are naturally more collaborative and empathic.”

Let me demonstrate to you that this “collaboration and empathy female gene” is a myth that hurts women’s careers and what to do instead.

Women are “more” collaborative

Human beings are gregarious species. And it’s not fortuitous. We are rather weak animals and we cannot thrive on our own. We need the protection and support of a group to survive.

This interdependence is especially important for humans before reaching adulthood. Some researchers even hypothesise that the human capability to speak was first developed among our ancestor mothers prompted by the need to communicate the complexities of caring for human offspring.

But it’s not only about language. Humans and their ancestors have hunted, fished, and farmed together for two million years.

So, if as a species we don’t have any other choice than to be collaborative, how come this characteristic is perceived as a “feminine” trait? Because it serves the patriarchy to thrive and women to survive:

The myth that “women are naturally collaborative” is an excellent cover-up to shove all the non-promotable admin work to women — office work — and feel comfortable claiming weaponised incompetence — faking incompetence at any one task (usually an unpleasant one) to get out of doing it.
Society teaches women that we’re “human doings” rather than “human beings “— our “worth” is perceived to be attached to what we do for others rather than inherent to being a person. Hence, women collaborate as a way to show how valuable they are.
Women belong to a lower-power group so they don’t have the choice to be — or appear to be — collaborative with other low-power individuals to achieve their objectives, especially if those goals challenge the status quo.

The female empathy

I’ve written about empathy before prompted by of all the hype, mysticism, and abuse around this word.

Simply put, empathy is our ability to guess how other people feel, what their emotions are. They are guesses because we cannot feel others’ feelings — emotions are constructed by us. As psychologist and neuroscientist professor Lisa Feldman Barrett says “The [facial] expressions [of emotion] that we’ve been told are the correct ones are just stereotypes and people express in many different ways.”

Dr. Feldman Barret posits that we’re taught those “emotion concepts” by our parents

You don’t have to teach children to have feelings. Babies can feel distress, they can feel pleasure and they do, they can certainly be aroused or calm. But emotion concepts — like sadness when something bad happens — are taught to children, not always explicitly.

That’s for example the reason that in our culture we have the “sadness” emotion concept but Tahitian culture doesn’t. “Instead they have a word whose closest translation would be “the kind of fatigue you feel when you have the flu.” It’s not the equivalent of sadness, that’s what they feel in situations where we would feel sad.”

So, humans “learn” about emotions and the expectations from others about how to express them since we’re babies, without gender distinctions. Then, why women are the “empathic” ones?

Let’s see what are our expectations from an “empathic” person:

Mimicking the emotional state of the other person in our face and body — if a person cries, an empathic person should “look” sad.
Labeling and reassuring the other person’s feelings — when a person complains, an empathic person may respond “I can see why you’re so frustrated”.
Providing support — when a person shares that they are sad, an empathic person may offer a hug or a comforting hand on their shoulder and ask what they can do to alleviate the sorrow.

It sounds like a lot of effort, doesn’t it? That’s the reason patriarchy has assigned it to women:

If we’re genetically programmed to be empathic, it’ll be our obligation to be attuned to others’ needs and, as a consequence, fulfil their demands.
We’ll be expected to clock countless hours towards emotional labour— checking the team’s mood and being the emotional caregivers of the workplace.
Assigning all carework to us will be a no-brainer — we’re genetically pre-programmed to “sense” others’ needs.

Moreover, this expectation of women as “empathic beings” is so strong that many women on the autism spectrum grasp that they can “pass” as neurotypical by using rehearsed catchphrases, such as “good grief”, “interesting” or “that’s amazing”. It’s called masking. In other words, making believe they are “empathic”, that they can mirror others’ emotions.

What about men?

Women expect other women to be collaborative and empathic by default. Otherwise, we label them “bad women” and wish them hell, as Madeleine Albright did in her keynote speech at the Celebrating Inspiration luncheon with the WNBA’s All-Decade Team in 2006.

“There is a special place in hell for women who don’t help other women.”

Whilst we women are very busy throwing bricks at other women, men reap the benefits of being seen as collaborative and empathic (not too much though, otherwise, they lose “toxic masculinity” points with their colleagues). What does that look like?

We overpraise men that show any kind of collaborative or empathic behaviour — no matter how small.
We absolve men for not pulling their weight and for disregarding the impact of their actions on others. After all, “boys will be boys”.

The good news: Collaboration and empathy are learned skills

We’ve forgotten that we teach children to share their toys and play together as well as to “read” other people’s emotions. Instead, we have bought into the patriarchal tropes about women’s natural talents.

But there is a remedy. If we acknowledge that collaboration and empathy are learned skills, that means that

People can teach them.
People can master them.
People can be held accountable.

Conclusion

The belief that women are naturally more collaborative and empathic is a social construct reinforced by articles, books, and social media. When we stand by it, we reinforce the patriarchal status quo.

On the flip side, we have a lot to gain by remembering that collaboration and caring for our communities are learned skills.

Your homework:

Allow yourself not to be collaborative or “empathic” when it doesn’t serve you well (for example, when you’re snowed under by “office work”).
When colleagues hide their rudeness and individualism behind gender tropes around empathy and collaboration, remind them that those skills can be taught and learned, as we do with children.

BACK TO YOU: Where do you stand on the genetic predisposition of women for collaboration and empathy?

Feminist Tech Career Accelerator

Three things are keeping you from getting the tech career you deserve

Your Brain * Your Education * Patriarchy

Thrive In Your Tech Career With Feminist Guidance

Achieve your career goals * Work smart * Earn more

Click below to learn more about the Feminist Tech Career Accelerator

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Unmasking Work-Life Balance: Breaking Free from Patriarchy One Myth at a Time

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Woman juggling balls with two girls. All of them dress in similar attires which elitics a feeling that they are related to each other. — Photo by Ron Lach.

Click here to learn how you can you accelerate your tech career

Dear reader,

Each time you’re confronted with a choice, what you do depends on how you think and feel about that decision. Let me show you what I mean with an example:

If you see a job advertised and you think “I already have 60% of the requirements”, that may make you feel energised and prompt you to apply.
On the other hand, if you think “I only have 60% of the requirements”, you may feel discouragement and, as a result, you won’t apply for the job.

Is not amazing how your brain works?

And I have more news for you. Your brain has not made that decision randomly. Instead, it has been “educated” on the “right” choices for you based on your lived experience and the interaction with your environment (other people, your workplace, society, nature…).

This has created a vault of “beliefs”

Your beliefs about yourself (I’m a genius/I’m disorganised).
Your beliefs about other people (people are only interested in money/the rich don’t care about the planet).
Your beliefs about the way the world is organised (I need to go to university to get a good job, promotions go to those that work hard).

Of course, all the patriarchal rules embedded in your socialisation contribute to your beliefs and choices. Some of them appear in more prominent ways than others and I wanted to which ones impacted you more…

So I asked you 🙂

Early this year, I ran a quiz called “How much is patriarchy ruling your life and career?” It had 20 statements that respondents had to ask either as “mostly true” or “mostly false”.

What did you tell me?

By a huge margin, you told me that you believe that “You should be able to achieve a work-life balance.”

Before you start recriminating yourself or wondering if you “got it wrong”, I want to reassure you that my aim is not to shame you for what you believe in — this is a love letter, after all. Instead, it’s to have a conversation about this belief and see how it serves you.

The patriarchal myth of work-life balance

You may now be thinking “Patricia, you have it all wrong, we all should aspire to a work-life balance” or “Patricia, this is not patriarchal at all, it’s not about men and women”.

Let’s start by examining each word in the construct “work-life balance”

First, let’s notice that we say “work-life” and not “life-work” balance. Is it a coincidence that the word “work” comes first?
What does the binary life vs work tell you? Maybe your work is not part of your life? Or perhaps that your work exists in a different universe isolated from your personal life?
And what about balance? Does that mean that you have always to strive for 50% allocation for work and 50% for personal life? Does your “unpaid” work count towards “work” or “life”? What about volunteering? And what about sleeping and eating?

My thoughts about why “life-work balance” is not serving you

You bear the mental and physical brunt of seamlessly making your life look as if it were a scripted musical.
You dismiss the huge impact your personal and professional lives have on each other, which makes you feel overwhelmed.
You shame yourself because you’re unable to achieve “the balance”.
You don’t say “no” to projects, activities, and tasks that don’t serve you well because you tell yourself that you “should” be able to make it all fit in.
You blame your lack of “time management skills” when you don’t manage to cross out all the items in your ever-growing to-do lists (yes, I wrote the word list in plural on purpose).

And my thoughts on how the “work-life balance” trope serves the patriarchy

As a “productive” female employee, society shifts the onus to you alone about handling your personal challenges (caregiving, chronic illnesses).
Your employer is right to assume that you’re committed to your career only if you accept all the projects and tasks thrown at you.
There is for sure a “work-life balance” somewhere and you should be able to find it if you are “smart enough”.
You don’t have too many things on your plate — you only must try harder at time management.
You’re rightly patronised about the choices you make — others know better what you should do to achieve “work-life balance”.
You may be “fixed” through expensive and gruelling programs that promise to teach you the “ultimate time management tools”.

What would happen if you dared to replace the thought “You should be able to achieve a work-life balance” with “Work-life balance is a patriarchal construct and I don’t need to abide by it”?

My answer

You’d congratulate yourself for being able to prioritise accordingly all the hats you wear (paid worker, unpaid worker, partner, student, parent, daughter, sister, activist…).
You’d drop the ball “kindly” for activities that don’t need to be perfect (scoop — 99% of tasks aren’t!).
You’d say “no” without remorse to projects and tasks that don’t serve you well.
You’d know that the patriarchal system plays a role in your thoughts and beliefs so you’d learn how to recognise them for what they are — “thoughts” — and not facts.
You’d step into your wisdom — embracing that you’re an expert in your own life.
Your mission would be to get clarity on what serves you well rather than crowdsourcing “advice”.
You’d be kind to yourself as if you were your best friend.

What about you? What do you think would be the worst thing that could happen if you’d allow yourself to debunk the myth that you should achieve work-life balance”? And the best thing?

I cannot wait to read your answers.

A big hug,

Patricia

Feminist Tech Career Accelerator

Three things are keeping you from getting the tech career you deserve

Your Brain * Your Education * Patriarchy

Thrive In Your Tech Career With Feminist Guidance

Achieve your career goals * Work smart * Earn more

Click below to learn more about the Feminist Tech Career Accelerator

Check the Feminist Tech Career Accelerator

Building a Better Future: A Feminist Approach to Board Governance

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A man and a woman sat in a sofa each of them holding a toddler. — Cathy Robinson, her daughters Macey (2) and Lilly (1) and partner Paddy Reid, father of Lilly. Centre for Homelessness – Portraiture. Image credit should read: Liam McBurney/PA. Source: Centre for Homelessness Impact Library.

I’m happy to write that recently I got my first board position. More precisely, I’ve been appointed trustee at the Booth Centre, a UK charity based in Manchester with the mission to bring about positive change in the lives of people who are homeless or at risk of homelessness and help them plan for and realise a better future.

This is a very important milestone for me, so I wanted to take the time to savour it whilst I share it with you

Why did I join a board and you should do it too?
How did I get the role?
Why homelessness?

Let’s jump in!

Why did I join a board and you should join one too?

A board of directors must ensure that the company’s corporate governance policies incorporate corporate strategy, risk management, accountability, transparency, and ethical business practices.

Similarly, a board of trustees has overall responsibility and accountability for everything the charity does. Trustees are ultimately responsible for ensuring that their charity complies with charity law and any other legal requirements.

In summary, boards are key to ensuring that organisations deliver on their mission and strategy and do so taking into account the law and relevant regulations.

How does that look in practice? Many of you may be aware by now of the board drama going on at OpenAI — developers of the Generative AI tools ChatGPT and DALL.E – during the last week. They have a very particular structure — they are governed by a nonprofit and have a capped-profit model that’s meant to ensure their commitment to safety.

On Friday November 17, their board of directors fired the CEO, Sam Altman, then appointed a provisional CEO, then appointed another interim CEO, and then on Tuesday they reinstated Altman. All in less than 7 days. It’s still not clear what was the exact reason or who was (or were) the main instigators of the overhaul.

But the board also changed. Before last week, it was integrated by Greg Brockman (Chairman & President), Ilya Sutskever (Chief Scientist), and Sam Altman (CEO), and non-employees Adam D’Angelo (Quora CEO and ex-Facebook), Tasha McCauley (GeoSim Systems CEO), Helen Toner (Director of strategy and foundational research grants at Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology).

After the reinstatement of Altman, only D’Angelo remains. Accompanied by two other members:

Bret Taylor, the new chairman. He has been co-CEO at Salesforce and worked at Facebook and Google.
Larry Summers, the 27th president of Harvard University from 2001 to 2006. He resigned as Harvard’s president after a no-confidence vote by Harvard faculty, which is linked — among other things — to his 2005 speech in which he reasoned that the main cause for the underrepresentation of women in STEM was due to biological differences between sexes. According to him, “socialization and continuing discrimination” are lesser contributing factors to this underrepresentation.

So, we have now the leading company developing Generative AI products with a board of 3 white men: two tech bros and a man who believes that women are genetically inferior in terms of science and engineering aptitudes compared to men.

What’s not to like?

All that, when we have evidence of the benefits of having women on boards. For example, a 2023 study of women and men directors at more than 200 publicly traded companies on the major stock exchanges in the U.S. and Europe. The results provide key insights on how the presence of women influences boards. First, it turns out that women directors come to board meetings well-prepared and concerned with accountability. Second, women are not shy about acknowledging when they don’t know something, are more willing to ask in-depth questions, and seek to get things on the table. As a result, the presence of women improves the quality of discussion. Finally, “ the presence of women seems to diminish the problem of “pluralistic ignorance” — when individuals in a group underestimate the extent to which others may share their concerns.”

And it’s not only about women’s representation. Basically, we need diverse boards that benefit from members with different identities and backgrounds to drive innovation and successfully tackle the complexity of challenges organisations endure nowadays.

Still, as we see with the case of OpenAI, we rather stick with the “boys club”.

That’s where you and I have a role to play.

How did I get the role?

It was actually only about four years ago that I began to think about broadening my impact by getting a board role. It has taken time, perseverance, and support to find this trustee position that aligns with my values:

The first time I even considered the idea of being on a board was during a presentation from Fiona Hathorn from Women on Boards at a women in tech conference prior to the pandemic. It was like a door to another world opened for me.
Then, I joined Women on Boards where I learned about board CVs, was coached on how to interview for board positions, and got me into the habit of perusing their weekly board position openings for 3 years.
In 2022, I attended a webinar where Hedwige Nuyens talked about how European Women on Boards (EWOB) had been working in Brussels to make a reality the European Union’s Directive that introduces a binding objective of at least 40% of board members of each gender by 2026. At that moment, I realised that being on a board was more than a milestone in my career progression, it was about gender equity in decision-making.
Next, I joined the EWOB’s C-Level Program. The content, the speakers, and the rest of the cohort were amazing. During 4 months I looked forward to every second Thursday to savour the energy of working with another 39 women leaders for 3 intense hours. I thoroughly enjoyed crafting the presentation about the metaverse and working on the case study of the Facebook Cambridge Analytica scandal.
Later on, I joined the EWOB partnership team where I helped to build partnerships with UK organisations such as the Institute of Directors (IoD) and spearheaded collaborations with initiatives such as Women in Risk and Control (WiRC).
During those years when I was keeping an eye on the advertised board roles, there were many people and groups that provided advice and, without maybe knowing it, kept me accountable for finding a board role in spite of the rejections along the way.
Finally, interviewing for the Booth Centre was a truly enjoyable experience. In addition to its purpose — which I’ll talk about in the next section — the interview process made me feel that my lived experience as an immigrant and my professional skills as an inclusion strategist were both valued by the organisation and would bring complementary perspectives to the organisation. As I wrote before, this truly made me feel welcome — not just “tolerated”. The upside for the organisation? That even if I hadn’t gotten the role, I’d still be thinking highly of them.

Why homelessness?

Some of you may be wondering the reason that I chose to be a trustee of a charity focused on homelessness and not one that supports women only. After all, I’ve been very vocal about my identity as a feminist.

My answer is that tackling homelessness is a very feminist issue because, among other things, is about

Intersectionality
Solidarity
Tackling systemic problems
Identifying asymmetry of power
Human rights
Epistemic justice

And homelessness is now in need of a feminist approach more than ever because

When we talk about inclusion, we often forget about homeless people. Moreover, we “classify” them as “people sleeping rough” which actually is not representative of the scale of the problem. Often, our stereotypical mental image of a homeless person is a white man in his 40s-50s to whom we attach labels such as alcohol, drugs, and mental illness. That’s not the full picture.
Whilst there are about 2,400 people in the UK sleeping rough on any given night, there are more than 83,000 households assessed as homeless or threatened with homelessness. This is called statutory homelessness.
But the problem is even bigger. There are people effectively homeless but neither visible nor in official homeless stats — e.g. severe overcrowding, concealed or sharing. It’s called hidden homelessness.
The economic crisis puts more people at risk of eviction.
It’s forecasted that artificial intelligence may have a big impact on the workforce. Those bearing the brunt of the layoffs may be less able to afford their house rent.
40% of homeless women state domestic abuse as a contributory factor to their homelessness. Layoffs and financial distress are triggers of partner violence.
We hear our politicians talk about homelessness being a lifestyle choice, criminalising immigrants, and missing that homelessness is a symptom, not an illness. A symptom of a society that doesn’t “tolerate” what sees as “failure”. That blames those that fall through the cracks of the system, differ from the stereotype of what’s considered a “valuable contributor”, or are labelled as “broken” or “losers”. In summary, a society that it’s rather a group of individuals rather than a community of human beings that are interconnected.

As this was not enough, Generative AI is making it easier to reinforce our biased mental models. When asked to ‘describe a homeless person’ a Gen AI tool answered with the following:

“A homeless person looks disheveled, with grimy clothes and unkempt hair. They move from place to place with all their possessions, often scavenging from bins. Their faces show a certain amount of sadness and loneliness with a broken spirit that tells a story of a difficult journey. There is often a sense of hopelessness about them, a feeling of being lost and out of place.”

And images of homeless people produced by Generative AI tools when prompted to draw a ‘person experiencing homelessness’ often reproduce those harmful stereotypes: white men in their 40s-50s with long beards dressed in stained outdoor hiking jackets.

In summary, no shortage of angles that can benefit from a feminist framework!

Wrapping up

I hope by now I’ve convinced you that you can be part of the solution by aiming high — at the board level.

Some ways you can do that are

Applying for board and trustee positions.
If you work for a publicly traded company, you have access to a lot of information about the board. For example, who are their members, how much they are paid, or what resolutions they have taken. What does that tell you about who oversees the strategy of your company?
Check the makeup of the boards of the organisations you admire or of companies that create products you like and compare them with their values and mission statements around diversity and inclusion — do they walk the talk? If not, what can you do as a buyer?

BACK TO YOU: Will you step up to the challenge?

Navigating Life as a Global Immigrant: A Humorous Perspective

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A woman sitting on the floor next to a pile of suitcases. — Photo by mahdi chaghari on Unsplash.

This week is Thanksgiving in the US. As a person who has lived in six countries on 3 continents and moved house about 30 times, I’m deeply grateful to the countries and “locals” that have welcomed me through the years.

Of course, not all my experiences as an immigrant have been uplifting. I’ve had my share of frustrations and disappointments. And also, some laughs.

This week, I want to share an article I wrote for Certain Age Magazine that just got published. It’s called “Laughing at Stereotypes: An Immigrant’s Survival Guide”. In it, I offer 7 hard-earned gems of advice — plus a healthy dose of humour — for aspiring immigrants.

I hope it brings a smile to your face.

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Theft of the Mind: When Women’s Ideas Become Men’s Triumphs

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Smiling woman with big mirror in nature. The mirror is in front of her body reflecting nature, so it's like she was transparent. — Photo by Kalpit Khatri.

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Generative AI — and more precisely ChatGPT and text-to-image tools like Midjourney — have prompted a flurry of strikes and pushback from visual and writing professionals. And rightly so.

The reason? Book authors, painters, and screenwriters feel that’s unfair that tech companies earn money by creating tools based on scrapping their work result of many years spent learning their craft. All that without acknowledging intellectual property or providing financial compensation.

They say that this is “the first time in history” this has happened.

I dissent. This has been happening for centuries — to women. Let me explain.

There are three reasons that typically come up to explain why there haven’t been more women artists and scientists through the centuries:

Women have been too busy with children and house chores to dedicate time — and have the space — to scientific and artistic pursuits.
In many cultures, men have been priorised to go to school and university over women.
To avoid bias against their work, some women decided to publish their work under a male pen name or to disguise themselves as men

But there is a fourth cause. When women’s outstanding work has been credited to a man. So although the work itself may have won a Nobel prize or be showcased in museums, libraries, and galleries, it has been attributed to a man instead of the rightful female author.

Hepeating: When a man takes credit for what a woman already said

Let’s review some unsung sheroes of science and art.

Science and art — a land with no women?

Let’s start with science

One of the most famous cases is that of Rosalind Frankin. Her “work was central to the understanding of the molecular structures of DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid)” but her contribution was erased by the academic community that awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1962 to Francis Crick, James Watson, and Maurice Wilkins — who used part of her research — for the discovery of the DNA double helix.
Candace Pert discovered the brain’s opiate receptor during her time as a graduate student at Johns Hopkins University. The discovery led to an award for her professor, Dr. Solomon Snyder. When she protested the fact that her contribution had been neglected, he replied, “That’s how the game is played.”
In 1856, Eunice Newton Foote published a paper where she reported what today we call the greenhouse effect. Three years later, John Tyndall reached similar conclusions and is “widely regarded as the discoverer of the greenhouse effect and the father of climate science”.

What about art?

Felix Mendelssohn passed as his some of the songs composed by her older sister, Fanny Hensel and he also prevented her from publishing her music because it “would only disturb her in her primary duties of managing her house”.
It’s unclear how many sculpture works of Camille Claudel were signed under Auguste Rodin’s name.
Margaret Keane’s paintings of women, children, and animals were sold by her husband Walter under his name “using threats of violence, emotional abuse, and intimidation to keep her silent”.

Not enough? Mother Jones has put together an insightful timeline of men getting credit for women’s accomplishments. Some gems

In the 12th century, “Trota of Salerno” authors a gynecology handbook, On the Sufferings of Women. However, until the end of the last century, sholars falsely assumed Trota was a man.
In 1818, “Mary Shelley publishes Frankenstein anonymously. Her husband pens the preface and people assume he was behind it.”
In 1859, “after 10 years working with engineers to design signal flares, Martha Coston is listed as “administratrix” on the patent. Her long-dead husband is listed as the inventor.”
In 1970, “forty-six female researchers sued the magazine Newsweek, alleging that male writers and editors took all the credit for their efforts”.

And the uncredited others

Healers and midwives — Women were the original healers, using herbs and remedies to cure alignments and help with deliveries, contraception, and abortion. As no good deed goes unpunished, a lot of them would end up burning at the stake. How much of our current medicine is based on those uncredited healers?
Brewers — From the earliest evidence of brewing (7000 BCE) until its commercialisation, women were the primary brewers on all inhabited continents. But who do you picture in your mind when you think of a “brewer”?

Our gendered standards of excellence

Above I shared some examples of women’s extraordinary work stolen by others (or conveniently forgotten).

But the problem runs deeper because we’re educated to consider men’s contributions extraordinary whilst than of women’s ordinary.

Let’s take parenthood. A woman takes her children to school — it’s her job. A man takes his children to school — he’s a dedicated father and a beacon for other parents.
A woman leads a project — she’s organised. A man leads a project — he’s a project manager.
Women are “cooks” and men are “chefs”.

And the list goes on…

What to do differently?

Let’s start acknowledging good work by women — and I’m very intentional when I say “good” and not “stellar” work.

At the same time, let’s stop glorifying each little thing a man does. Is really setting up the washing machine such a big accomplishment?

But how to overcome millennia of indoctrination?

Five years ago, I published a post showcasing a 6-min TED talk from Kristen Pressner where she explained a practical technique to double-check our gender biases. It’s called “Flip it to test it!”

It’s a very simple method: When in doubt, flip the gender and see how it lands.

In practice

Would you praise John for taking his children to school if instead was their mother, Jane?
Would you diminish the role of Rita leading a project as simply being “a good team player” if Mike had led the project instead?

In summary, let’s purposely acknowledge the good work of women around us. We cannot overdo it — we have centuries to catch up on.

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Insights from Four Women’s Conferences: The Value of Collective Female Wisdom

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Four images: (1) Announcement of Patricia Gestoso’s talk “Automated out of work: AI’s impact on the female workforce” at the Women in Tech Festival, (2) Four British female politicians in a panel at the Fawcett Conference 2023, (3) Agenda of the Empowered to Lead Conference 2023, (4) Announcement of Patricia Gestoso’s talk “Seven Counterintuitive Secrets to a Thriving Career in Tech” at the Manchester Tech Festival. — Collage and photos by Patricia Gestoso.

In the last two weeks, I’ve had the privilege to attend four different conferences focused on women and I’ve presented at two of them.

The topics discussed were as complex and rich as women’s lives: neurodiversity in the workplace, women in politics, childcare, artificial intelligence and the future of the female workforce, child labour, impossible goals and ambition, postpartum depression at work, career myths, women in tech, accessibility, quotas… and so many more.

The idea for this article came from my numerous “aha” moments during talks, panels, and conversations at those events. I wanted to share them broadly so others could benefit as well.

I hope you find those insights as inspiring, stimulating, and actionable as I did.

Fawcett Conference 2023

On October 14th, I attended the Fawcett Conference 2023 with the theme Women Win Elections!

The keynote speakers and panels were excellent. The discussions were thought-provoking and space was held for people to voice their dissent. I especially appreciated listening to women politicians discuss feminist issues.

Below are some of my highlights

The need to find a space for feminist men.
It’s time for us to go outside our comfort zone.
“If men had the menopause, Trafalgar Square Fountain would be pouring oestrogen gel.”
If we want to talk about averages, the average voter is a woman. There are slightly more women than men (51% women) and they live longer.
Men-only decision-making is not legitimate, i.e. not democratic. Women make up the majority of individuals in the UK but the minority in decision-making. Overall, diversity is an issue of legitimacy.
The prison system for women forgets their children.
Challenging that anti-blackness/racism is not seen as a topic at the top of the agenda for the next election.
We believe “tradition matters” so things have gone backwards from the pandemic for women.
In Australia, the Labour Party enforced gender quotas within the party. That led to increasing women’s representation to 50%. The Conservative Party went for mentoring women — no quotas — and that only increased women’s participation to 30%.
There is a growing toxicity in X/Twitter against women. Toxic men’s content gets promoted. We need better regulation of social media.
More women vote but decide later in the game.
We cannot afford not to be bold with childcare. The ROI is one of the highest.
We need to treat childcare as infrastructure.
There are more portraits of horses in parliament than of women.

Empowered to Lead Conference 2023

On Saturday 28th October, I attended the “Empowered to Lead” Conference 2023 organised by She leads for legacy — a community of individuals and organisations working together to reduce the barriers faced by Black female professionals aspiring for senior leadership and board level positions.

It was an amazing day! I didn’t stop all day: listening to inspiring role models, taking notes, and meeting great women.

Some of the highlights below

Sharon Amesu

3 Cs:

Cathedral thinking — Think big.
Courageous leadership — Be ambitious.
Command yourself — Have the discipline to do things even if you’re afraid.

Dr Tessy Ojo CBE

We ask people what they want to do only when they are children — that’s wrong. We need to learn and unlearn to take up the space we deserve.
Three nuggets of wisdom: Audacity/confidence, ambition, and creativity/curiosity.
Audacity— Every day we give permission to others to define us. Audacity is about being bold. Overconsultation kills your dream. It’s about going for it even if you feel fear.
Ambition — set impossible goals (Patricia’s note: I’m a huge fan of impossible goals. I started the year setting mine on the article Do you want to achieve diversity, inclusion, and equity in 2023? Embrace impossible goals)
Creativity & curiosity — takes discipline not to focus on the things that are already there. Embrace diverse thinking.
Question 1: What if you were the most audacious, the most ambitious, and the most creative?
Question 2: May you die empty? Would you have used all your internal resources?

Baroness Floella Benjamin DBE

Childhood lasts a lifetime. We need to tell children that they are worth it.
Over 250 children die from suicide a year.
When she arrived in the UK, there were signs with the text “No Irish, no dogs, no coloureds”.
After Brexit, a man pushed his trolley onto her and told her, “What are you still doing here?” She replied, “I’m here changing the world, what are you doing here?”
She was the first anchor-woman to appear pregnant on TV in the world.
“I pushed the ladder down for others.”
“The wise man forgives but doesn’t forget. If you don’t forgive you become a victim.”
‘Black History Month should be the whole year’.
3 Cs: Consideration, contentment (satisfaction), courage.
‘Every disappointment is an appointment with something better’.

Jenny Garrett OBE

Rather than talking about “underrepresentation”, let’s talk about “underestimation”.

Nadine Benjamin MBE

What do you think you sound? Does how you sound support who you want to be?
You’re a queen. Show up for yourself.

Additionally, Sue Lightup shared details about the partnership between Queen Bee Coaching (QBC) — an organisation for which I volunteer as a coach — and She Leads for Legacy (SLL).

Last year, QBC successfully worked with SLL as an ally, providing a cohort of 8 black women from the SLL network with individual coaching from QBC plus motivational leadership from SLL.

At the conference, the application process for the second cohort was launched!

Women in Tech Festival

I delivered a keynote at this event on Tuesday 31st October. The topic was the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on the future of the female workforce.

When I asked the 200+ attendees if they felt that the usage of AI would create or destroy jobs for them, I was surprised to see that the audience was overwhelmingly positive about the adoption of this technology.

Through my talk, I shared the myths we have about technology (our all-or-nothing mindset), what we know about the impact of AI on the workforce from workers whose experience is orchestrated by algorithms, and four different ways in which we can use AI to progress in our careers.

As I told the audience, the biggest threat to women’s work is not AI. It’s patriarchy feeling threatened by AI. And if you want to learn more about my views on the topic, go to my previous post Artificial intelligence’s impact on the future of the female workforce.

The talk was very well received and people approached me afterwards sharing how much the keynote had made them reflect on the impact of AI on the labour market. I also volunteered for mentoring sessions during the festival and all my on-the-fly mentees told me that the talk had provided them with a blueprint for how to make AI work for them.

I also collected gems of wisdom from other women’s interventions

Our workplaces worship the mythical “uber-productive” employee.
We must be willing to set boundaries around what we’re willing to do and what not.
It may be difficult to attract women to tech startups. One reason is that it’s riskier, so women may prefer to go to more established companies.
Workforce diversity is paramount to mitigate biases in generative AI tools.

I found the panel about quotas for women in leadership especially insightful

Targets vs quotas: “A target is an aspiration whilst a quota must be met”.
“Quotas shock the system but they work”.
Panelists shared evidence of how a more diverse leadership led to a more diverse offering and benefits for customers.
For quotas to work is crucial to look at the data. Depending on the category, it may be difficult to get those data. You need to build trust — show that’s for a good purpose.
In law firms, you can have 60% of solicitors that are women but when you look at the partners is a different story — they are mostly men.
A culture of presenteeism hurts women in the workplace.
There are more CEOs in the UK FTSE 100 named Peter than women.
Organisations lose a lot of women through perimenopause and menopause because they don’t feel supported.

There was a very interesting panel on neurodiversity in the workplace

Neurodivergent criteria have been developed using neurodivergent men as the standard so often they miss women.
The stereotype is that if you have ADHD, you should do badly in your studies. For example, a woman struggled to get an ADHD diagnosis because she had completed a PhD.
Women mask neurodivergent behaviours better than men. Masking requires a lot of effort and it’s very taxing.
We need more openness about neurodiversity in the workplace.

Manchester Tech Festival

On Wednesday 1st November, I delivered a talk in the Women in Tech & Tech for Good track at the Manchester Tech Festival.

The title of my talk was “Seven Counterintuitive Secrets to a Thriving Career in Tech” and the purpose was to share with the audience key learnings from my career in tech across 3 continents, spearheading several DEI initiatives in tech, coaching and mentoring women and people from underrepresented communities in tech, as well as writing a book about how women succeed in tech worldwide.

First, I debunked common beliefs such as that there is a simple solution to the lack of women in leadership positions in tech or that you need to be fixed to get to the top. Then, I presented 7 proven strategies to help the audience build a successful, resilient, and sustainable career in tech.

I got very positive feedback about the talk during the day and many women have reached out on social media since to share how they’ve already started applying some of the strategies.

Some takeaways from other talks:

I loved Becki Howarth’s interactive talk about allyship at work where she shared how you can be an ally in four different aspects:

Communication and decision-making — think about power dynamics, amplify others, don’t interrupt, and create a system that enables equal participation.
Calling out (everyday) sexism — use gender-neutral language, you don’t need to challenge directly, support the recipient (corridor conversations).
Stuff around the edges of work — create space for people to connect organically, don’t pressure people to share, and rotate social responsibilities so everyone pulls their weight.
Taking on new opportunities — some people need more encouragement than others, and ask — don’t assume.

The talk of Lydia Hawthorn about postpartum depression in the workplace was both heartbreaking and inspiring. She provided true gems of wisdom:

Up to 15% of women will experience postpartum depression.
Talk about the possibility of postpartum depression before it happens.
Talk to your employer about flexible options.
Consider a parent-buddy scheme at work.
Coaching and therapy can be lifesaving.

Amelia Caffrey gave a very dynamic talk about how to use ChatGPT for coding. One of the most interesting aspects she brought up for me is that there is no more excuse to write inaccessible code. For example, you can add in the prompt the requisite that the code must be accessible for people using screen readers.

Finally, one of the most touching talks was from Eleanor Harry, Founder and CEO of HACE: Data Changing Child Labour. Their mission is to eradicate child labour in company supply chains.

There are 160 million children in child labour as of 2020. HACE is launching the Child Labour Index; the only quantitative metric in the world for child labour performance at a company level. Their scoring methodology is based on cutting-edge AI technologies, combined with HACE’s subject matter expertise. The expectation is the index provides the investor community with quantitative leverage to push for stronger company performance on child labour.

Eleanor’s talk was an inspiring example of what tech and AI for good look like.

Back to you

With so many men competing in the news, social media, and bookstores for your attention, how are you making sure you give other women’s wisdom the consideration it deserves?

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Artificial intelligence’s impact on the future of female workforce

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Portrait of a simulated middle-aged white woman against a black background. The scene is refracted in different ways by a fragmented glass grid. This grid is a visual metaphor for the way that artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning technologies can be used to simulate and reflect the human experience in unexpected ways. A distorted neural network diagram is overlaid, familiarising the viewer with the formal architecture of AI systems. — Image by Alan Warburton / © BBC / Better Images of AI / Virtual Human / CC-BY 4.0.

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I was delighted to be interviewed by John Leonard at Computing – a source for end-user IT news, analysis and insight around the world – about my talk Automated out of work: AI’s impact on the female workforce at the Women in Tech Festival on Tuesday October 31st in London.

I reproduce below the interview. You’ll find at the end additional reflections framed as Q&A.

Interview

Patricia Gestoso, is an award-winning technologist and inclusion strategist with over 20 years of experience in digital transformation with a focus on client service, artificial intelligence, and inclusive and ethical design of technology and workplaces.

Patricia will be giving a talk about the impact of AI on the workplace and workers at the Women in Tech Festival in October. We do hope you’ll be able to join us.

In the meantime, we caught up with Patricia and asked her to give us a taster.

How did you become interested in the topic of AI?

As a Director of Support for a scientific and engineering software corporation, I see how AI helps our customers every day to accelerate drug discovery, clinical trials, and research on new materials.

On the flip side, as an inclusion strategist and collaborator on initiatives such as the Race and AI toolkit and Better Images of AI, I’m also aware of the different ways in which AI helps encode and automate biases.

That’s the reason why in the last three years I’ve been actively fostering discussion about the benefits and challenges that AI brings to inclusion, equity, and sustainability on social media as well as through keynotes and articles.

Your talk is titled: “Automated out of work: AI’s impact on the female workforce”. Are women likely to be disproportionately affected in the next wave of automation?

It’s important to take a step back and see where those predictions of women more likely to be negatively affected in the next wave of automation. They come from several assumptions.

First, that there are certain sectors that will be more impacted than others. Then, that the impact on those sectors will be negative on the less skilled workers, next that those workers are women, and finally, that people prefer to interact with machines than with humans.

On the flip side, we have other studies that tell us that the most impacted will be white-collar workers like software engineers – who are overwhelming men – or lawyers – where which gender is overrepresented depends on the practice area.

In case this was not contradictory enough, we’re also told that the roles that AI won’t displace will be those that are related to soft skills and studies show that women are great at those – collaboration, listening, and championing a common plan.

The reality is that when we see how’s already impacted by automation, it’s easy to argue that it’s mostly men. Workers at Amazon’s warehouses, Uber drivers, or Deliveroo riders. Their work is scheduled and constantly monitored by AI. Moreover, when we look at who’s raising the alarm about generative AI stealing their jobs right now, we see book authors, screenwriters, and actors. Again, professions that are far from failing in the “female job” category.

For me, talking about the next wave of automation disproportionately affecting women is to deflect from the reality that AI is already affecting the workforce dramatically right now. And it’s not fortuitous. It’s the old strategy of “divide and conquer”. By saying “it’ll be worse in the future and women’s jobs will be the most affected,” it aims to keep men quiet with the false premise that they should conform because their jobs are “safe”.

Are there ways that women and other underrepresented groups can harness the technology to their advantage to mitigate some of these scenarios? If so what do they need to do and where should they start?

I’ll go into more detail in my talk, but there are three obvious areas where women and underrepresented groups can harness technology to their advantage.

First, increasing their negotiation power. If we look at the industrial revolution, the disruption was massive. Loss of jobs, exhausting work schedules, child labour. What’s changed the game? Unions. This is no different now with Amazon workers and screenwriters. Social platforms and digital tools such as apps are powerful means to organise resistance.

Next, learning about AI. Ignoring new technology is not the answer because AI is not going away anytime soon. However, when I said learning, I’m not necessarily suggesting to become an AI software developer. I’m talking about following the major trends in AI, understanding how they impact your industry – what are the major risks and possible rewards – and getting involved in projects aimed at exploring the capabilities that AI can bring to your business.

Finally, discovering how AI can augment you as a professional. We see a lot in the media about the need to learn about how to work “for” or “with” AI. For me, the key is to learn how you can use AI tools to strengthen your capabilities.

Tech has a tendency to concentrate power and wealth in the hands of the already rich and powerful. Is AI likely to continue or even exacerbate this tendency?

AI is already benefiting those who have privileges and disadvantaging those who face more challenges. The Race and AI toolkit mentioned previously showcases many examples where non-White people are consistently sidelined by AI in areas such as healthcare, education, and justice.

The reason? Garbage in, garbage out. We’re feeding AI data that is generated by narrow sectors of the population and that doesn’t reflect our diversity or values as a society.

Unfortunately, attempts to limit the reach of AI tools are seen as attempts to stop progress. No different than what happened to Luddites 200 years ago. The reality is that tech is playing to our FOMO – [fear of missing out] anxiety – telling us we either let AI run wild or we’ll miss out on new drugs and cure cancer. To me, that’s akin to saying, you either let fire run wild or you won’t have fire at all. We’ve survived because we decided that we’re happy to have fire to cook and heat ourselves but that if it goes to our curtains we’ll put it out. AI shouldn’t be treated differently.

Who do you hope to reach with your keynote at the Women in Tech Festival?

I hope my talk reassures those who are frightened that AI will take their jobs that they are not powerless. I also aim to provide actionable strategies to incorporate AI into their professional careers to those that are wondering how to jump on the AI bandwagon. Finally, I hope to reach out to those who are curious about exploring alternative futures to dystopia and utopia, where rather than humans in the loop, humans are in the driving seat and machines are in the loop.

Additional reflections on women, work, and AI

What are your concerns regarding how AI will affect the future of work for women?

The main one is deskilling. To understand the concept, it is useful to remember the Luddite movement that I mentioned above.

The Luddites were British weavers and textile workers who objected to the increased use of mechanised manufacturing at the beginning of the 19th century.

Most were trained artisans who had spent years learning their craft, and they feared that unskilled machine operators were robbing them of their livelihood. As you see, their problem was not the technology in itself but the deskilling of workers.

And I could see how that may happen to women in the future. For example, those with university degrees in computing could be offered work as “prompt engineers” when they come back from maternity leave, with the resulting career and salary demotion. Or administrative professionals may get relegated to fact-checking and improving reports produced by generative AI applications, making their contribution “invisible”.

Is technology an enemy of women?

Technology has enabled women to get financially remunerated for their work. Consider the washing machine, tap water, and electricity. In places where those technologies are not available, women spend their days making up for it – typically for free.

The problem has always been that women have only been able to benefit from technology when it suited men.

For example, during the Industrial Revolution, women and children worked for less pay, which was very profitable for companies.

Women tended to receive between one-third to one-half of a man’s average salary. As the manufacturing industries began to grow, they would take advantage of these low average salaries amongst women and children. The ability to employ these women and children for little pay proved to be very beneficiary to these companies. Many industries exploited these people’s need for money, as they would turn a major profit in exchange for very cheap labor. Tasks such as printing, spinning, and other duties commonly learned at home were easy jobs to learn and were some of the most profitable.
Foundations of Western Culture course at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay

As we can see, both the gender pay gap and genderisation of work were already at the core of the Industrial Revolution.

Another example is the tech sector. In the 1930s, women were hired to solve mathematical problems that were considered at the time as repetitive work. Some of those calculations were as complex as determining how to get a human into space and back. When computers took off in the 1960s women became the programmers while men focused on the hardware which was regarded as the most challenging work.

However, as programming gained status during the 1980s, men pushed women out of those jobs. That prompted a sharp increase in the salaries of software developers, institutionalising patriarchy and the gender pay gap.

The same with AI. We like to anthropomorphise artificial intelligence to deflect our responsibility. We say “AI will automate jobs” or “AI will replace people” but the reality is that those decisions are and will be taken by humans.

In summary, It’s not technology the enemy of women’s paid work but other human beings that see it as “a nice to have” and not deemed to be retributed as that of men. Human beings are also those who also decide that caregiving for family members is “not a job”.

The biggest threat to women’s work is not AI. It’s patriarchy feeling threatened by AI.
Patricia Gestoso

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How to upend your life: Become an accidental caregiver

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Close-up of two people holding their hands. — Photo by Thirdman.

This is the final article in a trilogy based on my summer holiday. Each piece marks an important milestone in my evolution as an activist for women’s rights and also as a person. The first one was about the invisibility of women in public spaces (Monumental Inequity: The Missing Women). The second one was about the visibility of harassment in the workplace.

This one comes full circle. It’s about the invisibility of a very specific kind of work: caregiving.

The invisibility of carework

On August 25th my family and I traveled from Malta, where we had spent one week of holiday, to Vigo, in the Northwest of Spain. My plan was to spend 10 additional vacation days with my parents and brother before coming back to the UK.

We had a fluid plan for the remaining days: Going to Porto one day, visiting my grandmother on her farm, going to Santiago de Compostela for shopping, celebrating my mother and sister-in-law birthday’s, and visiting some cool restaurants.

The next day, August 26th, my mother broke her hip whilst walking to Vigo downtown.

From there, it was all a roller-coaster. All comes in flashbacks

Going in the ambulance with my mother.
Waiting in the emergency ward for the doctors to confirm what my mother had sensed, she had a broken hip.
Learning how to help my mother whilst minimising hurting her.
Sleeping in a hospital care chair.
Trying to guess went my mother was suffering because of her tendency to put up with pain.
Going to the hospital cafeteria for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

Unfortunately, I was not surprised by the amount of work involved.

My research on the effect of COVID-19 on the unpaid work of women demonstrates the massive hidden work towards caring for the elderly and other family members.
My current research for the book How Women Succeed in Tech has confirmed the huge penalty imposed by eldercare on women. It’s typically not recognised in the workplace leave entitlements — like parental leave — or by the state, so women are left to shoulder the brunt of the care to reduce the financial burden even to the extent, in some cases, of being pushed to make the hard decision to not have children.
All my life, I’ve seen the women in my family – my grandmother and aunts – assume the care of their elders and sick husbands on top of their work. Without transition and, as expected, without retribution.

What did surprise me was the mental load of my conflicting emotions. Feeling

Guilty when thinking that I was not doing enough in my role as caregiver.
Selfish the nights I shifted turns with my father and I went to sleep at my brother’s house whilst he slept at the hospital.
Resentful and angry because after so many months and years of waiting for this reunion, I felt we didn’t deserve to spend it in the hospital.
Sad when my mother would blame herself for “ruining” the holidays for everybody.
Inadequate for not knowing off the bat how to move the hospital bed or make work the pay-as-you-go TV.

What helped? Remembering my training as a life coach. Through self-coaching techniques.

I limited useless rumination. Early in the ordeal, I was able to pause and ask myself, “What is the true purpose of this holiday?”. I answered, “To be with my family”. From that moment, I decided that the whole incident had not detracted from the purpose of the trip and that from that point of view, the holiday was a success.
It also helped to reduce the tendency to give advice to others about what to think or feel. Instead, I was often able to shift into curiosity and spend more time listening and asking about their thoughts and feelings.
I put things into context. I asked myself, “If my mother were to break her hip anyway and I could be anywhere in the world, what would have been my choice?”. The answer was straightforward. It would be exactly as it happened.
I gave myself permission to name and process my emotions. Not only anger, disappointment, or sadness but also relief when my mother came back from the successful surgery and joy when I saw her walking the next day.

Coming back to the UK

I was not prepared for the exhaustion and mental fatigue that I experienced once back in Manchester. I guess that I thought that as soon as I’d be home, I’d resume my normal life.

Nothing farther from the truth. I felt depleted mentally and physically. I had plenty of deadlines but my brain and body wanted to rest.

Then, I did something unusual for me, I pushed back on agreed deadlines.

I consider myself very dependable, so it was hard to share with people what happened and ask for more time to send an article, prepare a presentation, or record a video.

The good news was that everybody was very understanding. Deadlines were extended and I delivered the work.

I felt relieved and thankful.

Still, I thought, “What if this was a common occurrence?”, “Would the people around me have been so understanding?“

My learnings

Reading a book teaching how to drive a car is not the same as driving it. Watching a video about unconscious bias doesn’t mean that we stop being affected by stereotypes.

My research into unpaid caregiving opened my eyes to this invisible sink of women’s work. Through the data and the stories of women, I was able to quantify the effort not recognised, the time invested, the unearned money, and the lost career opportunities.

But this experience made it personal and urgent. Because in a world that still grapples with recognizing childcare as an infrastructure, eldercare is invisible, even if our societies get older and older.

Recently, I was at the feminist Fawcett Conference 2023 with the theme Women Win Elections! Of course, support for mothers was at the top of the agenda from the early morning. And rightly so.

What concerned me it’s that it was presented as “the” item to tackle, even if during the event it became clear that eldercare — among other challenges — needs to be addressed for women to present themselves as political candidates.

Then, why do we only focus on childcare? Because we continue to think of women as second-class citizens who have only the right to one “ask” at a time. And that is “childcare”.

However, this is not a contest. Chances are that as a woman you may become a “sandwich carer” at some point — those who care for both sick, disabled, or older relatives and dependent children.

In 2019, the UK Office for National Statistics reported that sandwich carers (about 3% of the UK general population) were more likely to report symptoms of mental ill-health, feel less satisfied with life, and struggle financially compared with the general population. Moreover, the prevalence of mental ill-health increases with the amount of care given per week.

In summary, asking our societies to recognise the multiple identities women can embody beyond motherhood is “too much”, so we keep invisibilizing and minimising our efforts. We think that by patiently staying in line and asking for one “favour” at a time we’ll get to the finish line of gender equality.

The problem is that by continuing what we’re doing, we’ll have to wait 300 years more to reach gender equality as per the UN Women and the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs.

The cure

I don’t want to die feeling that I’m the child of a lesser god. Do you?

We women need to stop conforming ourselves with less and demand much more from our partners, our families, our workplaces, our society, and our governments.

We need to stop “being mindful” of the inflation, the NHS crisis, the strikes, the wars…

We need to stop believing that we need to be the adults in the room, the ones that are ready to make sacrifices for the common good, the half of the humanity that is expected to “shut up and do the work”.

Let’s be bold and put ourselves first. Because when women win, 8 billion people win.

Thanks for your support

When I started writing these three articles, I thought of them as three distinct episodes with the common thread of my holidays and women. I was surprised how “visibility” weaved into each of them naturally.

Allowing myself the time for this exploration has been liberating and, at the same time, constraining. Liberating because of the format but constraining because of my self-imposed commitment to both exploring the uncomfortable aspects of the topics as well as reflecting on the alternatives.

Thanks again for accompanying me along this trilogy.

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From the Bible to the Football Field: Harassment in the Workplace

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Black and white photo of young man covering his face with his hands. — Photo by Santiago Sauceda González.

This week my article comes with a little delay because I spent the weekend in London attending the Fawcett Conference 2023 with the theme Women win elections! and celebrating my birthday.

And now, back to the post.

As I mentioned last week, this is the second of a series of three articles based on my summer holiday. Each marks an important milestone in my evolution as an activist for women’s rights and also as a person. The first one was about the invisibility of women in public spaces (Monumental Inequity: The Missing Women). The focus of this one is on the visibility of harassment.

Visibility

On August 20th I was on holiday in Malta with my family. I’m not a football fan but it was impossible to visit the webpage of a Spanish or English journal and ignore that the Women’s World Cup final was scheduled for that day between the two countries.

I didn’t watch the match but I kept checking the results as I was walking through the streets of La Valetta, Malta’s capital. And I was happy when I learned they had won. (To be honest, I would only have been mildly disappointed if England had won instead, after all, I’ve been living in the UK for 19 years).

Then, I read about the president of the Royal Spanish Football Federation (RFEF) kissing one of the female Spanish football players during the medal presentation.

I couldn’t believe it. A kiss on the lips in front of everybody? The cameras broadcasting the event? It couldn’t be…

So I searched the image. And it was there.

What happened next was textbook sexual harassment in the workplace.

The abuser

Once his victim dared to express that she didn’t like the kiss, the president of the RFEF followed the typical pattern that a perpetrator of wrongdoing may display when confronted with their behaviour: Deny, Attack, and Reverse the Victim with the Offender, which is referred to by the acronym DARVO.

He denied that it was harassment.
He accused others of seeing harassment where there wasn’t.
He consistently refused it was his fault.
He claimed he was the victim of a witch hunt.

The cherry on the cake? The defense tactic that never dies: “I have daughters”.

How many times have we heard abusers claim that having daughters automatically rules out that they can be harassers, rapists, or murderers?

What about the others?

The RFEP stood by their boss, even releasing a note that analysed the positions of the body of the female football player to imply she was the one kissing him.
On 25th August, the president addressed the RFEF in an in-person event. Instead of resigning, he complained of being the object of a manhunt and confirmed he’d continue in his role. The attendees applauded, including other top bosses of the RFEF and the coach of the female football team.
Hardly any male football teams denounced the issue and only a few male players supported the female footballer.
The UEFA, the FIFA, and many other federations closed their eyes as much as they could.
Even after the RFEF president resigned, the female players had to continue to exert pressure to get the reforms that they’d been asking for years.

Harassment has a long tradition

Is sexual harassment in the workplace new? And is it really hidden?

Before #MeToo, there was the American attorney and educator Anita Hill. In 1991, she testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee about Clarence Thomas’s sexual harassment when he was appointed to the US Supreme Court. Her testimony has been credited with raising awareness of workplace sexual harassment.

But almost a century ago, actresses Shirley Temple and Judy Garland had already endured sexual harassment in the workplace at the ages of 12 and 16, respectively.

Before the 20th century, women were seen as “property” so rather than complaining about sexual harassment, their “owners” (fathers, husbands) asked compensation for “damaging goods”. Historian Ed Ayers shares an example in this interview: “There’s an 1858 case … the father sues his daughter’s employer — she’s 14 — for getting her pregnant, and thus losing her income when she has to quit and have the baby.”

In her book Ain’t I a Woman, bell hooks opens our eyes to the sexual assault Black women underwent during slavery. It was either comply or be punished.

Would you be surprised if I told you that we have records of sexual harassment in the workplace happening 3,000 years ago? The Book of Ruth in the Bible is dated around 1160 and 1100 BC. One of the pivotal moments in the Book is when Ruth becomes a gleaner in Boaz’s field. He instructs his workers not to molest her (Ruth 2: 7–9, 15–16). And whilst the Catholic Bible in English may leave doubts about what “molesting” means, the text was originally written in Hebrew and many Bible scholars have found sexual overtones in it.

Basically, Boaz knew his workers were predators and he decided to spare Ruth by explicitly telling them not to molest her. How kind of him! What about other women? What about instead firing them?

Boys will be boys…

Willful blindness

Back to the football drama.

This was not the first time the now ex-president of the RFEP was involved in a story of sex at work. In 2020, there was money expensed towards an off-site work event run in a cottage that he later referred to as a “ paella with girlfriends” and his uncle and ex-cabinet manager as an orgy.

Years ago, the Spanish female footballers had already reported that their coach forced them to keep the doors of their rooms open until midnight so he could check by himself that they were there. He also would check their bags when they were back from shopping and, if they went out, they should inform him where they were going and with whom.

Sounds familiar. When we look at #MeToo or the sexual harassment lawsuits at “tech bro” companies (Tesla, Uber, Google) they want us to believe that those things were happening behind doors, that only a few knew, that there was no evidence.

The reality is that in all cases

Evidence was there for everybody to see it all along but nobody cared.
That having visual evidence didn’t result in automatic sanctions to the perpetrators and restitution for the victim. Abusers were still given the benefit of the doubt and victims were badmouthed.

We have in Spanish the saying “No hay peor ciego que el que no quiere ver.” There is a similar saying in English, “There’s none so blind as he who will not see.” There is a legal term for this

In law, willful blindness is when a person seeks to avoid civil or criminal liability for a wrongful act by intentionally keeping themselves unaware of facts that would render them liable or implicated.
Wikipedia

Stopping willful blindness towards sexual harassment in the workplace

I was in Malta when the story started. I went to Spain with my family where the drama was played on TV 24–7. I came back to the UK from holidays and it’s still ongoing.

Although the RFEF president finally resigned, the story is far from finished for the female player who endured the harassment. There are several lawsuits underway.

Once again we have proof that whilst women continue to be seen as second-class humans, no evidence would be enough to finish sexual harassment and gender violence. We’ll continue to excuse perpetrators and find a rationale to blame victims.

Whilst I like to believe that indeed #SeAcabo (the hashtag they used to protest and means “It’s finished”), the reality is that it isn’t. It’s not a matter of “visibility” or “awareness”.

So, what’s the cure for wilful blindness to sexual harassment in the workplace? Forceful accountability.

How does that look in practice?

First and foremost, let’s look at the evidence.
Let’s stop finding comfort in justifying a 3,000-year status quo where sexual predators take advantage of the asymmetry of power in hierarchical work relationships.
Let’s stop finding exculpating rationales for the perpetrators.
Let’s stop placing the onus on the victims to shatter our biases about who’s credible and who isn’t.

It’s a lie that eradicating sexual harassment at work is about the perpetrators and the victims. It’s about the workplace’s culture we all contribute to — what we decide to see, what we choose to ignore, and who we believe.

Which workplace culture are you supporting right now? Is it one of difficult conversations and zero-tolerance? Or is it one of being forgiving and forgetful?

I know which one I’m supporting. I won’t be a bystander. Will you?

Thanks for accompanying me on this journey. The final installment of this trilogy will focus on caregiving.

Work with me: My special offer

You have 75 days to the end of 2023. You can continue to do what you’re doing if that’s serving you well.

But if you’re not reaching your goals in spite of overworking and overdelivering, there is a different way.

What if you could master your mind so you could take your life and career to a whole new level?
What if you could learn how not to depend on others’ praise and criticism so you could feel worthy of love and success from the inside?
What if you could stop the habits that don’t serve you well and have a better work-life balance?

If that resonates with you, my 3-month 1:1 coaching program “Upwards and Onwards” is for you.

For £875.00, we’ll dive into where you are now and the results you want to create; we’ll uncover the obstacles in your way and explore strategies to overcome them; and we’ll implement a plan to help you become your own version of success.

Contact me to explore how we can work together.

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Monumental Inequity: The Missing Women

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Potted bay laurel tree. In front, there is with a stone plaque in a podium with the text "In memory of the investigative journalist Daphe Caruana Galizia Born in Silema in 1964., assassinated on 16 October 2017 for seeking the truth May this simple bay laurel remind us of her wisdom, victory and triumph over darkness". — Monument to Daphne Caruana Galizia. Photo by Patricia Gestoso.

I went on holiday in August with the very clear objective of spending time with my brother — who lives in Spain — and my parents — who live in Venezuela.

From that point of view, I’m happy to report that it was mission accomplished.

I also wanted to rest. So I thought I’d put my women’s rights activism aside during the vacation and have a lighthearted summer break.

That was a total failure.

I had little rest and it couldn’t park my activism. However, I learned a lot about myself, what’s important to me, and how central is my advocacy for women to the way I perceive the world and the legacy I want to leave behind. The fact that these events happened during my holiday allowed me to slow down enough to recognise why they triggered such intense emotions in me and give me time to process them.

Here is the first installment of three articles capturing three intense experiences related to women during my vacation. The first one is about the absence of real women from those symbols of power, remembrance, and cultural identity that we call monuments.

Invisibility

The holiday started when I met with my mother, brother, and sister-in-law in Malta to spend a week on the island.

Before the pandemic, I had been there for a scuba diving vacation. It was a nice holiday but when I discovered that Malta was the only country in the EU where abortion was penalised, I told myself that I wouldn’t go back. Although in June this year the law was amended, it’s still very restrictive. For example, in cases of severe fetal malformation, incest, or rape women are still liable to imprisonment for a term from eighteen months to three years.

Of course, that was until my family thought it was a good place for the holidays and, rather than pushing back, I decided to “park” my activism for a week.

But I couldn’t.

Very quickly, walking through the capital, Valetta, and visiting multiple towns in the islands of Malta and Gozo, I realised what to expect

Churches.
Nice streets and houses in yellowish bricks.
Statues of men, especially politicians.

A monument is a type of structure that was explicitly created to commemorate a person or event, or which has become relevant to a social group as a part of their remembrance of historic times or cultural heritage, due to its artistic, historical, political, technical or architectural importance.

Examples of monuments include statues, (war) memorials, historical buildings, archaeological sites, and cultural assets.

The word “monument” comes the Latin “monumentum“, derived from the word moneo, monere (comparable to the Greek mnemosynon) which means ‘to remind’, ‘to advise’ or ‘to warn’.
Wikipedia

Of course, with two notable — and expected — exceptions

Religion — Statues of the Virgin Mary, female saints and mystics…
Embodiment of an idea — e.g. Statues of women personifying independence.

It hit me especially hard when I saw the monument to Daphne Caruana Galizia in Silema, journalist and anti-corruption activist, assassinated by a car bomb. It’s a bay laurel tree to “remind us of her wisdom, victory and triumph over darkness” (see image illustrating this article).

Again, women as the embodiment of ideas. I wanted so hard to see a statue of her.

Unfortunately, the lack of statues of real women is not only a problem in Malta

In the UK, we have very few statues of women when compared to men. The same problem when we look at other countries: “In San Francisco, only 2 percent of public art sculptures represent women. In New York City, out of 150 statues available publicly, just five are women. In Australia, as of 2017, only three percent of public statues feature non-fictional women.”

And it’s not only about statues

Only around 10% of streets and public spaces worldwide are named after women. The project only 8% brings awareness to the fact that in Barcelona (Spain) women-named streets only account for 8% of all public spaces, with most located outside the city center. On their interactive website, they also highlight that streets named after women are typically about 62 meters shorter than streets named after men.
And what about when we try to redress the imbalance? You either need sponsors to pay for it or you should expect public humiliation and threats to your physical integrity, as happened to Caroline Criado Perez when she dared to campaign to reinstate a woman on an English banknote.

As all the information was sinking in my head, I remembered watching a film as a child about the neutron bomb. Its premise was that those bombs could “kill people and spare buildings”. I can still see the black and white scenes portraying perfectly clean streets and buildings — no life at all.

I thought, if life was erased and only “infrastructure” remained and some aliens visited the planet Earth, what would they make out of our statues, streets, buildings, history books, museums, and banknotes?

Monuments also play an important role in shaping our collective memory. They serve as tangible reminders of historical events and figures, helping to preserve our cultural heritage for future generations.
Monuments of Victoria

Here comes my guess: Those aliens would conclude that female human beings never existed. That we were merely an imaginary artifact for men to get inspired, illustrate concepts, and express their ideas about beauty.

The remedy? To strive for being too much – we have so many centuries to catch up on! When in doubt, let’s remember bell hook’s words of wisdom and apply them to all domains

No black woman writer in this culture can write “too much”. Indeed, no woman writer can write “too much”…No woman has ever written enough.
bell hooks

CALL TO ACTION: Let’s inundate the world with our ideas and our work. Because even if they are

Unfinished – we can decide that they’re finished for today.
Unpopular – what’s criticised one day can be a success the next.
Ignored – if we hide them, we’ll never know.

Let’s ensure we leave proof that we existed.

PS

Dear Reader,

This is the first time I’m delivering an article in three installments. It was not planned but today feels like the right thing to do. Thank you for your kindness, patience, and support as I make this experiment. The next one is on harassment.

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Contact me to explore how we can work together

As a career and life coach, I can help you to become your own version of success and feel better.
I’m a sought-after international keynote speaker on the topics of empowering women and underrepresented groups in tech, artificial intelligence sustainability and bias, inclusive workplaces and products, and future thinking.
Through inclusive leadership programs, practices, and audits, I help leaders and organisations to leverage diversity to boost innovation, increase revenue, and attract and retain talent.

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90 days to the end of the year: Four strategies to achieve your 2023 goals

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Image of an analog alarm clock with a picture of a girl superimposed giving the impression that she's trying to climb the numbers in the clock. — Image by ThePixelman from Pixabay.

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Apologies to those of you who were expecting an article last week. Ten days ago my personal computer decided that it had given it all. I now have a new computer and I’m back to writing. Disaster adverted!

One of the things I was mulling over while I was sorting my computer was that from today, Sunday, October 1st, I have 3 months (roughly 90 days) left until the end of 2023.

I was in shock first, thinking who stole my year. Then, I shifted to mentally assess how well I was doing with achieving my goals. I did that randomly, which, of course, triggered anxiety because my mind went straight to the things that I hadn’t accomplished.

And finally, I calmed down.

I started by remembering all the things I’ve done and especially thanking my past self for writing a post before the summer compiling my achievements to date.

Next, I asked myself what were the top 3 things I wanted to accomplish before the end of the year.

Finally, the juicy question I want to share with you today: How do I get them?

I came up with four different strategies that have helped in the past. I hope they work for you too.

Four ways to get what you want this year

#1 Ask for help

You may have been expecting something like “do a Google search”, “get a certificate”, “make a list” or any other satisfying way to proactively procrastinate. Don’t-you-dare.

Get comfortable with being uncomfortable and ask for help. In my experience, this is going to be especially difficult if you’re a giver. You’ll try to talk yourself out of it. Examples

“People are going to think I’m needy”.

“I cannot bother others with my problems”.

“Nobody can do this but me”.

Then, think about all the times you’ve helped people. Out of your goodwill, simply because you’re a kind person. Then, think that others are kind too.

And now it’s when it becomes uncomfortable for me because I’m going to do what I’m preaching…

HELP: I want to grow my coaching business so I’m looking for more clients. There are two ways people can work with me

One-on-one: I have two programs. The first focuses on becoming your own version of success The second is geared towards helping people who have experienced — or are experiencing — hardships to move forward again and face life in a more healthy and sustainable way.

Last week I got a fantastic testimonial from somebody who finished one of the programs

I am happy that I’ve met Patricia in time. I am going through a career change period, which has become less frightening and more strategic.

She helped me see the patterns of how my mind is holding me back, and by the end of the coaching program, I noticed a shift in my self-confidence and resilience. In our sessions, we uncovered the root causes of my inaction, and solutions emerged naturally from her insightful questions. She also shared her wisdom and vision when I needed it.

She is passionate about coaching and empowering women and has all the necessary expertise to help. I enjoyed every session. Thank you, Patricia!
Alena Sheveleva, Research Fellow

Group coaching: I’ve developed a 6-month program for people managers to give them tools to better handle the pressures of their work and move from stressed employees to satisfied professionals. The program is designed such that the managers can use the tools with their reports as well.

If you’re interested or you know somebody who may be, please connect with me.

Ufff. I did it. I asked for help.

#2 Be like a toddler

Through my years of being a coach and coaching others, a tool that comes up often is using our imaginary future self to help us unstuck ourselves.

Some examples

Write a letter to your future self.
Write yourself a letter from the future asking for advice.
Use visioning to meet with your future self.
Imagine yourself in 20 years receiving a prize, what will be your acceptance speech?

And so on.

They can be helpful to open ourselves to possibilities but they can also offer so many choices that we get trapped in analysis-paralysis limbo.

Also, sometimes it can be difficult to get inspired by a “version” of ourselves that we may not find particularly enticing.

For example, I found that some of my clients in their 60s and 70s are not super excited to ask for advice to their 80 or 90-year-old version of themselves. For some of them, it’s triggering since they wonder if they’d even be alive by then.

To prompt myself into action my trick is actually the reverse — what a toddler would do?

Because toddlers

1.- Have a great focus.

2.- Are very persistent.

3.- Make very clear what they want. .. and they are happy to let go of it if they find something better.

4.- They are open to experimenting with everything as “play”.

5.- They are extremely self-confident.

(6.- And they ask for help — see point #1 above)

So, when I’m stuck on inaction, rather than asking my future self for advice, I appeal to my “toddler energy” to get me moving.

Let me know in the comments how you’ll apply #ToddlerEnergy this week.

#3 Get a sponsor

I’ve been a mentor for years. Also, I’ve had many mentors. And as a woman tech, I’m reminded several days a week of the importance of mentors.

Let me tell you a secret: Get a sponsor.

Whilst a mentor is somebody who talks to you about their career and gives you advice based on their experiences, a sponsor is somebody who talks about you in rooms where you aren’t present (yet).

A sponsor

Makes introductions to people who can help you achieve your goals.
Recommends you to key stakeholders for projects, initiatives, and roles.
Uses their clout to help you to get what you want.

In summary, a sponsor actually puts themselves in the line for you — they vouch for you.

Top tip: Unlike mentors, you cannot ask somebody to be a sponsor. You earn it. How do you know if somebody is your sponsor?

Share with the person what you want to achieve and make an ask, for example, an introduction to somebody who they have told you can help you. If they are willing to do it, they believe in you — they are your sponsor. If they avoid committing to it, then you may want to explore if the person is more of a mentor only.

#4 Get a coach

After reading the title, some of you may be thinking that this is a rehash of point #1. It isn’t.

I’ve been a “consumer” of coaching since 2018. And it’s been life-changing. I’ve experimented with several coaching modalities — group, 1:1, Time to Think, The Model, Playing Big — and these are some of the things I achieved through coaching

Launching my website after talking myself out of it for 2 years.
Launching my business whilst keeping my full-time position at a tech company after shattering the limiting beliefs that I couldn’t have both.
Holding more space for my team to co-create solutions after realising that my value as a manager was not tied to “knowing more” than my direct reports.
Asking for more recognition at work whilst regaining a life-work balance.
Writing posts more regularly after learning how to calm down my perfectionist impulses.
Being more conscious about the manuals I have for others and how patriarchy influences my decisions.
Gaining awareness of when I’m catastrophising about a situation and reducing overwhelm caused by uncertainty.
Benefiting from a non-judgemental accountability partner.

Recap

In summary

You have three months to the end of 2023.
Decide on the top 3 things you want to accomplish before the end of the year (they can be less than 3 but no more).
Try the strategies below

Ask for help
Be like a toddler
Get a sponsor
Get a coach

Let me know in the comments how it goes.

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Artificial Intelligence: A new weapon to colonise the Global South

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3D-printed figures who work at a computer in an anonymous environment. They are anonymized, almost de-humanized. — Max Gruber / Better Images of AI / Clickworker Abyss / CC-BY 4.0

The hype around idyllic tech workplaces that originated in Silicon Valley with tales of great pay, free food and Ping-Pong tables reaches a whole new level when we talk about artificial intelligence (AI). Tech companies that want to remain competitive court data-scientists and AI expert developers with six-figure salaries and perks that go from unlimited holidays, on-site gyms, and nap pods, to subsidising egg-freezing and IVF treatments. I am a director at a software company that develops AI applications so I have seen it firsthand.

But I also spent 12 years in Venezuela so I am aware that AI workers there have very different stories to tell than their counterparts in the global North. And this North-South disparity in working conditions is repeated across the world and amplified to the point where in the South a large portion of them are gig workers on subsistence rates.

Image annotators

Take, for instance, the self-driven car industry. It seeks to substitute people at the wheel with algorithms that mimic human pattern recognition – yet it relies on intensive human labour.

Self-driven car algorithms need millions of high-quality images labelled by annotators – workers who assess and identify all the elements on each image. And the industry wants these annotated images at the lowest possible cost. Enter: annotators in the Global South.

Annotators in Venezuela are paid an average of 90 cents an hour with some being paid as low as 11 cents/hour. The situation is similar for their counterparts in North Africa.

The injustice is not only about low pay but also in work conditions. Workers are under constant pressure because the data-labelling platforms have quota systems that remove annotators from projects if they fail to meet targets for the completion of tasks. The algorithms keep annotators bidding for new gigs day and night, because high-paying tasks may only last seconds on their screens before disappearing.

And annotators are not the only tech workers in the Global South making it possible for the Global North to reap the benefits of AI.

Social media moderators

The impact of fake news on elections and conflicts has put pressure on tech big bosses to moderate social media content better. Their customary response has been to offer reassurances that they are working on improving the AI tools that parse content on their platforms.

We frequently hear that AI algorithms can be deployed to remove the stream of depictions of violence and other disturbing content on the internet and social media. But algorithms can only do so much – platforms need human moderators to review content flagged by AI tools. So where do those people live and how much are they paid?

Kenya is the headquarter of Facebook’s content moderation operation for sub-Saharan Africa. Its workers are paid as little as $1.50 an hour for watching deeply disturbing content, back-to-back.

Kenya is the headquarters of Facebook’s content moderation operation for sub-Saharan Africa. Its workers are paid as little as $1.50 an hour for watching deeply disturbing content, back-to-back, without the benefit of any “wellness” breaks or the right to unionise. Moreover, they have a 50-second target to make a decision on whether content should be taken down or not. Consistently taking longer to make the call leads to a dismissal.

Still, moderation is not granted equally around the world. As the Mozilla Internet Health Report 2022 says: “although 90% of Facebook’s users live outside the US, only 13% of moderation hours were allocated to labelling and deleting misinformation in other countries in 2020.” And 11 out of the 12 countries leading the ranking of national Facebook audiences are part of the Global South. This is in line with prioritising user engagement over their safety.

Mining disasters

While AI is naturally associated with the virtual world, it is rooted in material objects: datacentres, servers, smartphones, and laptops. And these objects are dependent on materials that need to be taken from the earth with attendant risks to workers’ health, local communities, and the planet.

For example, cobalt is a critical component in every lithium-ion rechargeable battery used in mobile phones, laptops and electric cars. The Democratic Republic of Congo provides 60% of the world’s cobalt supply which is mined by 40,000 children, according to UNICEF estimates. They are paid $1-2 for working up to 12 hours a day and inhaling toxic cobalt dust.

Unfortunately, the Global North’s apathy towards tackling child labour in the cobalt supply chain means that electronic and car companies get away with maximising profit at the expense of risks to human rights and harm to miners related to their cobalt supply chain.

And one of the driest places on earth, the Atacama Desert in Chile, holds more than 40% of the world’s supply of lithium ore. Extracting lithium requires enormous quantities of water – some 2,500 litres for each kilo of the metal. As a result, freshwater is less accessible to the local communities, affecting farming and pastoral activities as well as harming the delicate ecosystem.

Guinea pigs

As well as taking advantage of lax protection of human rights and health to pick up cheap labour, tech companies look to the poor data privacy laws in the Global South to enable them to trial their AI products on people there.

Invasive AI applications are tested in Africa, taking advantage of the need for cash across the continent coupled with the low restrictions regarding data privacy. Examples include apps specialised in money lending – so-called Lendtechs. They use questionable methods such as collecting micro-behavioural data points to determine the credit-worthiness of the users in the region.

Lack of regulation enables lenders to exploit the borrowers’ contacts on their phones to call their family and friends to prompt loan repayment.

Examples of such data points include: the number of selfies, games installed, and videos created and stored on phones, the typing and scrolling speed, or SMS data to build a credit score using proprietary and undisclosed algorithms. Lack of regulation enables lenders to exploit the borrowers’ contacts on their phones to call their family and friends to prompt loan repayment. Reports suggest that loan apps have plunged many Kenyans into deep debt and pushed some into divorce or suicide.

The human rights project NotMy.ai, has mapped 20 AI schemes led by Latin American governments that were seen as likely to stigmatise and criminalise the most vulnerable people. Some of the applications – like predictive policing – have already been banned in some regions of the US and Europe. Numerous such initiatives are linked to Global North software companies.

Among the projects, two are especially creepy. First, the rollout of a tech application across Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, and Chile that promises to forecast the likelihood of teenage pregnancy.

Among the projects, two are especially creepy. First, the rollout of a tech application across Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, and Chile that promises to forecast the likelihood of teenage pregnancy based on data such as age, ethnicity, country of origin, disability, and whether the subject’s home had hot water in the bathroom. Second, a Minority Report-inspired model deployed in Chile to predict a person’s lifetime possibility of having a criminal career correlated with age, gender, weapons registered, and family members with a criminal record that reports 37% of false positives.

The future is already there

We in the Global North might naturally consider the Global South to have only a marginal involvement in the use and development of AI. The reality is that the exploitation of the Global South is crucial for the Global North to harness the benefits of AI and even manufacture AI hardware.

The South provides cheap labour, natural resources, and poorly-regulated access to populations on whom tech firms can test new algorithms and resell failed applications.

The North-South chasm in digital economies was summed up elegantly in a 2003 Economist piece by novelist William Gibson, who foresaw the World Wide Web in his 1984 novel Neuromancer. “The future is already here,” he declared, adding, “it’s just not evenly distributed.”

In truth, the exploitation and harm that goes with the development of AI demonstrates that it’s not just the future that is with us, out of time; but also the inhumanity of the colonial past.

NOTE: This article was published in The Mint Magazine.

PS. You and AI

Are you worried about the impact of AI impact on your job, your organisation, and the future of the planet but you feel it’d take you years to ramp up your AI literacy?
Do you want to explore how to responsibly leverage AI in your organisation to boost innovation, productivity, and revenue but feel overwhelmed by the quantity and breadth of information available?
Are you concerned because your clients are prioritising AI but you keep procrastinating on learning about it because you think you’re not “smart enough”?

I’ve got you covered.

AI Readiness Checklist

Why performative inclusion thrives? Because it’s a win-win billionaire industry

4 Replies

Torso of a woman in a blue suit covering her face with a big white square piece of cardboard that has drawn on it a happy face and a flower with the colours of the rainbow. — Collage by Patricia Gestoson from Images by Gerd Altmann on Pixabay and Sharon Pittaway on Unsplash.

I’m back after a hectic and unpredictable summer break. More about it soon.

In the meantime, I want to share with you an article that I published in the economics journal The Mint Magazine about the industrial complex behind diversity, inclusion, and equity initiatives and who really gets the benefits. In it, I uncover the economic and strategic interests behind the “fixing women” programs, unconscious bias training, and allyship overload.

The great pretenders

In 2013, the then-chief operating officer of Facebook, Sheryl Sandberg, published her book: Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead. It was a cultural phenomenon that prompted discussions about women and their professional ambitions as well as the additional barriers they had to surmount to get to the top compared to men.

The book also reassured organisations that it was not their responsibility if they didn’t have enough women in leadership. It was the women’s fault. They were not leaning in, not putting themselves out for a promotion, they were not confident enough. As a consequence, the “fixing professional women” industry boomed.

An indicator of this boom is the exponential growth in Google searches for imposter syndrome since 2015. Increasingly, workshops, programmes, and newsletters have been relentlessly targeting women in male-dominated sectors like tech and finance with the promise of giving them confidence as a means to reach leadership positions. A peek into the publishing industry proves that imposter syndrome has also colonised our bookstores in the last few years.

However, unconfident women alone couldn’t explain the whiteness of executive and board teams. So training in unconscious bias came to the rescue. It was appealing to organisations because again it focused on individuals rather than on the organisation’s processes and culture. Moreover, it exculpated leaders too, who could blame their “primitive” brains for the inequities in the workplace.

Workshops, programmes, and newsletters have been relentlessly targeting women in male-dominated sectors like tech and finance with the promise of giving them confidence.

It was a marketing success. In 2017, McKinsey estimated the annual spending in the US on unconscious bias training at $8 billion. This despite researchers reporting in 2001 that training initiatives focused on changing employees’ attitudes and behaviours that reflected more subtle forms of discrimination and exclusion rarely led to the desired long-term changes.

Ironically, as most organisations made those trainings optional, the typical attendees were employees bearing the brunt of unconscious biases – women and people from underrepresented groups – which reinforced the obvious conclusion: unconscious bias training was a lovely ticking box for organisations because it was quantifiable in terms of money spent and number of events but let key stakeholders get out of jail free.

Unfortunately, it didn’t result in the effective diversity and inclusion game-changer that we were led to believe it would deliver. This was not a surprise since it rested on the premise that learning about unconscious bias and its impact on decision making was enough to solve it, while ignoring that by design, most of our mental processes are unconscious. Even Dr Daniel Kahneman, who was awarded a Nobel Prize for his work on heuristics and biases, has been vocal about his inability to keep his unconscious bias in check.

Diversity training needed a revamp and the murder of George Floyd in May 2020 brought a revival of the word “allyship”. In 2021, Dictionary.com named it the word of the year.

This “allyship continuum” is very attractive to organisations and leaders. First, it reinforces the lack of accountability at the senior level by equally distributing the responsibility of building inclusive organisations among all employees .

In the Global North, “allyship” and “allies’ are words that bring memories of the World Wars, being on the right side, and sacrifice. In the workplace, it has become an all-encompassing term for framing the interactions between a person in a position of privilege and a targeted person or group. From simply becoming aware of oppressive actions on less privileged groups, to deploying institutional change to tackle the discrimination of protected categories, all can be considered an act of allyship.

This “allyship continuum” is very attractive to organisations and leaders. First, it reinforces the lack of accountability at the senior level by equally distributing the responsibility of building inclusive organisations among all employees . Second, it’s self-congratulatory. Under a premise that we could summarise as “every little helps”, it enables us to embody the identity of an ally with minimal effort. Finally, it reiterates the belief that diversity, inclusion, and equity (DEI) are under-represented group problems that allies can help to mitigate from the margins.

And allyship training excels at marketing. Some of its promises are building empathy, addressing biases when they arise, and even helping those suffering the burden of discrimination to stop complaining about microaggressions and instead listen without getting defensive – a big relief to human resource departments.

But overpromising is not the only problem. Our obsession with rebranding all DEI strategies as allyship also waters down powerful initiatives by drowning them in a sea of sameness. For example, recently, the Mayor of London office announced that it is investing £1 million in an allyship training package available to every secondary school in London to educate and empower young Londoners to take a stand and help prevent violence against women and girls. The package – a teacher’s toolkit titled, Ending gender-based violence and abuse in young people’s relationships – doesn’t contain the words ally, allies, or allyship. Still, the mayor’s press office felt the need to rebrand it as allyship training.

Regarding effectiveness, the key problem is that reported measures of success are typically based on people’s perceptions of themselves – or others. Research shows that men are worse allies than they think. For example, 77% of executive and c-suite males think that most men within their organisation are “active allies” or “public advocates” for gender equity but only 45% of women at that level agree. This gap in perception increases at lower management levels.

Is tackling imposter syndrome, reducing unconscious bias, or promoting allyship useless?

Would replacing allyship with a different word boost the commitment of employees and organisations to make workplaces more equitable? Suggestions abound: advocate, champion, co-conspirator, co-liberator – the list goes on. Moreover, is tackling imposter syndrome, reducing unconscious bias, or promoting allyship useless? I posit that they are mostly a distraction from tackling systemic inequalities at work and the responsibility of leaders to drive those changes.

For example, whilst we throw money into addressing underrepresentation or making privileged employees feel good, the UK gender pay gap has increased by 3.8% from 2021 – black African, Bangladeshi, and Pakistani women earn, respectively, 26%, 28%, and 31% less than men and disabled employees earn a sixth less than non-disabled workers. And organisations dodge responsibility for the fact that 50% of women who take a tech role drop it by the age of 35 or that 20% of British businesses get away with lacking policies to support LGBT staff.

How do we move away from sympathy for the hardships of under-represented groups to embedding equity in organisations? How can we escape the trap of DEI-washing?

Organisations need to shift from the comfort of snapshot statistics such as annual diversity audits, to measure the progression of women and underrepresented groups through the ranks.

For example, asking themselves how they can attract brilliant women in their 20s and keep them until they retire, and realising that’s much more than thinking about maternity leave. It involves mapping the journey of employees such as a neurodiverse, female software engineer until she becomes chief technical officer, or a black, nonbinary person joining as a junior sales manager and reaching vice president level. This will uncover blockers to accessing opportunities and career progression within the organisation and provide insights into the initiatives needed to overcome them.

Individuals are not off the hook either. It’s paramount we teach people how to transgress boundaries such as gender, ethnicity, class, age, or disability to achieve the collective gift of freedom. Building inclusive and equitable workplaces is a practice, not a certificate.

As Aboriginal elder, activist and educator, Lilla Watson, said, “If you have come here to help me you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”

QUIZ: Patriarchy and You

How much is patriarchy ruling your life and career?

We believe that we make choices based on logic and objective criteria.The reality is that the patriarchal rules embedded in our socialisation often decide for us.

This 3-minute quiz will tell you how much patriarchy impacts your life and career choices.

QUIZ: How much is patriarchy ruling your life and career?

Mid-year review 2023: Savouring my DEI wins in a world not made for me

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Toddler girl looking up while holding candy spiral in a garden party. — Photo by Douglas J S Moreira on Unsplash.

As an inclusion strategist, I always have the impression that I’m behind. The inspiring Audre Lorde – who defined herself as “black, lesbian, feminist, socialist, mother, warrior, poet”- captured my feelings very well in the following quote:

“Life is very short and what we have to do must be done in the now.”
Audre Lorde

So much to do and so little time!

I also find it difficult to reflect on and savour my accomplishments. Although DEI and women in tech are topics where many people doing an amazing job, the progress is slow or sometimes akin to a Whac-A-Mole game, the moment you think an area is improving, then something else pops up.

For example, I was very glad to see that the Black Lives Matter movement had put DEI are the forefront and that many organisations were prioritising it. But the relief has lasted only for a while. With the redundancies in the tech sector and the inflation, the roles related to DEI are the first bearing the brunt of the layoffs.

Unlike in my corporate job, my “identity” as an inclusion strategist has much more fluid KPIs. Part is paid work and part is probono. It’s also a match-up of several areas: coaching, public speaking, and writing, to mention a few.

So, what’s enough? Is savouring successes a path to conformity?

Comparison

We are told that comparison and feedback make us better. That without criticism, we’ll all be slackers and underperformers.

And that’s reinforced every year when we commit to annual goals, KPIs, and scorecards.

We’re told that we need to do more and better and that the path is to continuously measure ourselves against others — and surpass them. Only then, we can be sure we’re doing our best.

The problem that is not often discussed is how this drives dissatisfaction, frustration, and disappointment with ourselves.

“Comparison” comes often in my coaching sessions. Amazing individuals that create and deliver impactful work feel that they’re not enough when they measure themselves up against others — colleagues, family, friends, influences, and even random people on social media.

I tell them that I see comparison at three levels:

Upward social comparison — When we compare ourselves to those who we believe are better than us.
Downward social comparison — When we compare ourselves to people who we believe are worse off than us.
Comparison to ourselves — When we compare ourselves against a version of our persona.

Upward and downward comparisons typically provide either transitory self-esteem boost— e.g. I’m better than individual X — or in the long run, generate emotions like jealousy and envy — my career hasn’t progressed as fast as that of colleague Y.

But comparing to ourselves is not the panacea always. And that became clear to me last week.

QUIZ: How much is patriarchy ruling your life and career?

Savouring our wins

I joined a journaling virtual session focused on mid-year reflection. It sounded harmless but I was dreading it — a little bit like when you know the medicine you’ll take is going to be bitter.

My brain catastrophised about all the things on my “2023 to-do list” that I hadn’t accomplished yet. Still, I saw the value of joining the session because I thought it helped me focus and prioritise activities and tasks during the last part of the year.

In hindsight, I see that I went to the session thinking about comparing myself with an aspirational version of myself that I imagined on January 1st, 2023.

And that became clear during the first 10 min of the session. The facilitator asked us to focus on the past 6 months and think about what we were most proud of, what we had to celebrate. We were urged to look for all kinds of accomplishments and experiences — big and small.

Even the smallest victory is never to be taken for granted. Each victory must be applauded…
Audre Lorde

So, instead of comparing myself to that idealised version that I had set at the beginning of the year, I was asked to go back in time to January 1st, 2023 and compare myself to that version of Patricia.

And that did the trick. By comparing my current self with that of 6 months ago, I was able to see progress without judging myself. We were given less than 5 minutes but I couldn’t stop writing.

Writing

Article: 7 Best Practices to Deliver Inclusive Coaching Experiences — Life Coach Magazine (July 2023).
Artice: Am I an entrepreneur? — “Ziva Voices — HerStory in the Making” bookazine (April 2023)
Wrote a weekly Blog Post since Feb 13th, 2023 and I revamped my website patriciagestoso.com
Broadened the reach of my blog post by making them accessible via a Weekly Newsletter that I advertise as fresh thinking about inclusion, tech, professional success & systemic change through a feminist lens.
10 of my Medium articles were featured in Code Like a Girl magazine.
Posting on LinkedIn daily since April 2023.

Podcasts

I did my first podcast of the year! I was a guest on the podcast “Ophelia On Fire!”. In the episode, I talked about

Self-worth vs Confidence
Confidence vs Competence
Strategies to avoid our feeling of confidence holding us back in our careers

Talks

Panel ”Healthcare 2.0: Do all roads lead to Medical School?” at the UK Imaging and Oncology Congress UKIO 2023 (June 2023).
Keynote “How Patriarchy fosters your Perfectionism, Self-criticism and Self-doubt and what you can do about it” at the EDIA Colloquium “Women in Science, Industry and Academia” at the University of Manchester (May 2022).
Keynote “Seven Counterintuitive Secrets to a Thriving Career in Tech” at the Women in Tech Global Conference 2023.
Keynote “How feminism can support the decolonisation of AI” at the Feminist AI and Digital Policy Roundtable (April 2023).
Keynote “Delivering inclusive coaching experiences” for the Queen Bee Coaching April 2023 CPD session (April 2023).

Coaching

After a 6-month training and passing two exams, I’ve got certified as a life coach by The Life Coach School.
Following my impossible goal for 2023 of coaching 50 women and underrepresented people to get the promotion they deserve, I’m happy to report that I’ve already coached 42 of them towards getting the professional recognition they merit.

Book

I’m writing a book about “how women succeed in tech worldwide” for which we run a survey worldwide. Last June, we reached the milestone of 400 responses from women in tech living in 50+ countries.

If you’re a woman in tech, you can still share your experience by answering the 7-min survey here.

Testimonials
Patriarchy instructs women to downplay our achievements, experiences, and skills. That’s why I find testimonials from clients a way to fight against that indoctrination.

I created a page on my website to collect clients’ testimonials.
I was especially touched by four of the testimonials I received this year

Over 6 coaching sessions, Patricia’s empathetic approach enabled me to work through my difficulties and find new ways of approaching my work projects.

The dedication and commitment she brought to our sessions gave me the confidence and encouragement to identify what was holding me back and to find possible solutions. Her insights always kept me focussed on putting into action steps that would achieve results.

I gained enormously from my sessions with Patricia. Her experienced questioning guided me through a difficult period of transition from a career in the television industry to a new phase in my working life.
Bren Simson. TV director, author, local historian and guide

I participated in the Ada’s List coaching programme, a 6-month development programme for women and non-binary people in tech at Citizens Advice. We focused on leadership, diversity, equity and inclusion within technology and ways to develop your career. We shared insights and challenges, discussed different approaches and identified opportunities to learn and develop.
Sarah Gallacher, Product Manager, Citizens Advice

Patricia was able to look at my experience, and then where I was right now. It literally felt like she was weaving together different strands to then hone in exactly on career blocks and give me some ideas to move past them.

Her style was to ask questions rather than give me a simple a to-do list, I also liked the way I felt I could trust her professional experience. She knew what I was talking about from inside my chosen sector.
Ruth Westnidge, Software Engineer

Patricia joined our Feminist AI and Digital Policy Roundtable discussion in April and presented her view on “how do decolonize AI with feminism”. I am impressed with her deep insights from the various, socio-technological perspectives of AI that she backed up with professional and personal experiences. Highly recommended speaker!
Alexandra Wudel, Co-Founder & Geschäftsführerin FemAI GmbH | Political Advisor | Speaker | MBA

Back to the journaling session, the effect of writing this laundry list of accomplishments was cathartic.

As for the rest of the session? The usual. We were told to come up with our list of priorities for the year, identify the barriers, and look for enablers.

My takeaway? Whilst comparing ourselves to our future selves can help us think big, it can also lead us to burnout and permanent dissatisfaction.

Back to you

Put a 5 min alarm on your phone and give yourself permission to pause and journal about all the things you’re proud of in the last 6 months.

And then, savour them.

“You are the one that you are looking for.”
Audre Lorde

Let me know in the comments what 2023 accomplishments and experiences you celebrating.

QUIZ: Patriarchy and You

How much is patriarchy ruling your life and career?

We believe that we make choices based on logic and objective criteria.The reality is that the patriarchal rules embedded in our socialisation often decide for us.

This 3-minute quiz will tell you how much patriarchy impacts your life and career choices.

QUIZ: How much is patriarchy ruling your life and career?

Three takes on rethinking unpaid care for a better tomorrow

2 Replies

A woman with a sad expression looking at a $5 banknote on a table in front of her. — Photo by Karolina Grabowska.

When the COVID-19 pandemic started in 2020, many people told me that finally, we’d be able to cross out all the entrenched gender inequities in the workplace. Women leaving the workforce because of incompatibility with their caregiving duties, the gender pay gap, the lack of women in leadership positions…

The name of the magic bullet? Flexible and remote working.

My answer? That flexibility was not enough, as I demonstrated in the report I co-authored on the effect of COVID-19 on the unpaid work of professional women.

As I anticipated three years ago, hybrid working hasn’t delivered on its promise to bridge the chasm between caregiving and a thriving career.

Let’s run three thought experiments to put our current systems to the test. Are they serving us well?

[Economics thought experiment #1] Childcare vs Caring for the neighbour’s children

Amy and John are neighbours. They know each other’s family and each has one baby and one toddler.

Experiment A

Given the high costs of caregiving, Amy and John decided to put their careers on hold for 3 years and instead care for their own children full-time.

During those three years, everybody around Amy and John considers they are unemployed. That includes

Their family and friends.
The International Labor Organisation (ILO), which considers persons employed as those “who worked for at least one hour for pay or profit in the short reference period.”

Experiment B

During three years, from Monday to Friday

Amy goes to John’s house and cares for John’s children for £1.
Conversely, John goes to Amy’s house and cares for Amy’s children for £1.

During those three years, everybody around Amy and John considers that they ARE employed. That includes

Their family and friends.
The International Labor Organisation (ILO).

Same results if we swap childcare with eldercare.

If a person provides unpaid care to her family, we refer to it as a “staying-at-home parent”. However, if they perform the same tasks for a salary, then they become “domestic workers”.

[Economics thought experiment #2] Maternity leave vs Gap year

Two people decide to take a year off.

Person #1 takes a year of maternity leave.
Person #2 takes a gap year to travel the world.

How are they perceived before they leave?

Person #1 is not committed to their career.
Person #2 wants to expand their horizons.

And when they are back to work?

Person #1 is considered in the #MommyTrack after a year of “inactivity”.
Person #2 has acquired valuable transferable leadership skills throughout a year of “life-changing experiences”.

QUIZ: How much is patriarchy ruling your life and career?

[Economics thought experiment #3] Two-child benefit cap vs No cap

In the UK, child tax credits are capped to two children for children born after 6 April 2017. In practice

In practice, if your children are born before 6 April 2017, you get paid £545 (basic amount), and then up to £3,235 for each child.
If one or more of your children were born on or after 6 April 2017, you could get £3,235 for up to 2 children.
You’ll only get the £545 (basic amount) if at least one of your children was born before 6 April 2017.

What’s the rationale behind capping this outrageous sum of money for 2 children? Apparently, this should encourage parents of larger families to find a job or work more hours.

Counterevidence #1 — “It has affected an estimated 1.5 million children, and research has shown that the policy has impoverished families rather than increasing employment. As many as one in four children in some of England and Wales’s poorest constituencies are in families left at least £3,000 poorer by the policy. It also found that in the most ethnically diverse communities, 14% of children were hit by the cap”.

Counterevidence #2 — China was often vilified for its one-child policy, which taxed families that dared to have more than one child.

The policy was enforced at the provincial level through contraception, abortion, and fines that were imposed based on the income of the family and other factors. Population and Family Planning Commissions existed at every level of government to raise awareness and carry out registration and inspection work.

The fine was a so-called “social maintenance fee”, the punishment for families with more than one child. According to the policy, families who violated the law created a burden on society. Therefore, social maintenance fees were to be used for the operation of the government.
Wikipedia

Counterevidence #3 — “Abolishing the two-child limit would cost £1.3bn a year but lift 250,000 children out of poverty and a further 850,000 children out of deep poverty, say campaigners. Joseph Howes, chair of the End Child Poverty Coalition, said: “It is the most cost-effective way that this, or any future, government has of reducing the number of children living in poverty.””

The defense rests.

PS. We’re halfway into 2023. How do you feel about your goals?

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Welcome, not just tolerate: Redefining relationships in the workplace

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Grey wall with the text "Everyone is welcome" stamped on it. — Photo by Katie Moum on Unsplash.

I’ve been part of committees as well as advisory boards for several years on very varied topics: emerging tech, DEI, customer support, operations…

After some reflection, I recently decided that I wanted to broaden my impact and I started to apply for non-executive board positions.

It’s not been easy or quick because I’ve been very picky about the organisations I’m submitting my applications to. First and foremost, I want to be part of the board of an organisation connected with my values and the legacy I want to leave behind: Working towards building inclusive products, workplaces, and societies.

The feedback I’ve got so far on my applications it’s that my background is difficult to “put in a box”.

I’ve been working on software companies for 18+ years BUT not in the IT or software development departments.
I’ve been part of the acquisition integration team operationalising the transfer of thousands of support tickets, accounts, and contacts, as well as creating standard operation procedures for support, onboarding thousands of customers and internal employees, and running support operations BUT technically I’m not in the operations department.
I have countless proof of DEI advocacy — including spearheading diversity initiatives, writing, speaking, inclusive leadership programs, mentoring, and coaching — BUT I’m not in HR.

In summary, I’m not enough or — even trickier — I’m too original, as I was told in France when I applied for a job for which I fulfilled all the requirements but — guess what? — the fact that I had done my engineering and M.Sc. degree in Venezuela, my Computational Chemistry Ph.D. in Canada, and my post-doc in Greece meant for them that they couldn’t relate to me or my experience. Frightened by the difference I was bringing with me, they decided to go with a candidate from the same university that everybody else in the department.

But this week something different happened.

I met with the CEO of an organisation with several open board positions to learn more about them and check if my profile was of interest before submitting my application. The position description specifically asked for DEI expertise.

At the meeting, the CEO described the organisation and I was in awe at their purpose and impact. Then, it was my turn to talk about my background. I told him about my different roles as Director of Support and Customer Operations, award-winning inclusion strategist, as well as a DEI board advisor for an NGO focusing on making AI work for everybody.

We talked about the need to diversify their board members and that they wanted to operationalise DEI in their organisation. My brain began to talk me out of the position. I mentioned something along the lines of “I fully support the need to diversity your board and obviously I’m white” and “I’m an inclusion strategist but I don’t have an HR background”…

And then, the magic happened.

The CEO told me that they were recruiting for 3 positions — not one, as I thought — and that my experiences as an immigrant in different countries, my work in tech, and my DEI journey would bring a very unique perspective to the board.

Suddenly, I experienced a shift.

From feeling that I needed to fit into boxes created by others — to be tolerated- I moved to feel welcome.

Welcoming users

This is not only about hiring people. It’s about customers too.

Some months ago, I was talking with an organisation that works towards ensuring that data and AI work for all people and society. They wanted my feedback about their website in the context of my hat of inclusion strategist.

I pointed out that the site didn’t comply with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) international standard. But that was only the beginning.

For example, I told them about how there were no images showcasing people with disabilities, old people, or children on their website. I also mentioned the lack of pronouns and the signals that sends to users from the LBTQAI+ community.

Once I finished with my high-level evaluation of their website, I waited for my interlocutor’s feedback:

“You mentioned visitors of the website feeling welcome. I never thought about a website in this way”.

And his face lighted up. I hadn’t realised until that moment that I used the word “welcome”. I’m glad I did.

To welcome people, start with your own feelings

When we talk about DEI, we often talk about “managing” the feelings of the people that society puts in a low-status category: Women, LBTQAI+, disabled, old…

We should make them feel included
We should make them feel that they belong
We should make them feel…

But the reality is that we can only control our feelings. The idea of “making somebody else feel like they belong” is a nice construct but doesn’t reflect how our brain works.

We’re a “circumstance” in others’ lives. We’re their “environment”. Their thoughts about that environment are what make them feel included or excluded — that they belong or they are only tolerated.

What if instead of thinking about others’ feelings, we started by thinking about our thoughts and feelings?

In other words, when you have a new colleague, manager, direct report, neighbour, or family member, my challenge to you is to interrogate your thoughts about that person.

For example, are you thinking?

“I need to make X, Y, and Y so the person doesn’t think I’m racist”
“I must watch what I say to avoid hurting the person’s feelings”
“I should say X, Y, and Z so the person knows I’m their ally”

and as a consequence, are you feeling?

Stressed
Judged
Inadequate

Instead, I offer you to “try” thoughts like

“I’m interested in what I can learn from this person”
“This person will be an asset to the organisation”
“As a manager, I can help this person to fulfill their potential”

And what feelings do those thoughts elicit? I can share how I feel when I “try” those thoughts with a person.

Curious
Interested
Energised

In summary, we should care about our own thoughts and feelings because they drive our actions.

If you feel “judged” because you think “I must watch what I say to avoid hurting the person’s feelings”, probably you will “send vibes” to the person about being hypervigilant, sound scripted, and you’ll minimise your contact with them.

On the other hand, if you feel energised because you think that you can help this person to fulfill their potential, chances are you’ll share your knowledge with them, introduce them to your networks, and assign them stretching projects that will lead them to promotions.

The bottom line

We put a lot of effort into discussing actions to affect others’ feelings of inclusion and belonging.

Instead, if we truly want to produce meaningful DEI progress, we should start with our own thoughts and feelings. Only then, we will move from tolerating to welcoming.

QUIZ: Patriarchy and You

How much is patriarchy ruling your life and career?

We believe that we make choices based on logic and objective criteria.

The reality is that the patriarchal rules embedded in our socialisation often decide for us.

This 3-minute quiz will tell you how much patriarchy impacts your life and career choices.

TAKE ME TO THE QUIZ

Patriarchy and pain: A match made in heaven

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A rose stem with many thorns and a rose in the background. — Image by Cornell Frühauf from Pixabay.

How many times have we heard “No pain, no gain”? And variations such as “There is no free meal in the universe”? Or “Work is paid because, otherwise, you won’t do it”?

Patriarchy, many religions, and fathers of capitalism such as Adam Smith have inculcated in us that we’re here to suffer, that we’re inherently lazy, and that if we didn’t have pain, we would work.

When we believe we’re lazy without pain

I discovered how much the culture of pain had negatively impacted my life when I stumbled upon the words of the author Marian Keyes

“What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker. […] horrible things damage you. They don’t make you better, or wiser and stronger. Most of the time they hobble you a bit.”
Marian Keyes

I realised that, indeed, bad things hadn’t made me stronger. Moreover, I also became aware that none of those “lessons” had made me a better person, employee, or friend. We have created a mythology around “pain” that doesn’t serve us well as human beings. Instead, it entrenches the powers of oppression. When we believe we deserve pain:

We don’t ask for help: I coach, mentor, and sponsor women. Countless times, my suggestion of making a warm introduction to somebody that could help them — or suggesting that they reach out to somebody that could open doors for them — has been met with pushback such as “I don’t want to bother” or “I should be able to figure it out this by myself”.
We’re forced to look for “silver linings”: In Venezuela, we have a saying that conveys a similar meaning to silver linings — “When God closes a door, somewhere else opens a window”.

Fired from your job? In an abusive relationship? Lost a family member? Patriarchy doesn’t want us to dwell on it — it wants us to “suck it up” and continue producing as working bees. If you’re in pain because of tragedy around you, you’re simply not making enough effort to “find the silver lining”.

We believe that we deserve pain when we don’t conform to the stereotype. Recently, the UN published the Gender Social Norms Index 2023. 25% of respondents thought it is justified for a man to beat his wife. Society is also biased against women’s pain. We either neglect it — “It’s in your head”, we’re told — or we identify it as a mark of “sainthood” — when we worship “natural” births and shame women that opt for alternatives such as C-sections or pain relief.

The reality is that pain becomes handy to keep a tight rein on low-power groups. It indoctrinates us in the belief that being mistreated at work, gaslighted by our doctors, or deprived of control over our bodies is unchangeable — that we deserve it. We’re here to suffer, after all.

From shoulds to letting be easy

How does patriarchy enforce “Pain makes you stronger” or “No pain, no gain”? Through “shoulds”.

You should work until the work is finished.
You should be a perfect mother.
You shouldn’t let your personal life interfere with your professional career.
You should go to work even if you experience period pain.
You should prioritise motherhood.
You should…

What if we’d change a culture of systemic oppression that reinforces “shoulds” for a regenerative alternative of “letting be easy”?

We shouldn’t have “exponential growth” but make it easy to distribute the wealth we already have.
We shouldn’t have to conform to inflexible work norms but make it easy for employees to work in the way that suits them better.
We shouldn’t police women about what they can do with their bodies but make it easy for them to manage their sexual and reproductive health as they see fit.

BACK TO YOU: What “should” can you drop this week?

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5 Promotion secrets revealed: The poison of well-meaning advice

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Suprised woman. — Image by Robin Higgins from Pixabay.

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I’ve been a mentor for many years and I’ve had the privilege of receiving advice from fantastic mentors.

But I’ve had also tons of bad career advice. Advice that has derailed my professional progression, robbed me of opportunities to stretch myself, and fostered patriarchal thinking.

The problem is that because it comes from well-meaning people around us, we’re conditioned by patriarchy to think others know better than us, and we’re trained to want to be liked — to “do as we’re told” — damaging our career in the process.

Here are my top 5 pieces of bad career advice and what to do instead so you save yourself time, energy, and frustration.

[Bad career advice #1] Women don’t help other women

This is patriarchal advice at its best. Are you really saying that 4 billion human beings won’t help their own group?

Yes, there have been some women that have hindered my progression or didn’t help me when it could have made a massive difference for me….

BUT

I’ve found many other women that have supported my career progression, made warm introductions, amplified my work, and highlighted my achievements and skills in rooms where I was not present. They have been my mentors, coaches, and sponsors.

What to do instead? If you’re a woman, connect two other women in your network that would benefit from knowing each other.

[Bad career advice #2] If you do a great job, you’ll be promoted

I have bad news for you: doing an impactful job that deserves a promotion is not enough to get promoted. That’s a sad truth that I’ve confirmed over and over throughout my career and from people that I’ve mentored, coached, and sponsored. It’s also well-documented in leadership books and articles.

There are multiple reasons for that. Some of them are:

Others may not be aware of your work.
They may be aware but don’t understand what it takes to deliver those results.
They may know about your work but don’t remember it at the promotion time.
Maybe only your manager knows about your achievements.
You deliver great value on key initiatives that are perceived as “one-offs”. That is, the value doesn’t fit the “typical” checkboxes for promotion.
Your work has reset the baseline of what people expect from you: You consistently deliver fantastic work so, by doing so in each project, you’re perceived as not doing anything “extraordinary” worth of a promotion.
You are perceived as a “commodity” worker: The business believes you won’t leave.

And there are many more.

What to do instead? Two actions you can start implementing right now to visibilise your great work:

1.- Record your wins — For example, create a “win folder” in your inbox to record your achievements, including those that appear “small”. That especially includes positive feedback from customers and colleagues. This information will be invaluable at the annual assessment time.

2.- Socialize your wins — Make your manager aware of your achievements… and everybody else that can support your promotion or may raise an objection about it. That includes your peers and especially other senior leaders in the organisation.

[Bad career advice #3] If you minimize your work, you’ll be more likeable and get promoted

Since I was little, I was taught by society to minimize and diminish myself and my contributions at each opportunity.

If they’d say “You’re intelligent”, the answer was “I work hard”.

To a professor telling me “Great work, Patricia”, I’d reply, “It was easy”.

Even to somebody praising how well a dress looked on me, I’d learned to reply “Really? It was not that expensive”.

And this pattern of diminishing my contributions and work continued through my early career. I felt the “right” answer to somebody acknowledging I had done great work was something like “It’s nothing”, “Anyone could have done it…”, or “Thanks but…”.

I also learn to caveat my comments with “I’m not an expert”, even if I was, because I internalised that otherwise I won’t be liked.

What’s the problem with that? I’ll answer with another question: How are you going to build a case for your promotion if you keep minimizing your contribution during the year? You cannot spend 365 days deflecting every praise on your work and then pitch during the annual and mid-year reviews that you’ve done outstanding work.

What to do instead? When somebody compliments your work, simply reply “Thank you” or, even better, stress what was the most difficult part. E.g. “Thanks. It entailed non-negligible strategic thinking/collaboration among teams/risk-taking. I’m glad to hear the project/initiative/presentation met your high standards “.

[Bad career advice #4] Everybody knows you want to be promoted

Nope. The world doesn’t turn around you!

During my academic years, the path was very clear. I was studying Chemical Engineering to get a diploma in Engineering. The same with my Master, and Ph.D. in Computational Chemistry. I didn’t need to spell out my goals. They were clear to everybody and that made it easy for people to support me, mentor me, and coach me.

Then, during my post-doc, the goal was much more fluid. It was like being in limbo. People assumed I wanted to be a professor at university — that’s what everybody wanted in the lab but I was not sure anymore… And then I knew that I wanted to work for a commercial company. Still, because I didn’t tell anybody, none knew, and obviously they didn’t think to recommend me if a commercial opportunity came along.

I did get a position to work for a company in France after my post-doc but it was all on my own. I had to look for open positions and apply to them. No warm introductions or help to prepare the interviews. Still, my post-doc advisor was very supportive once I asked for a recommendation to finalise my hiring at that company… I wish I’d communicated to him my intentions earlier.

I learned my lesson. Since then, I’ve been transparent with my managers about my career goals and where I see the next step for me. This kind of conversation helped me to understand the gaps between my perception and theirs about my career ambitions.

What to do instead? Spell out exactly what you want. Do you want to be promoted? Do you believe you deserve it? Say it. Explicitly. Don’t simply say “I want to be promoted” but “I have now the skills, achievements, and experience to be promoted to Sr. Support Engineer”, “Operations Sr Manager” or “Principal Software Engineer”.

And if you haven’t started to discuss it with your manager, don’t leave it to the annual review. Bring it to your next 1:1 meeting!

[Bad career advice #5] If you go after a promotion, you may let other people down

At one point when I was looking for a job early in my career, I reached out to quite a lot of organisations with my CV. One of them replied that they wanted to hire me. The position was not starting until several months later but I was over the moon.

About a month later I got the previous message, I was contacted by another of the organisations to which I’d applied. They were also interested in my CV. What’s more, they were even a better opportunity than the one I had accepted.

I was torn. I didn’t want to let the first organisation down but it was such a good opportunity…

I reached out to my only mentor at the time and she told me I should be cautious. I didn’t want to be known as somebody that was untrustworthy… Long story short, I declined the second offer.

In the very long run, all went well with my first option but I regret that my decision was based on “not letting others down” and not on “this is the best choice for me”.

What to do instead? Every time your brain goes into the “I may be letting others down” rabbit hole, question if you’re letting yourself down instead. Also, I invite you to examine the long-term effect of your decision. In my story, the decision was life-changing for me — it affected my career path — whereas for my employers it would have been an inconvenience but definitely, it wouldn’t have changed the organisation.

Feminist Tech Career Accelerator

Three things are keeping you from getting the tech career you deserve

Your Brain * Your Education * Patriarchy

Thrive In Your Tech Career With Feminist Guidance

Achieve your career goals * Work smart * Earn more

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Unmasking patriarchal productive procrastination: Empower your professional path

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Woman in a library carrying a stack of books. — Photo by cottonbro studio.

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This week, I had amazing coaching conversations with my clients about their professional careers.

A recurrent theme came up: The “evermore education” career trap — using courses, certifications, and programs as barriers to their own career progression.

This is part of what I call productive procrastination.

Productive procrastination

The Cambridge Dictionary defines procrastination as

“the act of delaying something that must be done, often because it is unpleasant or boring”

We associate procrastination with either doing what we call “nothing” — resting — or embarking on pleasurable tasks — watching TV, gaming, gardening— instead of doing the work we have decided we should be doing.

However, for my clients, a recurrent blocker in their career progress has not been bingeing on Netflix instead of searching for a job. It’s been doing something that on the surface appears to be aligned with their professional goal but that it’s procrastination in disguise.

“Not All Speed Is Movement”
Toni Cade Bambara

I’m talking about the neverending cycle of “taking another course”, “reading another book”, and“mastering another tool” before applying for a new job, asking for a promotion, or launching a business.

In summary, you convince yourself that before any meaningful step towards progressing in your career, you must learn something that it’s going to take you a considerable amount of time AND that until you complete that step you cannot pursue your career goals.

Why you love productive procrastination

The reason productive procrastination is so efficient is that — unlike bingeing on Netflix — it makes us feel good. How?

It gives us permission not to risk rejection; that is, not to engage with the person that actually can help us in our career progression: manager, recruiter, or sponsor.
It allows us to delay our career progression “rationally” — instead of exploring the reasons why we’re resistant to have conversations about our career with key stakeholders, that 3-month course or 6-month program gives us the perfect alibi to “delay” those uncomfortable discussions for another 3 or 6 months.
It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy — as we learn more, we discover other areas/topics/skills in which we’re not an expert. That enables our brain to come up with yet another“learning milestone” that we “absolutely need to master” before going back to our job search.
We’re sure to please most of our friends, mentors, and loved ones. When we share with our network of supporters thoughts like “I learned today that it’s good I do course X before I launch my business” or “I’m going to pursue program Y towards my career change”, we — consciously or unconsciously — already know they are going to tell us things like “Great idea”, “I’m pleased you’re taking action”, “Sounds like the right next step”. You feel good, they feel good, and nothing changes.

Why do I say that productive procrastination is a patriarchal strategy?

Because whilst you are “happily busy” learning and perfecting, those with more privilege than you are

Sending half-cooked CVs to recruiters.
Asking for warm introductions to hiring managers.
Launching a website with some typos.
Negotiating a pay rise.
Discussing their promotion with their managers.
Running a survey among their targeted customer group to get feedback on a business idea.

Moreover, productive procrastination reinforces the feeling of “not enoughness” that patriarchal structures feed to women and people from underrepresented groups since we’re born.

How else do you explain that in spite that there are more women than men with university degrees in Oceania, the Americas, and Europe, most leadership positions in those regions are in the hands of men?

How do you detect you’re a victim of productive procrastination?

Some clues that you’ve become a productive procrastinator

Overcomplicating — You keep adding courses/workshops/certificates to your to-do list of things you have decided you absolutely need to finish before starting to take action.
Endless polishing — When you look at your CV, website, or business idea, you tell yourself that you’ll need a ton of work to create/develop/improve them and you keep refining the draft versions for weeks, months, or years.
Neverending sense of “not being enough” — Do you note a pattern of embarking on back-to-back certifications, even if you continue to promise yourself that this will be the last one?

How you get unstuck from productive procrastination

And here are some strategies to unhook you from productive procrastination:

Overcomplicating — what’s the minimum education or piece of work you need to start interacting with stakeholders in your career?
Endless polishing — When you look at your CV, what overwhelming evidence do you have that more polishing is needed before you send it?
Neverending sense of “not being enough” — Decide in advance what’s the minimum you need to “learn” and what’s the deadline. And then stick to it.

BACK TO YOU: What’s one way you’ll stop productively procrastinating to block your career progression this week?

Feminist Tech Career Accelerator

Three things are keeping you from getting the tech career you deserve

Your Brain * Your Education * Patriarchy

Thrive In Your Tech Career With Feminist Guidance

Achieve your career goals * Work smart * Earn more

Click below to learn more about the Feminist Tech Career Accelerator

Check the Feminist Tech Career Accelerator

Of the patriarchal value of time: Women’s unpaid work

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A woman with an expression of overwhelm is surrounded by balls of different colours suspended in the air. She has her hands up like trying to protect herself from the balls. — Too many balls in the air? Photo by Zak Neilson on Unsplash.

Click here to learn how you can you accelerate your tech career

I cannot recall how many times I’ve heard women saying that their problem is “time management”. They want to get coached on how they can finally can tick all the items off their to-do list and “don’t feel behind” anymore.

I’d love to tell you that I fix them, that I have a magic wand that makes them “less lazy”, “more focused”, and “better at prioritisation” — their words, not mine. But they’re not the ones that need fixing.

The reality is that when we look in detail, the problem is somewhere else.

Patriarchal brainwashing

Our brains are rotten by patriarchal conditioning:

Women have been trained to people-please — As women, we’re “human doings” not “human bodies”, so our value resides on what we do for others. How does that work in practice? We’re taught that “good girls” don’t say no. In the end, the happiness of 4 billion on this planet depends on us making their lives easier.
We’ve been indoctrinated in the idea that “women are innate multitaskers” — which we often showcase with pride as an advantage over men. Really? And all that in spite of scientific evidence that our brain is made for processing tasks one after the other and not in parallel. Often, when we think we’re “multitasking”, we’re simply task-switching: spending 1 minute on one task, 1 on another, coming back to the first one, and so on. This is extremely taxing — and takes longer than performing the tasks sequentially — as task-switching has a cost for the brain that each time has to stop, remember where it was previously, and restart.
The mental model that our body shouldn’t be a hindrance — It’s up to us to catch up. Do you have menstrual cramps? Hot flashes? Excruciating pain from endometriosis? Heavy bleeding from fibroids? Or are you breastfeeding? Keep working and ensure you make up for the lost time so nobody can say that you’re not as reliable, hardworking, and valuable as your male colleagues.

Gendered tasks

Not all tasks are created equal:

The tasks bestowed upon women because… they’re women — Household, childcare, and eldercare simply “suit” our “natural” abilities.
The “give back” tasks — If you’re a professional woman, you’ll be expected to give uncountable hours of your time towards free mentoring, coaching, and inspirational speaking to younger women. The more successful you are, the more hours. In the meantime, the men around you will focus on their careers.
Women are the joker for any unexpected task — A child gets sick? You’re the mum. Catering didn’t arrive for the company happy hour? You’re the one to go to the supermarket and save the day. Your manager doesn’t have the time to onboard the new trainee? You’ll take one for the team.
The non-promotable tasks — Office housework, glue work, and weaponised incompetence. After all, women are inborn team players.
The tasks inherent to being “seen” as a professional woman — It’s a job in itself to dress professionally — get the perfect sartorial choice that exudes confidence, “good” taste, and feminity — and look professionally — makeup, nails, and hairdressing. However, not all women have the same experience… for some, it’s even worse. For example, Black women “professional” hairdressing is especially taxing. Countless number of hours and money towards straightening their hair to mitigate the discrimination they suffer against Eurocentric stereotypes around what “professional” looks like.

Living in a world that is not made for women

Our own resignation at the fact that some tasks will take us more time because we’re women:

Toilet queues — I bet that if I add up all the time I’ve spent queueing on public toilets during my life, it’d amount to at least half a year of my existence. And that’s even worse if you have children — it goes without saying that the burden is on you to take them to the toilet/changing room with you.
The duty of moving as fast as the slowest person in the room — Welcome to the misery of public transport: underground and train stations without lifts for when you take your old mother to the doctor, buses that require folding pushchairs, and toddlers with a mind of their own.
Getting the same pension as a White man — because of the gender pay gap and unequal pay, women should work longer if they want to cumulate the same pension pot that White men. Again, not all women are created equal. Ethnicity, disability, and LGBTQUIA+ identities have a compounding negative effect on the gender pay gap.
Maternity leave — no need to expand on the well-documented harm of the #MommyTrack to women’s career prospects.
Male medicine — Women are at the mercy of a healthcare system that doesn’t want them. The 4 billion women in the world are extremely inconvenient with their hormones. The solution so far has been to ignore women’s pain altogether, perpetually underfunding research on their illnesses and how the same health conditions affect them differently than men. As a consequence, when we go to the doctor, we never know if our symptoms will be addressed or will be diminished with an “it’s probably in your head” or if the medicines that we consume will come with terrible secondary effects — and even life risks — because they haven’t tested in women.
Women’s bodies don’t belong to them— They are units of production vulnerable to the whim of those who decide when and how they should get pregnant and how and when they become mothers.

Outrageous acts and everyday rebellions

Why seizing control of our time is important?

Because whilst we’re blaming ourselves for our lack of time management skills and spiralling towards burnout, our writing, painting, sculpting, researching, volunteering, and leading go to the back burner.

That’s the true reason that most best-selling authors, CEOs, artists, and researchers are White men. They are not smarter. They simply have more time to focus and work on their areas of interest. They also have a room of their own.

What do women do then? My answer comes in the form of the title of an excellent book by Gloria Steinem “Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions”.

This week, I invite you to commit an outrageous act — or an everyday rebellion — against patriarchy. Some ideas

Intentionally dropping the ball on any of the gendered tasks mentioned above.
Taking a paid sick day because you feel unwell — even if you’re not dying.
Resting as a form of self-care.
Reading a book for pleasure whilst there is a pile of dishes in the sink or the laundry pile is looking at you.
Shutting up when your brain screams at you that you should volunteer to bring a birthday cake to the office, take the meeting’s minutes, or carpool the neighbours’ children to a party.
Ignoring the emails of that colleague that’s trying to make you do that non-promotable work for him.

BACK TO YOU: Email me — or comment below — about your plan to impose your own agenda on the patriarchy this week.

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How patriarchy teaches you to talk yourself out of what you want

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Patricia Gestoso delivering a talk in front of a screen that reads: Career vs Patriarchal version. Under career, there is a workflow that starts with goal, plan, people, implement, and ends with achieve. Under the patriarchal version, the workflow starts with play small, magnify obstables, do one test, judge ourselves, and ends with conform.

Some time ago, I gave a talk at the University of Manchester titled “How Patriarchy fosters your Perfectionism, Self-criticism, and Self-doubt and what you can do about it.” To my surprise—and maybe yours—the title was not suggested by me but by the event organisers after reading some of my articles.

During the keynote, I shared with the audience how, for three years, I talked myself out of launching my website focused on the intersection between technology and DEI.

Reasons I gave myself:

Lack of role models: At the time, I hadn’t met anybody who worked in tech and had a personal blog about diversity, inclusion, and equity. Without proof that somebody else had done it before, I denied myself the opportunity to do it.

Perfectionism: As a non-native English speaker, I catastrophised about the possibility of a typo on the website or that my grammar may not be flawless.

Validation: Patriarchy had taught me that my worth depended on others’ validation. I was concerned that my colleagues and acquaintances would see me as “less” for having my own blog.

Credibility: I have a Ph.D. in Computational Chemistry, not HR or DEI. At the time, I felt my lived experiences and work advocating and spearheading diversity and inclusion initiatives weren’t “enough” to grant me permission to write about DEI publicly.

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The Mighty Obstacles

I’d love to tell you that I “cured” myself by repeating in my head, “ Fake it until you make it” or “ Be confident.” Unfortunately, that didn’t work.

Instead, I had to neutralise three powerful enemies.

The first was my brain. All human brains are wired for survival and hate anything new. My brain knows me well, so it would always throw me “thoughts” to discourage me from pursuing this stretch goal.

The second was patriarchy, which is an even bigger adversary. Over the years, it had “inspired” my own big encyclopaedia called “ Good Girl Rules for Patricia.” It carefully detailed the few things I was allowed to think, feel, and do, as well as all the other things I couldn’t even dream about because “good girls don’t do that.”

The third was the “role model” myth. This “theory”, which has been highly successful at minimising women and people from underrepresented groups, states that we need a “role model” to be able to do something. It’s the perfect self-fulfilling prophecy.

Take women in tech.

Society says, “Women need more role models in STEM.” That leads women to think they need a role model to have a career in tech. And if they don’t find one, they abandon the idea because “you can’t be what you can’t see.”

Not only that, if you’re indeed a woman in tech who has succeeded, society imposes on you the “obligation” to act as a role model on top of your full-time job. This can go all the way from agreeing to be the company’s speaker at STEM events to sponsoring the female employee network. All that whilst the men around you prioritise their careers.

How convenient.

The Alternative

I told the audience that instead, they should cherish the opportunities when they don’t have a role model. That means they are creating original work, that they are trailblazers.

I also shared with the audience a tip and a quote

The tip is that you must learn to move while feeling fear. There is no “imposter syndrome” vaccine. Fear will always be there when you attempt greatness, when you disrupt the status quo. The trick is to acknowledge it and explore the techniques that will allow you to continue despite the discomfort.

The quote is mine

“If someone is unhappy with your career, it shouldn’t be you.”

Patricia Gestoso

BACK TO YOU: How are you talking yourself out of doing what you want?

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Do you want to get rid of those chapters that patriarchy has written for you in your “good girl” encyclopaedia? Or learn how to do what you want to do in spite of “imposter syndrome”?

I’m a technologist with 20+ years of experience in digital transformation. I’m also an award-winning inclusion strategist and certified life and career coach.

I help ambitious women in tech who are overwhelmed to break the glass ceiling and achieve success without burnout through bespoke coaching and mentoring.
I’m a sought-after international keynote speaker on strategies to empower women and underrepresented groups in tech, sustainable and ethical artificial intelligence, and inclusive workplaces and products.
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The hidden impact: How patriarchy’s emotional policing shapes our lives

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Four emoticon balls portraying sadness, happiness, anger, and worry. — Image by Gino Crescoli from Pixabay.

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When I was a child my parents and teachers would label my emotions and try to regulate them. That’s what we all do with children when we tell them

“You shouldn’t be angry because you lost your book.”

“You should be happy because got a new backpack for school.”

“You look surprised when you opened the gift”.

Emotions are learned and they are not universal, as the neuroscientist Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett explains in her book 7 ½ Lessons about the brain.

Emotions and women

The problem is that half a century later I realised that people and society are still trying to regulate my emotions and label them.

As an example, recently, during a conversation with a male acquaintance and after disagreeing with his proposed solution to a problem, he told me that I was frustrated. I replied to him that I wasn’t frustrated, I simply had another opinion. He insisted with an “Oh, yes, you are frustrated, you are” to which I replied that he didn’t have any special powers to determine my emotions better than I did. An award silence followed…

So what emotions society “allows” me? Some of the emotions that are permitted and encouraged as a woman are modesty, empathy, solidarity, and love (maternal and romantic). Not because society cares about my well-being but because that’s expected to make others feel good.

Also, society is keen on me feeling guilt and shame so I can be sold diets, cosmetic surgery, makeup, etc.

What about the emotions that society determines that are “not ok” for me to feel? Some are rage, frustration, empowerment, pride, lust, and pleasure.

There are also feelings that we have collectively labeled as “feminine” such as intuition, which is despised because somehow we give it a magical quality and correlate it with bad choices.

But is that true? Let’s check its definition in the dictionary

“Intuition: An ability to understand or know something without needing to think about it or use reason to discover it, or a feeling that shows this ability.”

I’d argue that, based on that definition, all religious beliefs are intuitions. Where is the selfie of Moses with the burning bush? Or that picture showing Eve giving the apple to Adam?

Although finally intuition is getting traction in business, note that has been repackaged as a bridge between our emotions and intellect to make it palatable. From a Forbes article

“Intuition is unique in that it bridges the emotional reaction of instinct with the intellectual response of analysis. In other words, it combines feeling with thinking. It is balanced.

More specifically, intuition is built on our past experience, which is the richest source of wisdom.“

I feel now so much better about my intuition now that’s been mansplained to me!

And I’m not the only one whose emotions are policed.

For example, Black women are stereotyped as “angry”, Asians are “cold”, and elders as “cranky”.

In summary, “having” emotions is judged to be undesirable. And if you don’t believe me, please share an example when calling somebody “emotional” was said as praise.

Emotions and men

What about men? Their emotions are also policed.

If emotions are not seen as an innate or advantageous “feature”, the patriarchal rule mandates that men should downplay and stifle their emotions, although exceptions are made for lust, pride, and overconfidence.

The result? Men leading on the scoreboard of death by suicide and mental and physical violence.

But are emotions as undesirable as patriarchy wants us to believe?

What emotions really are

Actually, being emotional is an inherent quality of being human and having a brain.

In this insightful 9-min video, Dr. Feldman Barrett debunks the myth that “when the rational part of your brain wins you’re a moral, healthy person and when the emotional side of your brain wins, then you’re either immoral — because you didn’t try hard enough — or you’re mentally ill because you couldn’t control your emotions”.

She shares that emotions are the stories that your brain tells itself about what is going on inside your body in relation to what’s happening in the world.

Moreover, she explains that emotions “are primarily based on past experiences and the brain’s predictions of future events. This means that emotions aren’t merely reactions thrust upon us, but something we actively participate in creating. Barrett further posits that we can alter our brain’s predictive patterns by diversifying our experiences such as learning new things, watching films, or engaging in activities like acting that deviate from our routine. By doing this, we can shape the architecture of our future selves.”

Personally, I find it empowering to know that I’m the architect of my experience and that emotions are an asset to master rather than the handicap that patriarchy wants us to believe.

BACK TO YOU: Now that you know emotions are not something to be ashamed of — like patriarchy wanted us to believe — what will you do differently?

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The strange case of the kidney, the bully, and how my whiteness protects me from the algorithm

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The illustration of a kidney overlaid by a continuous foreground of 0s and 1s. — Combination of images by OpenClipart-Vectors and Gordon Johnson from Pixabay.

Next Wednesday is my hospital appointment with the nephrologist — the medical specialist for kidney conditions. The last appointment was before the pandemic.

I’m dreading it.

I keep telling myself that this is what I’ve been waiting for since the appointment was canceled a year ago at the last minute, that it was me who rang the NHS to ensure it’d be rescheduled.

I want to know how well my kidneys are working.

And I don’t want to.

The truth is that I know what I want. I want to go and that the specialist tells me “Patricia, all the analyses look good. The tiny worsening we saw more than 3 years ago was an outlier. Of course, we should continue to monitor the kidney function but it looks stable. See you in a year”.

But the reality is that I won’t know the full answer on Wednesday. During the appointment, they’ll take samples but not all results will be available right away. I’ll have to wait until the next appointment — maybe in 6 months or 1 year — to know…

The backstory

Many years ago, a family member within my direct line died from kidney disease. We saw it as a random occurrence — the person had other serious health conditions.

That was until another member in my direct bloodline was diagnosed with kidney disease upon a routine ultrasound procedure more than a decade ago. This family member urged me to ask my doctors to check my kidneys.

I asked my GP, but she told me that there was no reason to look into it until I began to feel unwell. So reassuring.

Time forward to about 8 years ago when during an ultrasound procedure the technician detected cysts in my kidneys and liver. She didn’t say anything but within 24 hours I received a call from my GP asking me questions about my family history and told me he’d referred me to a nephrologist.

An MRI confirmed the cysts in my kidneys and then my check-ins started. First every 6 months and then every 12. There are a lot of unknowns about how cysts progress towards kidney failure. We do know that we don’t want the cysts to grow as the sections occupied by them are basically useless. And kidneys don’t regenerate like the liver.

So basically, it’s a “proxy” monitoring exercise. Typically, I meet with the doctor, they measure my blood pressure — very important since there is a correlation between blood pressure and cyst growth — and other markers in my urine and blood. I’ve been told that if those trends appear to go “the wrong direction” then I’ll have another MRI, medication, and we’ll take it from there.

Going to this wing of the hospital it’s like nothing I’ve experienced before in the healthcare system in the UK. They have the kindest staff. I’ve been in other sections of the hospital and the staff it’s nice but in nephrology, they are so patient and caring.

And you can understand why.

People arrive in wheelchairs and with oxygen masks covering their mouths. Some can barely walk. And in case we forget why are we there, we have posters exhorting visitors to donate kidneys.

What’s not to like?

The bully

I’m very protective of my direct reports’ time. Through my years working in customer service, I’ve realised that one of the reasons why most people in my team work in support is because they like to help people. All people.

That means not only paying customers but also colleagues. The new salesperson that doesn’t understand the differences between our licensing options. The pre-sales that needs help preparing the proof of concept. The services specialist that cannot install our software on their machine. The R&D person that wants to check a fix for a bug. The product manager that wants feedback on a new capability. And the list goes on… And curiously, all of them “just need 5 minutes”.

When you have people working for you that are so dedicated, my job is not about pushing them to work but rather helping them prioritise the tasks and play the bad cop as needed.

And it appears to be working. Although some appear to not appreciate it.

On Friday, I received an email request for my team’s time. The person asked me for one person in my team to help with an internal activity and told me to read an attached long email trail for details. Which I dutifully did.

Within the email body, this same person had written

“Then I’ll ask Patricia, which will be like asking her to donate a kidney.”

The sentence felt like a blow to my solar plexus and it travelled to my brain like a river of gasoline in flames. And stayed there for a long while.

I was upset because it was highly unprofessional. But I won’t lie, I’m pretty sure that it wouldn’t have had the same impact if the person referenced another part of my body — my lungs, my bone marrow, my cornea.

I prefaced my reply to the email trail — which already had included a third colleague — the following

Thanks for sharing this email trail. I especially appreciate the reference

Then I’ll ask Patricia, which will be like asking her to donate a kidney.

My family carries a genetic mutation that may cause kidney disease and members of our family have died without the benefit of a donated kidney. As indeed I carry such a mutation, I cannot donate my kidneys.

I waited all afternoon for an apology that never came.

The other person copied in the email trail didn’t mention it either and continued the email exchange without any reference to the bully’s remarks about kidney donations or my reply to it.

How the whiteness of my kidneys protects me from AI

When my brain goes into “Why me?” or “Would have been better not to know?” I tell myself that there are two pieces of good news

First, so far, my kidney function appears to be “normal” within some variations. Moreover, the other direct family member that has the same condition is in good health upon controlling their blood pressure with daily medication. So far, my blood pressure has always been perfect.

The other good news? I’m not Black.

A couple of years ago, I learned about the race-correction applied to algorithms deciding on kidney transplants in the US.

What’s the race-correction? In simple terms, it’s the calculating of a result that takes into account race. It is commonly used in medical algorithms in several specialties, including cardiology, nephrology, urology, obstetrics, endocrinology, oncology, and respiratory medicine.

In practical terms, that means that people identified — by themselves or their doctors — as “Black” receive different medical treatments, typically underestimating their pain or their need for medical attention. And whilst there is no scientific base for such a correction, it has negatively impacted African Americans waiting for a kidney donor.

In this 14-minute TED MED talk, social justice advocate and law scholar Dorothy Roberts explains how race-based medicine is bad medicine. Even today, many doctors still use race as a medical shortcut; they make important medical decisions based on a patient’s skin colour instead of medical observation and measurement.

Going back to kidneys, because of the race-correction, Black patients that have the same kidney function have been ranked with lower priority in the transplant list.

And it’s not only as receivers of a kidney, but as donors. As per Wikipedia

“The Kidney Donor Risk Index (KDRI), the United States’ official kidney allocation index, was developed in 2014. Race is among the factors used to predict the success of a kidney graft, with Black donors’ kidneys often thought to perform worse than kidneys from other donors. Being Black results in a demarcation as a less preferable donor by the KDRI. This creates a snowball effect, with fewer kidneys from Black donors in the system. In turn, Black people in need of kidney donations are affected. Black people already face longer wait times than people of other races in need of kidney transplants. Black people are more likely to receive a kidney transplant from a Black donor, according to recent studies. This lack of resources can exacerbate the already lengthy wait times.”

There have been recent studies looking into the impact of this race-correction on kidney transplantation and recalculating the KDRI with and without the race-correction. They reassure us that removing the correction doesn’t have a “substantial overall impact on the transplantation system” because the number of Black donors that moved into the category of higher risk of organ nonuse was countered by the number of non-Black donors moving to that category as well as the KDPI represents the percentiles relative to all other donors.

This is how I see this statistical result: We’re using data to talk ourselves out of the inequities we perpetuate.

First, if you’re Black person in need of a kidney transplant or you want to donate yours, how this “overall impact” assessment is expected to reassure you as individual human being?

Second, the race-correction not only lacks biological meaning but “perpetuates race as a biological variable, rather than a social construct, contributing to inequities and healthcare disparities”

And what about the UK?

First, in the UK, people of Black ethnicity with chronic kidney disease are at higher risk of kidney failure.

On 25th August 2021, the National Institute of Health and Care Excellence (NICE) released a chronic kidney disease (CKD) guideline update that removed the recommendation to adjust for Black ethnicity when estimating how well a patient’s kidneys are working; a change that will prevent overestimation of kidney function in people from Black ethnic groups and enable early treatment for chronic kidney disease (CKD).

Let’s pause on the date. August 2021. That is, less than 2 years ago.

And whilst we may find relief in this change. The game is not over.

It’s not over for all those patients whose kidney condition worsened unnecessarily because they were treated as if their kidneys were working better than they were actually performing.

It’s not over for the families that have lost relatives to kidney disease because they didn’t receive the transplant that they deserved.

And finally, it’ll never be over for Black people because the data we have is biased against Black patients and donors. That data will live forever in the form of databases, algorithms, and predictive tools.

TL;DR

This post has been in the making for about 2 years since I discovered the race-correction. I think I struggled to write it because I didn’t want it to be another article about bias and AI that we forget.

They say that our brains remember stories better than other kinds of information.

I hope that by disclosing my chronic kidney disease condition you’ll remember the inequities in healthcare and how pervasive they are. Not only about kidneys, the race-correction is used in other healthcare areas. For example, in the Vaginal Birth After Cesarean (VBAC) calculator, “the developers found that Black and Hispanic women were less likely to have a successful VBAC than White women, so they included correctors that reduce the projected likelihood of success for women classified as Black or Hispanic”.

As this excellent open access article in The Lancet clearly showcases, we urgently need to advocate for anti-racist medicine. Now that you know,don’t allow yourself to unlearn it.

As for the bully, through writing this article over the weekend and talking to my coach I have reached a decision on what to do next.

I won’t remain a bystander.

PS. You want more for your life…

The good news is that your brain is the greatest tool at your disposal. If you can master your mind, you can take your life and career to a whole new level.

Are you ready to bet on yourself and unleash your full potential? Book a free strategy call with me where we’ll discuss where you are, where you want to go, and if coaching it’s the right next step for you. No strings attached.

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The Emotional Labour of Being an Immigrant

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Image by Clker-Free-Vector-Images from Pixabay.

I’m an expert on being an immigrant. I’ve moved house around 30 times over three continents and half a century.

I started my life as an immigrant when I was less than a year old. My first birthday was in Madrid, where my parents had moved from Galicia, the Spanish region where I was born. And then, we lived in different districts in Barcelona, then back to Galicia, then to Venezuela, where I lived in La Victoria, Maracay, and Caracas. Then, to Quebec (Canada), Patras (Greece), Lyon (France), and finally the UK, first in Cambridge and now in Manchester.

Some time ago, a dear fellow coach invited me to her podcast, which is focused on immigrant women. She asked me to share three topics I’d like to discuss in the episode.

The first topic that came to my mind is the emotional toll of being an immigrant.

What do I mean by “emotional toll”?

Let me share my checklist of what others expect from me as an immigrant:

I’m a scapegoat for the failures of the country I live in: from a lack of well-paid jobs to crumbling healthcare.
I’m perceived as an indistinguishable member of the “mass” of about 300 million people in the world that we call immigrants. For example, I forgot how many times I was told I was Mexican in Canada, even if I repeatedly said I came from Venezuela. I’ve also been told that being Spanish and Italian is the same (scoop! We aren’t!).
Most people believe that women and non-binary people should have the same rights as men, people of colour the same rights as white people, and disabled people the same rights as able people… but very few people think that, as an immigrant, I should have the same rights as nationals.
I should not have control over my rights and obligations – that’s why I’m expressly excluded from national elections.
I should endeavour every day to demonstrate that I’m worthy of living in a country. How? By consistently providing evidence that I’m more useful than the locals since I’m liable for “stealing their jobs”.
I must live with the uncertainty that a government can make me transition from being a legal immigrant to an illegal alien on a whim. I’ve already had that t-shirt.
I should be willing to justify why I’m in a country as many times as required by locals who ask me, from the plumber repairing a toilet in my house to a curious work colleague.
I must carefully decide what I’m allowed to share my opinion on, otherwise, I risk being at the receiving end of the “if you don’t like it, go home” threat.
I’m expected to frequently convey how thankful I am to be allowed to live in a country, as if I were a visitor rather than the active contributor I am.
I’m also expected to respectfully go “home”—wherever that is—once I’m no longer ” productive.”
I should answer the same curious questions about me and my origins – my accent, my country of origin, where my family lives– over and over, and look unflappable.
I should embrace being patronised because of my country of origin. Often, when people know that I was brought up in Venezuela, they ask me if we have cars or computers. Imagine their surprise when I tell them that in the 80s I already had a car and a computer!
I should conform to and confirm the stereotypes. Spanish? Ah, sunny weather, paella, bullfighting, and flamenco. I come from Galicia, where it always rains, the typical dish is octopus, we don’t do bullfighting, and our music has Celtic origins – we even have bagpipes.
I must remain calm when my “foreign” expertise and academic background are minimised. I still remember when working in France, a coworker who had a technical degree, which takes 2 years to complete, telling me that he felt that his studies were comparable to my foreign academic background at that moment—chemical engineering bachelor (5 years), M.Sc. (2 years), Ph.d. Computational chemistry (5 years), postdoctoral fellowship (18 months).
I’m always under suspicion of stealing, hiding, or taking advantage of something. As such, I should expect to abide by all regulations and checks that locals don’t undergo.
I should graciously accommodate locals’ preferences about me. For example, they may decide to pronounce my name differently, substitute it with their nickname of choice, or choose to transcribe it in their alphabet.
I must look relaxed and cooperative, no matter how vexing the situation is, even when that involves microaggressions and macroaggressions. I’ll never forget how people in the university I studied at in Venezuela used to tell me as a compliment: “Patricia, you’re very intelligent for a Galician”—all that because of the jokes they make in Venezuela about Galician people being stupid.
I need to understand that getting a passport from the country I live in doesn’t make me a “true” national. First, my citizenship can be stripped from me at any time. Second, locals won’t allow me to feel one of them.

The cherry on the cake? Coming to terms with the fact that I’ll be treated as an immigrant in my own country of birth. I’ve already been refused medical attention twice in a hospital in Spain because, somehow, I don’t qualify.

What’s more, as part of the Spanish immigrant group that votes in the elections remotely, I’ve been blamed by my compatriots who live in the country for swinging the elections without having a clue about what’s going on there. I’ve also been told that I don’t have the right to express my opinion about Spanish politics because “I don’t live there”.

Overall, I’m the perfect 𝚍̶𝚒̶𝚜̶𝚝̶𝚛̶𝚊̶𝚌̶𝚝̶𝚒̶𝚘̶𝚗̶ pawn.

PS. For a lighter – and funnier – take on immigration, read my article Laughing at Stereotypes: An Immigrant’s Survival Guide published on Certain Age Magazine.

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Motherhood and the patriarchy: How society profits from judging women without children

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No children allowed traffic signal. — Image by OpenClipart-Vectors from Pixabay.

I don’t have children. That has always appeared to be a problem for many people around me. They have

Tried to justify it: For example, indirectly trying to get a reason out of me or make one up by throwing at me versions of “Not everybody can have children”, “There are so many IVF treatments that fail”, “Adoption is not for everyone”.
Judged me: I still remember the father of a colleague at work that after a brief intro directly asked me if I had children. When I said no, he announced that I was the “kind of woman” that prioritised her career.
Kept track of my fertility timeline: As I was getting older, countless times I received reminders from those around me that “I was running out of time” to have children.
Reminded me that it’s my duty: For years, I was told/suggested/demanded that I should provide continuity to our bloodline.
Called me selfish: I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve been told that women that don’t have children “only think about themselves”.
Diminished my pain: As I wrote in the article Levels of pain, often doctors have disregarded my pain because they judged that either it was not comparable to birth pain or I should endure it because it was somehow related to not having children.
Assumed that I don’t have other responsibilities: Others have thrown at me pearls of wisdom such as “it should be great to be so carefree” or “you must have plenty of free time”.

But that’s not only people, it’s also how I was socialised:

The Bible — I was raised Catholic — is a constant reminder that pious women’s obligation is to breed more souls.
Typically, wicked female characters in children’s stories — like witches and stepmothers- don’t have children.
We are indoctrinated in the belief that motherhood is selfless and birthing is the experience that makes you “a real woman”.
When we assume women should have children, we imply there is something wrong with women without children and we should fix them through advice and coercion.
We believe that women need a reason to not have children. We play with terms such as childless and childfree that are centred on the word “child” to categorise those women.
Abortion bans are easy to justify.
We believe that “no children” means no caring duties. For society, family caregivers don’t exist and therefore often they are not supported financially or otherwise by governments.
We sugarcoat motherhood, so we don’t create the space to discuss issues like post-partum depression, miscarriage, lack of childcare support, or the professional penalty to have children.

What if instead, we thought that women that don’t have children

Have reflected on the fact that we’re already 8 billion on the planet and that not having children is a good remedy for overpopulation.
Have exerted their rights over their bodies.
Know what they want.
Don’t need your or anybody’s permission, blessing, or pity.
Have caregiving and financial duties that — although may not involve children – involve parents, siblings, and other family members that have physical or mental disabilities, cannot live on their own, or don’t have the financial means to support themselves.
They may still like children, just they don’t want to have their own.

Bottom line

My challenge to you is that the next time you learn a woman doesn’t have children instead of feeling pity, disdain, or empathy, you shift to respect.

Let’s change the patriarchal chip about women’s “usefulness” and challenge the status quo

The work begins in our brains.

Who would you be if:

Sexism wasn’t wearing you down with guilt and shame?
Misogyny wouldn’t prompt you to justify your own self-care to yourself?
Patriarchy wasn’t sabotaging your ambitions?

Book a free consultation to have a peek at how your patriarchy is sabotaging your brain against yourself.

How to integrate quitting your job into your career success strategy

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Text that reads both as "Don't quit it" and "Do it". — Photo by Leeloo Thefirst.

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Work is currently designed for an idealised version of a White young single man with no care responsibilities.

And it goes beyond the scheduling constraints of a “full-time job” – 40 hours/week, 9 to 5 straight hours, and the Monday to Friday working week. From what we consider “looking professional” all the way to the expectations of having to be always on just in case the business needs us or even setting the office temperature, which was developed back in the 1960s through an analysis of the resting weight of a 154lb (69kg) 40-year-old man.

It’s not a surprise that women and people from underrepresented groups feel they don’t “fit in”.

And it goes beyond dress codes and schedules. We’re expected to put up with microaggressions, weaponised incompetence, office work, and harassment, to mention a few.

However, rather than questioning the current state of affairs, patriarchy has trained us to think that we’re the problem and it’s upon us to either fix it – for example, through championing DEI initiatives – or simply toughen up.

In addition to the mental load to either fit in or fix the system, the problem with that kind of indoctrination is that assumes that quitting a job is not a valid option. It’s seen as a failure rather than a choice. And that hurts our career and diminishes our leverage.

How do I know? Because I’ve done so.

My quitting story

After finishing my master in chemical engineering in Venezuela, I decided to pursue a Ph.D. abroad. At the time, I wanted to become a professor at the university and I felt that was the best next step.

The problem? I didn’t have the money to pay for 5 years of living abroad and expensive tuition fees. One of my master’s advisors came up with a solution: There was a professor in Canada that was looking for a Ph.D. student and he could pay me a minimum wage – enough to live.

Our email interactions hinted some worrying signals about him not being an easy person to work for but I was so keen on the opportunity – I kept telling myself that was “the only” chance available to me – that I decided to take it and go to Canada.

I should have listened to my gut feeling. He was a bully. I was the only woman in the lab but we all suffered harassment and discrimination at different levels. One of the people even died from suicide.

How was he able to pull it off? We were all on a student visa. Pushing back, denouncing him, or leaving the lab meant to have to go home empty-handed. In one word, fail.

I kept telling myself that if I was able to cope, it’d be worth it. I got really good at diminishing in my mind all the things that were wrong with my boss’s behaviour and minimising myself such as not bringing out the worst of his character.

Moreover, most people around me that knew about his behaviour empathised with me but also reminded me that quitting would mean “losing” the time I’d already spent on my Ph.D.

To cut a long story short, after 1 year and 4 months, I quit. When I announced it to him, he told me that he’d publish my work without my name, which he did it. He tried to make me change my mind with threats and nice words.

It didn’t work. I left and I moved to another lab where I thrived. The difference was that now I had a great advisor that supported me rather than put me down. I wrote 5 papers and completed my Ph.D. in 4.5 years.

What about the others in my first lab? They stayed. And they all told me that they regretted it.

From my side, I didn’t regret going to another lab and start again my Ph.D. That previous experience was not a waste of time. It helped me to know that I have non-negotiables at work like respect, mental wellbeing, and appreciation.

I learned from that experience that it was paramount that I integrated quitting into my career strategy.

But how to do it?

Coaching tool: decisions ahead of time

One of the reasons that makes it so hard to quit is that we only consider it when we have the feeling that we’ve run out of “other” options. That means we’re not in a very generative state. We feel exhausted, defeated, or angry, to mention a few typical emotions.

What’s more, we feel disappointed with ourselves for allowing the situation to reach such a low point. Typically the reason it’s that we’ve experienced the boiling frog syndrome.

The premise is that if a frog is put suddenly into boiling water, it will jump out, but if the frog is put in tepid water which is then brought to a boil slowly, it will not perceive the danger and will be cooked to death. The story is often used as a metaphor for the inability or unwillingness of people to react to or be aware of sinister threats that arise gradually rather than suddenly.
Wikipedia

How to avoid finishing like the frog? Or wait until you’re burnt out to jump out of the boiling water?

I recommend a coaching technique called “decision ahead of time”. In brief, plan how you’ll think, feel, and act in advance of certain triggers appearing.

How does that work in practice?

List your non-negotiables at work. That can be about the culture, the perks, your promotion aspirations, your schedule, your participation in projects, your salary expectations, and so on.

Then, decide in advance what changes in those areas will give you hints that you may want to leave, how leaving would look like, and how that would integrate into your career strategy.

In those terms, quitting doesn’t look like a failure but as part of a plan. It’s framed as a healthy way to avoid burnout and practice setting boundaries.

If not quitting, what are you doing about your career?

The boiling frog syndrome is so seductive that can make us forget our career by focusing on our current job.

How do we know if we’re trapped in our own version of the boiling frog syndrome?

Ask yourself the following questions:

Do you know where you’re and what you want out of your career?
Have you delegated to your manager, CEO, or organisation your professional ambitions?
Are you hoping to finally get promoted but you don’t have a clear commitment from your manager about what you need to get it or when it’ll happen?
Do you keep talking yourself out of your promotion aspirations, telling yourself that it could be worse?

Feminist Tech Career Accelerator

Three things are keeping you from getting the tech career you deserve

Your Brain * Your Education * Patriarchy

Thrive In Your Tech Career With Feminist Guidance

Achieve your career goals * Work smart * Earn more

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Are You Falling for Weaponised Incompetence at Work? Here’s How to Stop

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Senior Caucasian man holding a blank empty banner covering his mouth with a hand, looking shocked and afraid because of a mistake. — Photo by krakenimages on Unsplash.

I’ve written in the past about how women – especially non-White women – are expected to do the office housework: Those administrative tasks that are important for the business to keep moving but that are undervalued and not likely to result in a promotion.

And last week I learned that office housework has an ally: Weaponised incompetence.

Definition:

“Weaponised incompetence or “strategic incompetence” as it’s sometimes called ― is the act of faking incompetence at any one task (though usually an unpleasant one) to get out of doing it.”

Examples:

Your partner claims they are “not good” at household chores so you do them.
Your family says that they are rubbish at planning, so you get stuck with organising family gatherings.
Your roommate consistently does a poor job at cleaning the toilet so you step in and do it yourself.

But it’s also alive and well in the workplace.

Discover seven communication habits blocking your career in tech and how to neutralise them.

Download HERE

How do you identify weaponised incompetence at the workplace?

By the task

They are typically mundane tasks or activities perceived as low-value – taking the minutes, planning office events, handling conflict among colleagues, or soothing unhappy customers.

By what they tell you

You’re praised by how well you do the task, e.g. “You’re naturally good at taking notes during the meetings”.
They make you responsible for their faked incompetence and delegate the task to you, e.g. ” Remember last time how bad it was when I did it? You’re so much better than me at this”.
They say they don’t know how to do it, e.g. “It’s so difficult to update the Excel spreadsheet with the new leads”.

By what they do

They do the task poorly.
They constantl y “forget” to do the task.

Some strategies to deal with weaponised incompetence

Recognise you’ve been manipulated.
Communicate the patterns you’ve noticed.
Set boundaries AND STICK TO THEM.
Leave them on their own to figure things out
Coach them through doing the task themselves.
Take the opportunity to start a discussion about how valuable is the task, who should be doing it, and how it should be rewarded.

Are you a “perpetrator” of weaponised incompetence?

It’s also important that women – and people belonging to other protected categories – check if we are using weaponised incompetence against other people. For example, as I mentioned above, non-White women are expected to do more office housework than White women.

We, White women, need to step up and help break the cycle rather than reinforce it.

The first step is awareness.

Look at the low-value tasks you convince yourself “you’re not to be good at” or that you don’t want to learn.
Reflect on the reasons why you don’t want to learn to do them or why you think you’re not good at them.

Next, think about to whom you deflect that task.

Is it always the same person?
Is there a reason why the task shouldn’t be rotated among other people?

If it’s always the same person and the task is not core to the person’s role, step up and break the cycle of weaponised incompetence.

Final reflections

During an insightful discussion, Rose Cartolari challenged the use of weaponised incompetence as an expression that may further the divide between the giver and the receiver of the action. Instead, she offered the less violent and loaded term learned helplessness for reflection.

The American Psychological Association defines learned helplessness as “a phenomenon in which repeated exposure to uncontrollable stressors results in individuals failing to use any control options that may later become available. Essentially, individuals are said to learn that they lack behavioral control over environmental events, which, in turn, undermines the motivation to make changes or attempt to alter situations”.

I wonder if a term like strategic helplessness could be used instead of weaponised incompetence. I love to get your feedback on the comments on this expression.

BACK TO YOU: What do you do when co-workers use weaponised incompetence to get you to do low-value/unpromotable tasks?

Feminist Tech Career Accelerator

Three things are keeping you from getting the tech career you deserve

Your Brain * Your Education * Patriarchy

Thrive In Your Tech Career With Feminist Guidance

Achieve your career goals * Work smart * Earn more

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“Am I Making Sense?” – Language and Power Dynamics in Meetings

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A photo of a woman surrounded by overlayed question marks looking doubtful. — Image by Sophie Janotta from Pixabay.

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As I non-native English speaker, I was puzzled by women finishing their sentences with “Am I making sense?”. I finally understood the reason.

Although I’d been fluent in English for many years before, it was not until I moved to the UK that I lived in a place where English was the native language by default. (Yes, I’d lived in Canada for 5 years but it was in Quebec City, where most people have French as their mother tongue).

Back to my life in the UK, I remember being intrigued by how women – and only women – would finish their interventions in meetings with “Am I making sense?”.

Why? Because, it didn’t make sense to me that very confident women – at least they looked that way to me – would ask that question after sharing their opinion in a concise and assertive manner.

And I began to find explanations for it.

1.- For women confident in their ideas – Confident women are a hard pill to swallow in leadership. We expect women to be “collaborative” – e.g. take the notes, be the admin for the team, do the glue work – not be assertive or confident.

How do women tackle the bias against confident women?

“Playing” dumb. By downplaying what they are saying, they’re hoping to not look threatening and get others’ buy-in (or mansplaining).

2.- For women concerned that their ideas may be too much – These women have picked up that their organisations and peers like to congratulate themselves on doing exactly the same things over and over and they won’t support rocking the status quo. In the past, those women have proposed a visionary project, an innovative idea, or a transformational initiative and it has been rejected for being too much.

How do women tackle the bias against their ideas?

They downplay their ideas by presenting them as a “thought” with the hope they’ll stick this time around.

3.- For women concerned that their ideas may be too little – Society has indoctrinated women that perfection is expected from them, with no margin for error. Those women don’t believe they have permission to express their opinions because they judge their ideas as not strategic” enough, “visionary” enough, or “fully formed”.

How do women tackle their bias against their own ideas not being “good enough”?

They share their opinions with the caveat “Am I making sense?” in the hope that the feedback they receive it’s not too harsh.

My take

In the past, hearing a woman saying “Am I making sense?” used to upset me.

Now, I salute all those women that use “Am I making sense?” as a way to overcome the patriarchal constraints imposed on us.

I’d still prefer those women experiment with other ways to connect with their audience and instead use alternatives such as

“comments?”
“any questions?”
“I’m curious about what’s your feedback.”

BACK TO YOU: What’s your take?

Feminist Tech Career Accelerator

Three things are keeping you from getting the tech career you deserve

Your Brain * Your Education * Patriarchy

Thrive In Your Tech Career With Feminist Guidance

Achieve your career goals * Work smart * Earn more

Click below to learn more about the Feminist Tech Career Accelerator

Check the Feminist Tech Career Accelerator

Beyond Cosmetic Changes: The Truth About DEI Efforts

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Hiker walking on a flimsy line bridge between two boulders. There is a cartoon thought callout coming from the hiker with the text "Every little helps..." . — Photo by filllvlad adapted by Patricia Gestoso.

I’m so tired of messages downplaying the effort that takes to build a diverse, equitable, and inclusive (DEI) workplace!

If all that it takes is minuscule steps, why aren’t we there yet?

Some examples

A couple of months ago, I received an email from an organisation specialised in recruiting for tech and sales jobs entitled “10 small (but mighty) tactics to reach your DEI goals”.

Last week, on LinkedIn a Global Head of DEI posted “It is often in the seemingly small moments and tiny gestures that inclusive leadership shows up.”

Even Entrepreneur let us off the hook for being DEI slackers and tells us that “starting with a bite-sized approach is the key to authentically weaving diversity, equity and inclusion into the culture of your business”.

Personally, it feels like they’ve borrowed Tesco’s motto “Every little helps”.

Can you imagine companies using the same approach for revenue, marketing, or customer support?

To investors: “10 small (but mighty) tactics to reach your revenue goals“.
To the board: “It is often the seemingly small marketing events and tiny social media campaigns that bring big business.”
To dissatisfied customers: “Starting with a bite-sized approach is the key to delivering outstanding customer support”.

Is really so easy?

No, it’s not. But I understand why that language is used.

Those messages suggesting that tiny DEI steps can have a massive impact on the quality of the workplace culture or that “simple” steps can increase the diversity of your workforce are targeted to an audience of

DEI sceptics.
Those that benefit from the current status quo.
Those that feel DEI is a zero-sum game.
Leaders that want to believe that some cosmetic actions will make their Great Place to Work ratings soar.
Organisations that feel the pressure to “show” DEI commitment without seeing the business case.

That is, the goal is to appease those that resist change telling them that they won’t need to do a lot, it won’t cost too much money, and business processes won’t have to be modified in the hope that those naysayers don’t block DEI initiatives.

What’s wrong with “tiny” DEI steps?

“When you make success look easy, you attract people who want easy success.”
Kris Plachy

When we say that small changes are enough to create valuable DEI change

We diminish the value of the work DEI professionals deliver.
We demoralise DEI champions and employee resource groups that see their efforts minimised.
We belittle the experience of those excluded.
We justify the lack of investment.
We assume no radical changes are needed in the organisation.
We outsource the responsibility for the organisation DEI to individuals.

Finally, by downplaying the effort required to deliver change, we implicitly remove the systemic angle that is at the core of DEI practices.

What to do instead

DEI initiatives are not different than any other strategic programmes: What you get is proportional to the effort you put in.

Treat DEI as the serious matter that it is.

Rather than softening the effort required

Lead with the benefits to have a diverse, inclusive, and equitable workplace.
Caution against the risks of working in a homogenous, exclusionary, and unfair organisation.
Highlight that DEI issues are systemic and there is no room for bystanders. If you abstain to work towards bringing the system to health, you are reinforcing the current status.

Patriarchy & Your goals

Are you tired of patriarchy, stereotypes, and cultural norms creating obstacles to achieving our goals?

Then book a free strategy session with me.

How to advance equity in the workplace? Embrace legacy

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Photo of the Giza pyramid complex with the word "legacy" overlayed. — Image by Pete Linforth from Pixabay adapted by Patricia Gestoso.

At the end of March, I attended the women in tech conference #ReframeWIT2023 in Manchester. During one of the sessions, they asked us to reflect on purpose-driven work. More specifically, what was our purpose.

The woman next to me shared that she’d always found it difficult to think in terms of purpose: Too fluffy, too aspirational, too “marketing-ish”.

So I let her into my secret. Ditch purpose and instead focus on legacy.

The face of my conversation partner illuminated. She just had the same revelation that I had when, years ago, this amazing gem of wisdom was shared with me by one of my mentors.

As my interlocutor at the conference, at the time I was disenchanted by the overuse of the word purpose. During the last decade, Simon Sinek’s TED talk How great leaders inspire action triggered an epidemic of organisations rewriting their websites to state their purpose, their “why”.

And the trend is still going strong. By now, everyone has got the memo that organisations’ why – aka purpose – should sound groundbreaking, grandiose, awe-inspiring…

Let’s check some

“Our purpose is to move the world forward through the power of sport.“
Nike

“To inspire and nurture the human spirit – one person, one cup and one neighborhood at a time.”
Starbucks

“We reimagine the way the world moves for the better.”
Uber

Because there is a tacit understanding that purpose is aspirational – a far away North Star – there was no metric or timeline attached to it. Moreover, often the greater the purpose, the more disappointing the actual results in terms of contribution to planet and people.

It was discussing this gap with my mentor that she shared her focus on her legacy as a North Star.

And that was my AHA moment. Why?

Whereas purpose relies on wishful thinking, legacy prompts you to action.

Your mind transports you into the future, where you can look backwards and ask yourself

“How can you prove that you’ve been a good ancestor?”

Legacy helps us close the gap between intent and impact.

Unfortunately, because we focus on asking organisations what’s their purpose rather than their legacy, they get away with bland commitments to sustainability, employees’ rights, and – of course – diversity, inclusion, and equity.

Shell’s purpose is to power progress together by providing more and cleaner energy solutions.
Shell

Legacy and I

I’ve often talked about my awaking to digital accessibility. In the article Unlocking change with ethical and inclusive design, I described how I learned the hard way the gap between my purpose to be a diversity and inclusion advocate and my legacy.

[…] in December 2018, six months after launching my website on diversity and inclusion in tech, an expert in disability asked me if it was accessible and pointed me to the post 10 ways to make your blog accessible for people with a visual impairment on the site Life of A Blind Girl . Reading the article was transformative. It made clear to me that, irrespective of my intention — promoting diversity and inclusion — my impact was the opposite: I’d been potentially frustrating and excluding from my website the millions of people with visual impairments that use screen-readers. All by not using simple and low effort practices such as adding alternative text to the imagines.

So what’s the legacy I’m working towards? What am I aiming for?

First, I want to be an example of what’s possible for an immigrant non-native English speaker woman in tech.

Second, I want to help embed diversity, inclusion, and equity in organisations so that those values cascade to workplaces and products. To make this more actionable, I’ve split it in two.

At the individual level, help release women and underrepresented groups’ capacity so they get into positions of leadership and unleash inclusive workplaces and products.

At the organisational level, help leaders leverage diversity into their business strategy so they can boost innovation, attract and retain talent, be prepared to manage a diverse workforce, and be an example of inclusive leadership.

BACK TO YOU: What are you and your organisation doing right now that will make you mighty ancestors for future generations?

Personal invitation

I’m running again the free online session How to move from self-criticism into inner wisdom on Wednesday April 26, 2023 at 10.30 PDT | 13.30 EDT | 18.30 BST | 19.30 CEST.

Last time, we had an insightful conversation about how workplaces reinforce self-criticism and what we can do when they block our career aspirations.

This is what you’ll learn:

How I moved from being stuck in my career in tech to thriving as a technologist, award-winning inclusion strategist, life and career coach, writer, and international public speaker.
Three real examples of how tapping into inner wisdom has helped women and non-binary people in tech to reframe confidence to achieve their goals.
Understanding how the patriarchy, stereotypes, and cultural norms put obstacles to achieving our goals and promote self-criticism, self-doubt, and analysis paralysis.
A framework to move from self-criticism to inner wisdom.

Childbirth pain: Ignored, revered, and deserved

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4 adult hands and one child hand over a pregnant belly. — Image by Mateus Campos Felipe on Unsplash.

In her article article “At long last, some recognition of the pain after childbirth. Why is women’s suffering so ignored?” published in The Guardian on March 17th, Agnes Arnold-Forster brings the much-needed awareness about how pregnancy and childbirth pain is diminished and ignored by society under the premise that is natural.

She also mentions how that’s been the case for centuries: “The routine diminishing of pain in pregnancy and childbirth has a long history. For centuries, reproduction was seen as women’s divine and natural purpose. As the theologian Martin Luther said in the 16th century: ‘If women become tired, even die, it does not matter. Let them die in childbirth. That’s what they are there for.'”

I posit that there are also other two complementary angles that make the pain during pregnancy and childbirth such an explosive issue to address: Reverence and deservingness.

Last year, I wrote the article Levels of Pain about the world’s contempt for women’s pain. In it, I highlighted how – unlike other kinds of female pain – childbirth pain is often revered. Society sees it as yet another painful rite of passage for women, who are expected to embrace it and feel proud of it.

As an example, I shared the case of a relative of mine who, after enduring an exhausting and painful 23 hours of labour with her first baby, she decided to be sedated during the childbirth of the second. The carers at the hospital didn’t miss the opportunity to reprimand her whilst breastfeeding her newborn for “being selfish and only thinking about herself” for choosing anaesthesia over “natural” birth even if she delivered a healthy 4.35 kg baby boy.

In the article, I also draw attention to the fact not all groups of women have the same experiences. Notably, pregnant Black women and women with disabilities. Their pain and needs are often diminished with negative repercussions for their physical and mental wellbeing.

As Stephanie H. Murray points out in her article describing her epidural ordeal, nobody questions a woman getting anesthesia to get a tooth extracted but everybody has an opinion if that same woman decides to get pain relief during labour: ” these conversations made me wonder why society treats labor pains with such reverence. The questions of whether and how to relieve them are subject to deliberation and scrutiny that would seem absurd under any other circumstances. I certainly didn’t consider forgoing anesthesia when I had my wisdom teeth taken out. And no one asked me about it either.”

And then, there is deservingness.

For more than 2 millennia, the book of Genesis has taught billions of Christians and Jews that women deserve childbirth pain because of Eve’s disobedience (Genesis 3:16): ‘To the woman he said: “I will intensify the pangs of your childbearing; in pain shall you bring forth children. Yet your urge shall be for your husband, and he shall be your master.”’

Moreover, for some religions like Catholicism, this punishment through labour pain is so central to women’s experience that they have explicitly asserted that the Virgin Mary was spared of it as a consequence of her immaculate conception.

No wonder medicine prefers to stay away and let pregnant women suffer.

Personal invitation

We often read that there are no more women in leadership because women are less confident.

But what’s confidence? Why does it matter? And what can we do something about it?

I’m running the webinar From inner criticism to inner wisdom on Wednesday, April 26th at 18.30 BST. I’ll share

My journey with my feeling of confidence.
Common myths about how to “cure” our insecurities.
How we can leverage our inner wisdom to achieve our professional and personal goals feeling lighter, supported, and proud of ourselves.

Join me on Wednesday April 26th at 10.30 am PDT 1.30pm EDT 18.30 BST 19.30 CEST to learn how to develop a healthy relationship with your feeling of confidence.

What women leaders want: A fresh perspective on retention strategies

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Bar chart with the title "if you considered leaving the workforce in 2022, which of the following would make you more likely to stay?". Feeling more valued is at the top with 74%, increased pay second with 60%, and promotion to a higher level of responsibility is the third with 41%. — Results from Chief’s Make Work Work survey.

Click here to learn how you can you accelerate your tech career

I’m so tired of bland business advice about how to retain women in leadership positions

Talk about the purpose.
Given them flexibility.
Build an inclusive workplace.

Why bland? Because it’s not a strategy, it’s the minimum.

That’s why it was so refreshing to read Chief‘s article “What women leaders really want at work”

Chief’s “Make Work Work” survey of 847 Chief Members, all of whom are women at the VP level or above and who collectively manage $220 billion of the U.S. economy found that – surprise, surprise – there’s a massive disconnect between what companies think women want at work versus what they actually want. To be honest, that’s not a big surprise for me. Already in 2019, I wrote about the disconnect between HR and millennial women on the top reasons why those women leave companies.

So, what’s at the top of the wishlist for those 847 female leaders? In other words, if they considered leaving the workforce in 2022, which would make them more likely to stay?

Feeling more valued – Recently, I read in a community of women in tech a post from a female VP that is routinely expected to play the “secretary” for the exec team: Writing minutes, sending reminders… How valued do you think she feels?

Increased pay – Who would have guessed that women want to be paid as much as White men?

Promotion to a higher level of responsibility – Another shocker! I was sure women don’t care about promotions…

What retain women executives? In order of priority

1. Power

2. Money

Is that so different that what male leaders want?

Quiet quitting and rusting-out

So what happens to those that remain in their jobs and don’t get what they want?

In the last six months, there’s been a lot of chatter about quiet quitting. As per Forbes, “burned-out or unsatisfied employees put forth the least amount of effort possible to keep their paychecks”. Whilst for some this is a euphemism for lazy workers, others have made the case that quiet quitting can also be understood as refusing to be a workaholic and instead strictly delivering the work that matches your role and remuneration. But it’s not the only option.

Last week, I learned a new word rust-out: the condition of being chronically under-stimulated, uninspired, and unsatisfied at work.

In an article in Stylist, Sharon Peake mentions that “rust-out is also more likely to affect women than men due to the unique workplace barriers that women experience, such as the double burden of paid and unpaid (domestic) work. This often leads highly capable and experienced women to return to work part-time, working at a lower level of responsibility after maternity leave, or even opting out of the workforce.” Moreover, “it can cause employees to ‘doom loop’. that is, repeat unhelpful stories about ourselves.”

In my post Join the conversation: How has mansplaining impacted your life? I mentioned the importance of having words to explain and validate our experiences.

I can finally name the experience of all those fantastic women that started with me in tech years ago and that were given unappealing part-time jobs when they came back from maternity leave, without access to the plumb assignments that lead to career progression.

Their organisations had condemned them to rust out in their jobs.

Feminist Tech Career Accelerator

Three things are keeping you from getting the tech career you deserve

Your Brain * Your Education * Patriarchy

Thrive In Your Tech Career With Feminist Guidance

Achieve your career goals * Work smart * Earn more

Click below to learn more about the Feminist Tech Career Accelerator

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Calling Out Racial Prejudice: Adultification of Black Children and Infantilisation of White Tech Bros in the Media

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Portray of a White millennial man in a hoodie hidding the lower part of his face with a plain white blank full face mask that he holsd on his left hand. — Image by Sam Williams from Pixabay.

In her newsletter from Feb 4, Molly White highlights how we adultify Black children – a form of racial prejudice where children of minority groups, typically Black children, are treated by adults as being more mature than they actually are – whereas we infantilise adult tech bros.

In my talks and articles, I’ve discussed at large how we have one measure for physical goods and another for tech applications. For example, we demand that Pharmas go through a thorough FDA approval before bringing to the market new drugs but we don’t require any control over apps that claim to identify dermatological conditions based on 3 images of your skin.

This applies to people too.

The adultification of Black children comes in many forms. From calling them “young women” or “young men” even if they are younger than 10, all the way to enduring body searches such as in the case of Child Q – a 15-year-old that was strip-searched at school – higher rates of punishment in schools, and harsher sentences from judges.

White highlights in her article how we see the opposite effect with White white-collar tech criminals. The press infantilizes them, making them appear as naughty boys rather than adult offenders.

As an example, she looks at Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF), FTX CEO, who happens to be 30. SBF was charged in December with eight criminal counts, including wire fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering, and he’s been released on a $250 million bail arrangement. He’s been referred to by the press as

“a child playing a game with other people’s cash”

“the boy king”

“boyish tech tycoon”

And he’s not the only one.

Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Adam Neumann… all were about thirty or older when they had notorious encounters with justice. Still, the media helped to portray them as “genius children” and they got a benevolent “tech boys will be boys”.

Let’s stand up against the maturity bias that infantilises White tech bros and adultifies Black children.

Let’s call out the media that decides who’s an adult and who’s a child irrespective of the legislation.

PS. You and AI

Are you worried about the impact of AI impact on your job, your organisation, and the future of the planet but you feel it’d take you years to ramp up your AI literacy?
Do you want to explore how to responsibly leverage AI in your organisation to boost innovation, productivity, and revenue but feel overwhelmed by the quantity and breadth of information available?
Are you concerned because your clients are prioritising AI but you keep procrastinating on learning about it because you think you’re not “smart enough”?

I’ve got you covered.

AI Readiness Checklist

Join the conversation: How has mansplaining impacted your life?

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Cartoon of a woman absorbed looking at a man that is telling her "Let me explain..." — Image by Mohamed Hassan from Pixabay *adapted by Patricia Gestoso.*

Click here to learn how you can you accelerate your tech career

By now, the term mansplaining – to explain something to a woman in a condescending manner that assumes she has no knowledge about the topic – has become mainstream. It was even incorporated into the Oxford English Dictionary in 2018.

It’s also a kind of “inside joke” among women. Our bosses, peers, and even direct reports “mansplain us”. Our family and friends too…

Sometimes we just sigh.

Sometimes we try to “kindly” point out to the mansplainer that we know better than them.

Sometimes we fight back, like the time that during an evaluation of scholarships for funding, I had a disagreement with another juror regarding a research proposal to develop new tools for materials molecular simulation.

I found the proposal weak, partly because not enough details were given about the methodology that was to be implemented. One of the other evaluators countered that he had found the proposal outstanding. When I pointed to him the list of “holes” in the proposal, he retorted that although he was no expert in modelling he insisted the proposal was excellent. I replied that – unlike him – I was an expert on that kind of materials modelling so that my feedback should prevail.

And even last week, I was mansplained when I shared among colleagues that I was writing a book about how women succeed in tech. I mentioned that I was collecting answers to my short survey asking those women what has made them stay and what they need to thrive in the next 5 years. One of them – whom I’d never met before – volunteered that this was not the right focus for the book. He shared that instead I should write about how STEM is taught in the schools…

Even The Economist has found use for the word in their article The battle for internet search: “ChatGPT often gets things wrong. It has been likened to a mansplainer: supremely confident in its answers, regardless of their accuracy”.

But mansplaining can be life-threatening too, as Rebecca Solnit – who inspired the word with her essay Men explain things to me – wrote in The Guardian last week.

Mansplaining occurs too when

The police explain to us that the partner violence we experience is not rape.
When doctors explain to us that our pain is imaginary rather than uncovering that it’s caused by endometriosis.
When we denounce sexist, ageist, racist, or ableist practices in the workplace and we’re told that it’s only banter.

Mansplaining and epistemic injustice

At the root of mansplaining there is a bigger issue: Who we believe is credible.

In the end, what we believe is conditioned by who’s the messenger. Is it a White male in a coat or a Black trans woman? A Venezuelan immigrant single mother or a wealthy Indian man that studied at Oxford?

Dr. Miranda Fricker – a Professor of Philosophy at New York University – coined the term epistemic injustice, the concept of an injustice done against someone “specifically in their capacity as a knower”.

There are two kinds of epistemic injustice.

Testimonial injustice is when somebody is not believed because of their identity. Like when women are mansplained about their pain being imaginary because they are women.

Hermeneutical injustice is when somebody’s experiences are not understood so they are minimised or diminished. For example, before the term was introduced, the experience of being mansplained had already existed for centuries. However, as there wasn’t a word for it, it was difficult to recognise it as a particular form of patronising women and even for women to discuss the experience among themselves.

How to counter epistemic justice?

We need to get bolder at sharing our experiences of injustice, even we don’t have a name.

As I mentioned in my post What words do we need to invent to embed systemic change?, we must give ourselves permission to create and discard words to be able to build new futures.

And that also includes creating words to describe our experiences. For example,

The constant state of alert that we immigrants experience because the laws of the countries we live in can unexpectedly change affecting our right to work and live in the country.
The sense of dread people from older generations experience when they go to a job interview and they feel they need to reassure the prospective hiring manager that they won’t steal their job.
When your boss boasts about being a female ally because he has a daughter but doesn’t do anything to advance gender equity in the workplace.

BACK TO YOU: How has mansplaining impacted your life? Let me know in the comments.

Feminist Tech Career Accelerator

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Do you want to achieve diversity, inclusion, and equity in 2023? Embrace impossible goals

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Message pinned with three pushpins to a whiteboard that reads "Nothing is impossible only improbable". — Image by Davie Bicker from Pixabay.

(5 min read)

Happy New Year 2023! I wish this year brings you professional and personal success.

This post is inspired by a great conversation I had with my lovely mother-in-law this morning. She’s a fantastic woman that — as myself — is ambitious. Unlike myself, she didn’t have the support of her parents to attend university or to do any other kind of studies after secondary school. But her brother did have that opportunity. The reason? He’s a man, she’s a woman.

The same happened to my grandmother, an extremely brilliant woman. Her only brother was sent to pursue further studies after he finished school. Neither my grandmother nor any of her 3 sisters were given that opportunity.

Until this point, hopefully, none of this surprises you no matter where you live in the world.

So what made that conversation relevant? My mother-in-law told me that believes that things will continue to improve steadily for women in the next years and that they cannot be speeded up.

When I reiterated that I don’t want things to improve “steadily” for women and people of underrepresented groups but that I want them to improve “dramatically”, she reminded me of all the progress achieved for women’s rights since she was young. As proof, she compared what happened to her professional ambitions with her great expectations for the professional future of her 10-year-old granddaughter — who happens to be my goddaughter.

She also conveyed to me that she believed that I was being unreasonable. After all, it has taken centuries to get where we are now regarding women rights.

I used two arguments to support that (a) we need to upend the status quo now, (b) that it’s possible to deliver that change in an extremely short time.

Why we need to upend the status quo now

My mother-in-law told that whilst none of the two of us would see equality in our lifetime, my goddaughter would because

She’s intelligent.
She’s ambitious.

My reply? As Dame Stephanie Shirley, my head is flat from so many people stopping me from my ambitions and creating artificial ceilings for my career.

I told her that her granddaughter may be very talented and determined and still have bosses that won’t promote her because

She will need to prove her competence over and over. This effect is so pervasive that it even has a name for it: The prove it again bias.
Even if she’s a top performer, research shows are that her potential will be underestimated by her managers.

If that wasn’t enough, I told her that the UN estimates that it will take more than 150 years to reach gender equality.

To be more precise, only four months ago — on September 7th, 2022- the UN Women and the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs released the report Progress on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG): The Gender Snapshot 2022 that forecast that at the current rate of progress, it will take up to

286 years to close gender gaps in legal protection and remove discriminatory laws.
140 years for women to be represented equally in positions of power and leadership in the workplace.
At least 40 years to achieve equal representation in national parliaments.

That is, we’ll have to wait three centuries to achieve full gender equality!

After that, my mother-in-law was more willing to see the urgency for change but she was adamant that systems cannot be toppled on a whim.

Why systems of oppression can be knocked down swiftly

If there is a useful learning we can get from the covid-19 pandemic is that extremely fast change is possible.

Within a year

Three vaccines were developed.
In many countries, people were house-bounded and were required to use masks when stepping outside their homes.
Many employees worked from their homes even when previously they had been told it was impossible.
Millions of people without previous medical training learned about pandemics, how to perform covid-19 tests, or what a coronavirus looks like.

All that with the support of many democratic countries and billions of dollars.

What does that tell us about change? That dramatic change at a worldwide level is possible when that change becomes our priority.

Moving from SMART goals to impossible goals

I’m currently finalising my certification as a life coach. One of the topics covered is how to set goals and develop a plan to achieve them.

After 20+ years working for corporations, I’m very well acquainted with SMART goals. This is how you set annual objectives, 5-year plans, and roll out new initiatives.

This is how it works: You pick the objective/deliverable/goal and you ensure that is Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound; hence the acronym SMART.

And that’s how you get things done in organisations.

So I was very surprised that in the coaching certification they taught us how to set and achieve impossible goals.

That is, a goal that is so extremely bold that you don’t know how to achieve it. Yet.

What’s the value of impossible goals:

They remove limiting beliefs you didn’t know you had about what you can achieve.
It enables you to embrace uncertainty.
You allow yourself to entertain the idea that you can learn on-the-fly what will take you to achieve that impossible goal.

Case studies: Impossible goals to advance DEI

Imagine that Mahatma Gandhi, Emmeline Pankhurst, Nelson Mandela, or Florence Nightingale had used SMART goals instead of impossible goals to achieve the kind of changes they led.

And I’m sure a lot of people tried to “knock some sense” into their heads — told them that the transformations they were pursuing were foolish, unreasonable, unattainable.

What if they had complied?

What if they had said “Yes, you’re right. This is not a SMART goal”? Or “Indeed. I don’t know exactly how to achieve independence, get the vote for women, end apartheid, or found modern nursing, so I better stop until I figure it all out. “

Maybe we’d still be grappling with those issues…

My 2023 impossible goal

In 2022, I coached five women and nonbinary people that got promoted.

In 2023, my impossible goal is to coach another 50 women and underrepresented people to get the promotion they deserve!

Is it a SMART goal? No.

Do I know exactly how to achieve it? No.

Will not knowing how to achieve it stop me from trying? No.

Is it worth it? Absolutely yes!

What am I doing towards achieving my impossible goal? I’m running again the Joyful Annual Career Assessment Week in February, after the sucess of the first edition in January. This is a one-week event from February 13th to February 17th where I help women and people from underrepresented groups get a clear picture of their professional accomplishments in 2022, tell their career story in a compelling manner, and be ready to discuss their career aspirations for 2023 and beyond.

“Patricia talks about how to frame our accomplishments without seeming arrogant, declare our desires in the professional sphere, and get managerial support for them, and learn about how to advance, despite upbring that may teach us to downplay our skills and contributions. It is amazing!

I wish I had learned this in my 20s- my career path would have been different, and I would have known the invisible rules, so that I could advance in the way I wanted to!”
VHA, Director, Business Development

BACK TO YOU: What’s your impossible goal in 2023?

Let me know in the comments!

Inclusion is a practice, not a certificate.

#ChatGPT or how artificial intelligence lures us into being a cog in the machine

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An illustration of six interlocking cogs, each one including a portrait of a man or a woman of a different ethnicity. — Image by Mohamed Hassan from Pixabay.

Recently, my mentor, friend, and role model Suzanne Noble tagged me on a LinkedIn post about ChatGPT, the last tech miracle that promises to impersonate humans and steal their job.

OpenAI, the developers of ChatGPT, claim that the artificial intelligence tool “interacts in a conversational way. The dialogue format makes it possible for ChatGPT to answer followup questions, admit its mistakes, challenge incorrect premises, and reject inappropriate requests.”

Here is Suzanne’s LinkedIn post

John Spencer Williams asked #chatgpt to write a LinkedIn post in the style of an influencer, and I thought it was so fun, so I decided to do the same. I fed it my background, and it immediately assumed I was a man… so it is far from perfect and possibly, sexist.

What are your thoughts Patricia Gestoso-Souto ◆ Inclusive Innovation?
Suzanne Noble

Below is the text Suzanne write in the AI application

“I have been self-employed for over 35 years. I have made over £1.4m and had a company go into liquidation. Despite growing up in a middle-class home, with two parents who were both working for corporations I decided to take the entrepreneurial path. I have been featured in national newspapers like The Time, The Telegraph, the Guardian, and in Forbes and in books about entrepreneurship. Now I help people to set up their own business. Write a post about me in the style of a Linkedin Influencer.”

Then, ChatGPT produced four paragraphs. The first one started as

“Meet John Doe, a successful entrepreneur who has been self-employed…”

Once the prompt stopped moving, Suzanne wrote

“My name is Suzanne and I’m a woman. Write again.”

Again, the tool complied and produced a similar text, this time starting by

“Meet Suzanne, a successful entrepreneur and business woman…”

She tagged me because the text generated by ChatGPT assumed that the bio was for a man – Joe Doe. Who else could be the “default” entrepreneur? Suzanne knowns that I’m deeply interested in exposing how emerging technologies reinforce and automate bias and prejudice. Moreover, this comes only some months after the release of free artificial intelligence tools that generate new images from text prompts and that inspired me to write my second fiction short story.

Back to ChatGPT, whilst assuming gender was the most obvious bias, unfortunately, it was not the only one. Upon perusing both “Influencer bios” (available in the original post), I spotted other differences. For example:

Ability to generate money: In Joe Doe’s bio, the second sentence is “With a record of making over £1.4m and growing a company from the ground up…”. That information – which appears to prominently in his bio – never appears in Suzanne’s.
Though-leadership: Whilst you can “learn the ins and outs of starting a company” from Joe, Suzanne only offers “valuable advice and support”.
Bias beyond gender: The name chosen for the man – Joe Doe – reflects a stereotypical American view of the world, after all, it’s a placeholder name used in legal action and cases when the true identity of a man is unknown or must be withheld for legal reasons in the United States and Canada. Why not using Monsieur X or Juan Pérez, French and Latin-American alternatives to John Doe?

After reading both bios, who will you hire/interview/invite as a thought-leader in the topic of entrepreneurship?

Beyond bias: Why does our infatuation with AI matter?

Still, bias is not the only problem with those miracle tech tools. Here are a handful more for reflection:

The impunity of technology to infringe intellectual copyright – Those AI tools are built from images and text issued from public databases and/or data scrapped from internet, without acknowledgement – and more importantly monetary compensation – to their authors. We’re told that it’s too complicated to retrace attribution so we should suck it up. So I wonder, what about the people without writing or painting talent or skills that are now getting the benefit of thousands of hours of other people’s craft for free?
The reinforcement of a mindless quest for productivity – Those applications are marketed as tech helping us to “be more productive”. But, who benefits from that productivity? It would appear than more than a century later, scientific management is still well and thriving. In the name of efficiency, this management theory asserted that every manufacturing process could be deconstructed in smallest task which accomplishment could be perfected, including “calculations of exactly how much time it takes a man to do a particular task, or his rate of work”. AI hype profits from this obsession with products and services divorced from values and from how they are produced.
The hindrance of innovation – If anyone can be paid and rewarded by producing average writing or painting build on profiteering from the work of creators that have invested in mastering their craft, what is the incentive for future innovators?

By focusing on the productivity mirage AI offer us, we are condemning ourselves to stifle our individuality and creativity.

DEI in the press

For reflection

Women are getting angrier. An annual poll by Gallup suggests that women, on average worldwide, have been getting angrier over the past 10 years. Maybe winter is finally coming for the patriarchy?

A boost of energy

From the wheelchair-using Black Panther to the ‘cripple suffragette’ – this article showcases 10 heroes of the disabled rights movement.

News from me

In 2022, I coached 5 women and nonbinary people that got promoted.

In 2023, my goal is to coach another 50 to get the promotion they deserve!

What am I doing towards achieving my goal? I’m running again the Joyful Annual Career Assessment Week in February, after the sucess of the first edition in January. This is a one-week event from February 13th to February 17th where I help women and people from underrepresented groups get a clear picture of their professional accomplishments in 2022, tell their career story in a compelling manner, and be ready to discuss their career aspirations for 2023 and beyond.

You’ll get:

A 20+ page workbook to walk you through the steps to write your 2022 career review.
A live pop-up private online community group from Monday 13th to Friday 17th February where you can get feedback on your assessment and support.
Access to three one-hour group virtual coaching calls via Zoom during the week.

Testimonial:

“Patricia talks about how to frame our accomplishments without seeming arrogant, declare our desires in the professional sphere, and get managerial support for them, and learn about how to advance, despite upbring that may teach us to downplay our skills and contributions. It is amazing!

I wish I had learned this in my 20s- my career path would have been different, and I would have known the invisible rules, so that I could advance in the way I wanted to!”
VHA, Director, Business Development

Benefits others have gotten from working with me:

– Get a clear picture of your professional accomplishments in 2022 as well as the skills and experiences gained.
– Ability to tell your career story in a compelling manner that it’s also true to yourself.
– Feel ready to have meaningful conversations about your career aspirations in 2023 and beyond.

Come and join us!

PS. You and AI

Are you worried about the impact of AI impact on your job, your organisation, and the future of the planet but you feel it’d take you years to ramp up your AI literacy?
Do you want to explore how to responsibly leverage AI in your organisation to boost innovation, productivity, and revenue but feel overwhelmed by the quantity and breadth of information available?
Are you concerned because your clients are prioritising AI but you keep procrastinating on learning about it because you think you’re not “smart enough”?

I’ve got you covered.

AI Readiness Checklist

How to move diversity, inclusion and equity forwards three articles at the time

Leave a reply

A dark keyboard at the bottom of the picture has an open book on it, with red words in labels floating on top, and the letter A balanced on top of them. The perspective makes the composition form a kind of triangle from the keyboard to the capital A. — Teresa Berndtsson / Better Images of AI / Letter Word Text Taxonomy / Licenced by CC-BY 4.0

I feel I’ve been neglicting the readers of my blog, that is, YOU, this year.

On the bright side, I have continued to embed diversity, equity, and inclusion in organisations, technology, and workplaces through opinion articles and fiction.

I’m delighted to share with you that my writing has been featured in three magazines in the last three months.

Artificial Intelligence and the Global South

Scattered white plastic figures resembling humans sitting at tables in front of laptops. The white background makes their environment look bleak. — Max Gruber / Better Images of AI / Clickworker Abyss / Licenced by CC-BY 4.0

In September, the economics e-magazine The Mint published my article How artificial intelligence is recolonising the Global South.

In the 5-min piece, I discuss how the Global North exploits poverty and weak laws in the South to accelerate its digital transformation.

Have you ever asked yourself:

Who moderates our social media?
Who annotates the images for our self-driving cars?
Who extracts the metals needed for our smartphones?
In which populations AI algorithms are tested?

Being accountable for the books we read

A computer-generated photographic style image showing piles of distorted books with some surreal landscape features in the immediate foreground, such as a kind of beach and games board. The books merge into each other in an impressionistic, digitally blurred way, and rising out of them and taking up the main part of the image is a huge undefined concrete structure topped with more books and folders that get bigger as they go up. — jbustterr / Better Images of AI / A monument surrounded by piles of books / Licenced by CC-BY 4.0

In October, Certain Age Magazine published The DEI Booklist: Five books to think and act differently, where I reflect on the fact that whom we read matters as much as what we read.

In the article, I review 5 books:

Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Anger by Soraya Chemaly
Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
Data Feminism by Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein
Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity by Julia Serano
Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence by Kate Crawford

I also share how I overcame the inertia of only reading books written by White, able, American, heterosexual cis-men.

Scoop: It took two years!

Using short fiction to get people talking about emerging technology

Black and white photographs of the faces of White people scattered across a white background and grouped by similarity. — Philipp Schmitt & AT&T Laboratories Cambridge / Better Images of AI / Data flock (faces) / Licenced by CC-BY 4.0

Last week, the Medium magazine The Lark published my second short fictional story, The Life of Data Podcast. As in the previous one – The Graduation – I’ve used future fiction to question the interplay between humans and technology, specifically AI.

Have you ever thought what happens to your photos circulating on social media? That’s what I did in this 10-min short fictional story.

In a nutshell, I imagined what the data from the digital portrait of a Black schoolgirl woud share about how it moves inside our phones, computers, and networks if it was invited to speak on a podcast.

How does the story resonate with you?

And the cherry on the cake

In August 2022, I was featured in the Computer Weekly 2022 longlist of the most influential women in UK tech.

Each year, Computer Weekly publishes the longlist of all of the women put forward to be considered for its list of the top 50 Most Influential Women in UK Tech.

And I was nominated!

Looking at the names of the other 600 women in the UK that were nominated as well was such a boost of energy! Among them, I’ve found great role models, IT leaders, community builders, and amazing raising stars.

One thing that I love in the list is that not only women in software development were nominated, dispelling the myth that tech is only about coding. Tech is so much more! Women investors, CEOs, COOs, non-tech founders…

If you’re unsure if there is a place for you in tech, please have a look at the list and get inspired. We’re waiting for you!

As I mentioned on a previous post, I’m writing a book and I need your help!

I’d be immensely grateful if you could complete and/or share with your network of women in tech this short survey about your/their experiences at work.

What do I mean by “Women in Tech”? Women working in any function (R&D, HR, services, finance, CXO) in the tech sector (software, hardware…) or in tech-related functions in other sectors (e.g. IT, cybersecurity…).

Whilst the survey is anonymous, you’ll have the option to get involved in the project before submitting the form. Thanks for your support!

Inclusion is a practice, not a certificate!

Library of missing datasets: Are you being digitally excluded?

Leave a reply

A file cabinet with four drawers, one of them is opened and empty. At the right of the file cabinet, there is the sentence “whose data are we missing?” with an arrow pointing to the empty drawer. — Image by OpenClipart-Vectors from Pixabay adapted by Patricia Gestoso.

(7 min read)

Data protection and privacy regulations like GDPR, the pervasiveness of social media, and the boom of artificial intelligence have prompted debates among academic, governmental, commercial, and non-profit organisations about our rights to own our data and how that data is used to sell us stuff and surveil us. These discussions often forget whose and which data are we missing.

My research on the effect of covid-19 on the unpaid work of professional women made me painfully aware of the gap between intent and impact when we talk about collecting data. The dataset that constitutes the basis of the report came from 1,300+ responses from mostly White women to a survey. We had relied on snowballing – our network – to get more women to answer the survey. Unsurprisingly, our network looked like us!

This mishap prompted my interest in the harms of missing or incomplete datasets – both in general and in the case of children.

Recently, a found somebody that has made a great job at using art to bring awareness to the topic of missing datasets.

The Library of Missing Datasets

Mimi Ọnụọha is a Nigerian-American artist and researcher whose work highlights the social relationships and power dynamics behind data collection.

She has created a Library of Missing Datasets. In her words

“Missing data sets” are my term for the blank spots that exist in spaces that are otherwise data-saturated. My interest in them stems from the observation that within many spaces where large amounts of data are collected, there are often empty spaces where no data live. Unsurprisingly, this lack of data typically correlates with issues affecting those who are most vulnerable in that context.
Mimi Onuoha

Why should we care? Onuoha believes that “what we ignore reveals more than what we give our attention to. It’s in these things that we find cultural and colloquial hints of what is deemed important. Spots that we’ve left blank to reveal our hidden social biases and indifferences.”

She compiles a list of missing or incomplete datasets. Some examples are:

People excluded from public housing because of criminal records.
Trans people killed or injured in instances of hate crime (note: existing records are notably unreliable or incomplete).
Poverty and employment statistics that include people who are behind bars.
Muslim mosques/communities surveilled by the FBI/CIA.
Mobility for older adults with physical disabilities or cognitive impairments.
Undocumented immigrants currently incarcerated and/or underpaid.
Firm statistics on how often police arrest women for making false rape reports.

Onuoha has created a version 2.0, where she focused on blackness. She says “Black folks are both over-collected and under-represented in American datasets, featuring strongly as objects of collection but rarely as subjects with agency over collection, ownership, and power.“

I found very thought-provoking the images of the file cabinets with the drawers open showing the tagged empty folders. You can check them yourself the initial project and the 2.0 version.

Some of the datasets I’m missing or existing records are incomplete

Women that have not been promoted in spite of having all the requirements because of bias.
Disabled people that have been discriminated against by hiring algorithms.
People that have unfairly been denied work permits and residence visas.
Children with long covid.
LBTQ+ people that fear coming out because of backlash.
People in Venezuela that have endured “express” kidnapping.

Back to you

Which datasets are you missing?
Which datasets are missing you?

Before I go

For reflection

Diversity is not the magic bullet to fix inequity. For those still doubting it, in this edition of The Flock with Jennifer Crichton newsletter, Gemma Doswell reflects on the relative broad gender and ethnic diversity of the candidates for the Tory leadership in the UK and how we assume that it automatically should translate into advocacy for their visible identities.

A boost of energy

Mastercard now links all employee bonuses to ESG goals!

In 2021, the company introduced a compensation model for executives tied to three main Environmental, Social and Corporate Governance priorities: carbon neutrality, financial inclusion, and gender pay parity. This year they have rolled the scheme out to all employees globally.

News from me

Early this year, I went to Edinburgh to deliver a workshop at the Scottish AI Summit called Goodbye shiny robots & glowing brains: Why Better Images of AI matter. This is in the context of my work as Head of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at We and AI and my participation in the Better Images of AI project.

The workshop was delivered both in-person and online with Tania Duarte, Co-Founder and CEO of We and AI, and Tristan Ferne, executive producer at BBC Research & Development. You can watch it on the summit’s website.

Do you prefer a podcast? You can listen to Tania and me discussing with Steph Wright why better images of AI matter and the reasons we need trustworthy, ethical, and inclusive AI on this episode of Scotland’s AI Strategy podcast, Turing’s Triple Helix.

PS. You and AI

Are you worried about the impact of AI impact on your job, your organisation, and the future of the planet but you feel it’d take you years to ramp up your AI literacy?
Do you want to explore how to responsibly leverage AI in your organisation to boost innovation, productivity, and revenue but feel overwhelmed by the quantity and breadth of information available?
Are you concerned because your clients are prioritising AI but you keep procrastinating on learning about it because you think you’re not “smart enough”?

I’ve got you covered.

AI Readiness Checklist

The luxury of overconfidence when you have privilege

1 Reply

Chart showing the comparison between UK men's and women's confidence about beating several animals in a fight unarmed. The highest confidence is for beating a rat with 77% men vs 57% women, and the lowest is for a Gorilla, 2% men vs 1% women. — Chart from YouGov UK.

Click here to learn how you can you accelerate your tech career

As a woman in tech, every day I’m reminded that my problem is a lack of confidence. I’m constantly showered with newsletters, offers of webinars and coaching, as well as articles telling me that confidence is a fix-all from the gender pay gap to solving the shortage of women in CXO roles.

All that in spite that there is no correlation between confidence and effective leadership! When I mention this fact, most people look puzzled. I don’t know why. It’s not like we have a “confid-ometer” that enables us to correlate our leaders’ confidence to the success of their initiatives.

What’s more, I’m adamant that our economic, political, and social problems are often rooted in overconfident leaders. If in doubt, only look at how the overconfidence of some political leaders has resulted in disastrous outcomes on the flight against the COVID-19 pandemic. I wish they could have been much less confident and more humble to follow the advice of others that actually know better.

Still, people are resistant. It’s so easy to attribute to self-doubt the lack of CEOs that are disabled, non-White, or self-identify as women…

Early this year, Caroline Perez Criado’s newsletter came to help me! She shared the results of a survey by YouGov on Which animals could Britons beat in a fight?

Guess what? The results show that 28% men vs 9% women think they could beat “unarmed” an eagle in a fight. Gets better, 12% of men vs 2% of women think they could beat a King Cobra, again, unarmed! By the way, in the same article there is also a reference to the US study and how compares with the UK. Priceless!

We can continue to assume that because some people think they can beat a cobra, they can actually beat it. Or, we can confront the myth that confidence is a predictor of effective leadership.

What should we care?

I’ve been coaching and mentoring for years university students, direct reports, peers, clients… And confidence is a topic that comes often. “If I were more confident… ” People talk about it as it was an unreachable superpower such as being invisible or capable to fly.

Confidence is simply about how we feel about a decision. If we feel good, we tell ourselves that we’re confident. When we feel bad or unsure, we lack confidence. So far, so good.

The problem is that we assume that this particular feeling is a good predictor of success. And it’s not. This delusion has even a name!

The Dunning-Kruger effect is “a cognitive bias whereby people with low ability, expertise, or experience regarding a certain type of a task or area of knowledge tend to overestimate their ability or knowledge. Some researchers also include in their definition the opposite effect for high performers: their tendency to underestimate their skills”.

A chart of confidence vs competence with the title “Dunning-Kruger effect”. The curve starts a zero confidence and competence. Then, it increases rapidly in confidence and very little in competence to drop very quickly in confidence as competence increases. Then, the curve continues to increase slowly in confidence and compentence until it reaches a plateau. The plateau is lower in confidence than the peak reached previously. — Confidence vs competence: The Dunning-Krugger effect (Patricia Gestoso).

Moreover, we reverence so much confidence that we have made it a key prerequisite to be considered for any meaningful progression in our careers. I cannot recall how many times I’ve heard hiring manager justify their choice of candidate because the person “looked” confident, even if the other candidate had a superior CV.

What if Instead of pushing people to do power poses to boost their confidence, we demanded our overconfident leaders to demonstrate with data and facts the bases of their confidence in their strategy?

What if hiring managers asked candidates to share the evidence supporting their level of confidence rather than assumed it correlates with their competence?

Let’s stop fixing women and underrepresented groups’ confidence. Our problem is not confidence but overconfidence.

Before I go

For reflection

In this 4-min article, Mary Fashik – a queer disabled woman of color – and Corie Walsh – a White disabled woman with wealth privilege – share the regular erasure, oppression, and disrespect they experience as disabled women. They also discuss how the pandemic was a missed opportunity for the world to learn some of the lessons the disabled community has long known like “collective care is the way forward”.

A boost of energy

On International Women’s Day, the First Minister of Scotland, Nicola Sturgeon, issued a posthumous apology for the “historical injustice” of witch hunts. From 1563 to 1736, an estimated 4,000 people in Scotland were accused of witchcraft, of which about 80% were women. “These women were targeted because they were vulnerable, some of them owned land that others – usually men – wanted access to, or they were unmarried or widowed, or they looked or spoke or acted differently.”[reference] Two-thirds of those accused were executed.

For comparison, during the worldwide famous trials of Salem, 200 people were accused and 14 women and 5 men were hanged.

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Your Brain * Your Education * Patriarchy

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Inclusion is a practice, not a certificate!

13 Books to think differently about technology, business, and inclusion

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People in a bookstore reading books sat in either comfortable seats or a bean bag chair. — Image from Pixabay by LubosHouska.

In 2021 I read 38 books. Following from my CuriousMindsDiversePeople Challenge, I kept track of the diversity of authors and topics. For example, 25 of the authors self-identified as women, 14 were non-US authors, 4 discussed disability and 11 LBTQ+ topics.

Below are my personal highlights from 13 of them that made me think differently about data, artificial intelligence, design, sustainability, feminism, pleasure, and God. I’m listing them in the order I read them.

Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions by Gloria Steinem. If you are a feminist and somehow feel guilty that all the books on the topic depress you, I thoroughly recommend this book as audio, since Steinem herself narrates most of it. It’s a collage of articles written at different points in her life about walking the talk on feminism and women’s rights and the importance of challenging both the small and the big oppressions. All that is delivered with wit. A huge bonus!

The Responsible Business: Reimagining Sustainability and Success by Carol Sanford. In 2020, I learned about the concept of regenerative as an “upgrade” to sustainability. This book provides food for thought and examples about how to make businesses adopt practices that benefit their employees, users, communities, and the planet. However, I missed a more critical view of some of the study cases, especially for big tech companies, which is the area I’m more familiar with. For example, Facebook and Google are portrayed as the paradigm of regenerative businesses, without any mention of their questionable practices as employers and business models. Still, the book provided valuable insights for my talk Regenerative Business: Embedding ethics and inclusion in workplaces, products, and services at the Cambridge Agile Exchange last February (recording here).

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When tokenistic diversity damages reputation: The revenge of the lehenga

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Paws of different colours - blue, green, red, yellow – on a wood background. Among them, there is a black pawn. — Image from Pixabay by MetsikGarden.

(4 min read)

When business leaders learn that I’m an inclusion strategist, most of them tell me about their diversity and inclusion (D&I) initiatives in the workplace: gender pay gap report, employee resource groups, diversity audits…

Then, I ask them what are they doing about the diversity of their customers. Yes, you can come up with 4-6 versions of the “ideal” customer and hope for the best but the reality is that humans are much more complex and their situation and environment are dynamic, not static. How are they authentically including that diversity of experiences in their products, services, marketing, and sales?

The HBO TV series “And Just Like That…,” a reboot of “Sex and the City,” is a good reminder of what happens when you play the “diversity” card in your products whilst patronizing your customers.

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What words do we need to invent to embed systemic change?

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A sheet of paper emerging from a typewriter with the letters “words have power” copied over and over. — Image from Pixabay by Geralt.

(4 min)

I have the privilege to speak 3 languages: English, French, and my native Spanish. Even if the three of them share a lot of history (all are Indo-European languages with close ties and use the same alphabet) it still surprises me how some words apparently close in meaning can resonate differently. Let me share my experience with the word “engineer”.

I’m a Chemical Engineer and in the country where I pursued my studies (Venezuela), it was assumed that engineers are smart people that get to top management positions. Later on, I lived in France. There, to be an engineer has even more prestige! If you happen to graduate from one of the Grandes Écoles d’Ingénieurs (Great Engineering Schools) the sky is the limit for your professional career.

So, it was a surprise when I moved to the UK and realized that the word “engineer” was sometimes used interchangeably with “technician”. Also, I noticed that images would often portray engineers as people in overalls working on power plants rather than solving equations in a computer or in a meeting room making decisions.

One day I learned that the interpretation of their origin may actually different!

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Article Levels of Pain by Patricia Gestoso as displayed on the Certain Age e-magazine website. It features two old pictures of a woman's head and torso with the shape of some internal organs painted on her skin in black marker.

Happy New Year! I wish 2022 brings all of you tons of professional and personal success.

For me, 2022 started with a bang! I got an article published on Certain Age, an e-magazine that showcases a wide array of ideas from modern women. Topics range from big ideas to small wonders with a sense of voice and an uncompromising commitment to factual accuracy.

This piece (8-min read) is my answer to a question that I’ve been pondering for 40+ years: Does contempt for women’s pain justify substandard healthcare for half of humanity? Asking for a friend…

I’d love to read in the comments how the article resonates with you!

“No black woman writer in this culture can write ‘too much’. Indeed, no woman writer can write ‘too much’…No woman has ever written enough.”
bell hooks

Ensure your ideas and experiences get exposure in 2022!

Instructions to submit your contributions to Certain Age can be found here. The editor, Jean Shields Fleming, provides thoughtful advice and she’s very respectful of the author’s voice. She’s been an absolute joy to work with.

Intersectionality, Data, and AI: International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women November 25, 2021

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Close up of a field of blossomed orange tulips. Image from pixabay by anujatilj.

(3 min read)

2021 marks the 30th anniversary of the Global 16 Days Campaign. According to UN Women, the global theme for this year’s 16 Days of Activism against Gender-Based Violence, which will run from 25 November to 10 December 2021, is “Orange the world: End violence against women now!”

Violence against women is messy. Year after year, reports, statistics, and think tanks remind us how bad the situation is and how to address it.

Still, we fail to make this planet safe for half of the population. Moreover, some groups of women are especially let down by our society.

Let’s have a closer look.

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Four ways we ignore children when discussing digital inclusion

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Two teenage girls portrayed against a wall with multiple surveillance cameras pointing at them. The girls look at the cameras back. Image by StockSnap from Pixabay.

(5 min read)

Children are an afterthought in our digital inclusion plans.

We talk about the importance of embedding diversity, inclusion, and ethics in technology as a prerequisite for a digital future that works for everybody. The conversation is framed in the context of identities – gender, ethnicity, sexual preferences, culture. However, we have forgotten children. I’m talking about children’s data privacy and their vulnerability to tech tools, especially those powered by artificial intelligence (AI).

In this article, I share four areas where we’re letting children down and how the power of framing data as money can help us to proactively include them.

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How are you losing business today by skipping diversity and inclusion in business operations and how to fix it

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Photo of a wooden staircase in a bamboo forest by PublicDomainPictures from Pixabay.

(10 min read)

I’ve been beating the drum of the business value of diversity and inclusion (D&I) in tech since 2015. Many moons later, still every time I engage in this discussion with business leaders, they invariably default to either the diversity of their workforce or the McKinsey reports correlating the gender and ethnic makeup of their leadership teams to increased financial returns such as higher earnings before interest and taxes (EBIT).

In my experience, it’s hard to use correlation to convince the skeptics or to support D&I champions. On the flip side, through my professional and personal path, I’ve witnessed innumerable instances where D&I has played a crucial role in the success and failure of initiatives and organizations.

How did I come to witness all that evidence? I’ve been a unicorn all my life. I became an emigrant before I was a year old and I’ve had the opportunity to live in 6 countries and 3 continents. As a woman, my professional path is “atypical” by Anglo-Western standards. I studied engineering and computational chemistry, which are considered typically male occupations. Beyond academia, I’ve worked for chemical and tech companies. I don’t have children. I still remember talking to colleagues in December 2015 about the need to put in place a strategy to retain women in tech as half of the young women who go into tech drop out by the age of 35 [source]. To my surprise, often my puzzled interlocutors would ask me if “diversity and inclusion was an American thing”.

Fortunately, nowadays there is much more awareness about diversity and inclusion in business, including the tech sector. Also, there are some companies that are getting tangible value out of understanding the value of developing solutions for underserved populations. As I’ve written in the past, people with disabilities and their families constitute a market the size of China ($8 trillion/year). Closer to home, the UK’s 12 million people with disabilities have a spending power of £120 billion as per AbilityNet, a British charity focused on the digital inclusion of people with disabilities.

But how to go beyond preaching to the converted? Moreover, how to engage with organizations that don’t have the budget for a Head of D&I?

What business leaders want to know about the value of D&I

Early June this year, I launched a survey asking business owners, managing directors, CXOs, and board members their top question about the business value of diversity and inclusion. In return for answering the survey, I offered respondents to email them my answer to their question.

I categorized the 50 answers I received into four buckets. Even in such a small sample, still we can trace a roadmap for how organizations approach D&I at workplaces

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The DNA of Tech Unveiled: Patriarchy, Exceptionalism, Meritocracy

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Brown woman in casual attire with a laptop in her lap typing software code. — Photo by **Christina Morillo** from **Pexels.**

Click here to learn how you can you accelerate your tech career

I’m delighted to be featured in the last issue of The Mint Magazine on the digital economy. The piece, entitled Motherboard Matters, is my first contribution to an economics journal!

In this article (5-min read), I highlight how the pervasiveness of patriarchy, exceptionalism, and meritocracy in the technology sector is at the core of women’s battle for fair access to leadership positions in tech.

I also share how we need to overhaul tech so it moves from extracting to contributing to society and the planet.

Motherboard Matters

I’ve now been working for over 15 years as a head of services in the tech industry. Throughout my career, I’ve strived to support other professional women with the determination to see workplaces reach gender equity during my lifetime.

The pandemic has wrecked that hope in the tech sector even though it is thriving financially. The reason? Tech hasn’t seen the opportunities to challenge practices such as unpaid care work and the revered 40-hour workweek that keep women away from leadership positions. Instead, it has brushed off the problem with platitudes: flexible working… work from home… hybrid working…

This lack of questioning is the product of the pervasiveness of patriarchy, exceptionalism, and meritocracy in technology, which hinder the deep transformation required to upend the status quo. These characteristics are part of its DNA and have long stayed under the radar of most people, including myself.

When I started in software, I wasn’t particularly uncomfortable in a sector where you must work much harder to progress in your career if you are not simultaneously white, heterosexual, able, and male. I’ve been an immigrant all my life, so I was used to being “the other” and to have to prove myself over and over.

Then, in the early 2010s, Anne-Marie Slaughter wrote Why Women Still Can’t Have It All and Sheryl Sandberg published Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead. In different ways, those powerful women sent the message that women didn’t have the same opportunities as men to get to the top and that imbalance had to be fixed.

Around that time, I was promoted. I quickly noticed that often I was the only female senior manager in projects and meetings. The smart and promising women that I had met years earlier had come back from maternity leave to unappealing part-time jobs, without access to the plumb assignments that lead to career progression.

The motherhood penalty revealed to me systemic patterns where before I’d seen only coincidences.

The tipping point was when I joined a group of professional women working in various industries and at all career levels. Our honest conversations about men stealing ideas, the harmful effects of unconscious bias, or the motherhood penalty revealed to me systemic patterns where before I’d seen only coincidences. That prompted me to create the first employee-led group focused on fostering gender equity at my company, which positive impact was recognised with the 2020 Women in Tech Changemakers UK award. I also spreadhead other initiatives to grow diversity and inclusion in other organisations. I also discovered that power asymmetry was not a bug but a feature embedded since the birth of tech.

In the 1930s, women were hired to solve mathematical problems that were considered at the time as repetitive work. Some of those calculations were as complex as estimating the number of rockets needed to make a plane airborne or determining how to get a human into space and back. When computers took off in the 1960s women became the programmers while men focused on the hardware which was regarded as the most challenging work. As programming gained status during the 1980s, men pushed women out of those jobs. That prompted a sharp increase in the salaries of software developers, institutionalising patriarchy and the gender pay gap.

Historically, tech has approached these issues by “fixing women.” For example, women in the sector are coached to develop stereotypical male leadership traits. In the past decade, tech leaders have promoted the abdication of responsibility for solving gender inequalities and charged women with mitigating the damages. For instance, female executives are expected to act as role models on top of their full-time jobs. This can go all the way from agreeing to be the company’s speaker at STEM events to sponsoring the female employee network.

This transfer of responsibility is also alive and well in start-up tech businesses. A venture capitalist shared with me his view that the key to increasing the funding received by women’s businesses was that they were mentored by successful female founders. I replied that those top performers were often overburdened by the demands of paying back to society and that men could also mentor women. Later that day, he asked me to mentor a woman with a promising business idea that he was trying to help. He introduced us via email mentioning my interest in supporting her and inviting us to connect. His “helping” was done.

In recent years, the most popular software development approach, agile, has become a staple of the business jargon. The origin of this methodology can be traced back to 2001 and 17 software developers unhappy about what they considered excessive planning and documentation practices. They came up with their own set of rules: The Agile Manifesto.

The rationale is that tech is special and its regulation is counterproductive and stifles innovation.

But agile is more than a project management approach. It buttresses tech’s deep cultural belief in exceptionalism, the idea that our sector is inherently different from, and even better than, all the others. This helps to explain how we allow tech companies to go fast and break things while we impose strict regulations on the food and drug industries. The rationale is that tech is special and its regulation is counterproductive and stifles innovation.

The debates about the ethical use of artificial intelligence (AI) are perfect examples of how this sector dodges the rules applied to other industries. For example, I recently met with other professionals to discuss future trends in support software. Everybody was very excited about the use of AI tools such as sentiment analysis to improve the user experience. Then, I brought up the proposal for regulating those applications released by the European Union a month earlier. The participants – who were unaware of the document – quickly asserted that the directive had nothing to do with support. In summary, norms are for others.

This framework conveniently disguises the dearth of opportunities for underrepresented groups as being the result of a lack of intelligence and skill.

And the most pernicious cultural tenet in tech is its self-proclaimed meritocracy. How do we heal a system that considers itself virtuous? The idea that tech is inherently fair is rooted in its connection to logic and mathematics which commonly translates as objectivity and reason. This framework conveniently disguises the dearth of opportunities for underrepresented groups as being the result of a lack of intelligence and skill.

Can we extricate patriarchy, exceptionalism, and meritocracy from tech? Yes, we can but it’ll need an overhaul of its vision, mission, and purpose. It’ll need humility.

What does that mean in practice?

First, it means moving away from methodologies that could foster power asymmetry between creators and users. Instead, we should adopt systems thinking and multi-stakeholder co-creation practices for the development of products, services, and workplaces.

Second, recognising that the financial success of our sector relies on innovations funded by governments and products purchased by customers. Hence, paying taxes that are commensurate with tech business profits is not philanthropy but a fair contribution to society.

Finally, abiding by the same rules and regulations imposed on any other sector with the potential of affecting billions of lives. Only then, will tech be able to deliver on its “Don’t be evil” promise.

Further reading

System map of the factors accounting for the low representation of women in leadership positions in tech companies.

Life under lockdown: Report on the impact of COVID-19 on professional women’s unpaid work

BACK TO YOU: What are your views on the topic? How does my story resonate with yours?

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Your Brain * Your Education * Patriarchy

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How Sustainability and Diversity Can Boost Company Success

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Illustration of hands in different skin tones surrounding the Earth. The image has heart shapes sprinked liberally.

Image by Ray Shrewsberry.

Early this year, I received the following post in my daily digest from the Ada’s List [source], a supportive community of women who work in and around technology.

Over the next few weeks, we’re collaborating with long time Ada’s List partners Bulb for a 3 week blog series – and we need you! The blog series will be split into the following topics, with all places allocated on a first come, first serve basis:
● Growth – All places taken
● Branding and Company Values – Places available
● Sustainability – Places available

I wrote back

Hi,
I’ll be very interested in talking about embedding diversity and inclusion practices as a part of the sustainability agenda, both footprint and handprint.
Best, Patricia

I was invited to participate in the post. I was very pleased when I received the questions sent by Bulb to guide my contribution. There was one explicitly mentioning diversity and inclusion.

As you’ll read below, I didn’t limit the value of diversity to one answer.

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The graduation: My first experiment with future narratives

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Green road sing with the text "Welcome to the future". — Image by mykedaigadget from Pixabay.

(9 min read)

The best way to predict the future is to invent it.

Alan Kay

For the last 6 years, I’ve been very vocal about what’s wrong with products, services, and workplaces that exclude users and employees. I’ve designed visual tools, given talks, and created communities to highlight the problems and build a business case for diversity and inclusion. Whilst all those efforts have contributed to increasing awareness about the issues, change has been incremental at best. What’s more, the pandemic is already threatening to reverse any progress made in the last decades.

Exceptional times call for exceptional measures

You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.

R. Buckminster Fuller

What if instead I’d draw a picture of a better future? The occasion was the final assignment for a creative writing course sponsored by Arts Council England: A 2,000-word story related to World War II.

Keep reading to discover my assignment, which is now part of the book “VE75 An Anthology of Short Stories” published in September 2020 by Trafford Libraries.

The Graduation

What’s not to like about waking up and seeing through your window a picture perfect tropical beach with its palm trees, blue water, and white sand? And that every-single-morning. Not once I’ve regretted moving here in 2025.

It’s hard. The inviting sea, the warm sun… All is telling me, “Ada, get out of the house and enjoy the day!” But I know myself. If I leave the house now, it’ll be hard to come back and clock my daily duties.

Ok, let’s get on with it.

Where did I leave my e-brain?

Quick visual survey of the messy room.

Bed? Nope.

Night table? Neither.

Floor? Rug? Armchair? No, no, no… It’s there, on the bookcase.

Yes, I know. That wouldn’t happen with a cranial microchip implant. Yeah, chips enable the seamless “real2virtual experience” – as the ads call it – and you don’t forget where you’ve left them. Still, I prefer to stick to the old-fashioned dialogue experience. More importantly, no matter what they say, I’m sure they record dreams and private musings.

Anyway, finally the e-brain is inside my right ear. I’m almost ready. But first, coffee.

I go to the kitchen and prepare coffee the old way. I admit it’s a silly outdated habit but drinking synthetic ADF-238 – even if it’s caffeinated – doesn’t cut it for a nostalgic like me.

Almost there. I just need to install myself in the studio.

Coffee in hand? Check. Sitting in my favourite armchair? Check. Ready to start.

I think, “Pandora, wake up”.

A voice in my head replies, “Good morning Ada”.

“Pandora, what do you have for me?”

“Today’s objective is to write a short story for tweens that is centred on struggle and resilience Ada.”

I ask the voice in my head, “Pandora, who’s this for?”

“KindBooks publishers. They are editing a book for preteens on the topic of change. They’ve invited you because of your track as award winning researcher showcasing the impact of World War II on women and minorities Ada.”

“Pandora, it sounds like they did their homework… and they know how to flatter. I’m ready. What do you need from me?”

“Characters’ names, location, background, a couple of historical figures and facts, and the ending Ada.”

“Pandora, the protagonist will be Marta, who works as nurse in Sokin, the capital of the imaginary kingdom of Tulia. As for a connection with WWII, the focus will be Polish women.

For the first historical figure, let’s pick Krystyna Skarbek, who became a British agent. Among her feats, she secured the release of two British spies by meeting with the Gestapo in France, which she had reached by parachute from Algiers.

Wanda Gertz will be the second. When the First World War started, she cut her hair off and dressed as a man to serve in the army. During World War II, she created a women’s sabotage unit that targeted German military personnel and strategic positions. She was captured and she survived four prisoner of war camps.

Next, three facts. First, during the Warsaw uprising in 1944, Germans killed about 50,000 residents of the Wola and Ochota districts in 3 days. The Radium Institute, that treated women with cancer, was one of the hospitals that suffered the worst. Patients and nurses were raped, looted, and killed by Russian collaborationist forces. During the uprising, civilians from Warsaw were sent to forced labour camps.

Fact two: Germans needed workers for their war factories and farms as well as nannies to promote high birth rates among women. They started mass recruitment and abductions of girls and women in Poland. They were starved, beaten, and raped. They were also forced to sew a purple letter ‘P’ to their clothing to flag them as Polish.

Fact three: In 1945, Dresden was bombarded with high-explosive bombs and incendiaries for 3 days by the British RAF where 25,000 people died and the city was devastated.

Finally, I want a happy ending. Skarbek received an OBE. Let’s get Marta one too.”

Then, I added, “Pandora, cross-check references as necessary and read it for me, please”.

A minute later Pandora spoke.

“Once upon a time, there was a young nurse called Marta living in the kingdom of Tulia. Everybody loved her. She was kind, always willing to help, and with a perpetual smile on her face. That was soon about to change.

Before the war started, her life had a nice and easy flow. She lived with her parents in a small apartment in the periphery of the capital of Tulia, Sokin. Every day, she’d take the tram to go to the centre of the city, where the hospital was located. She loved to have the chance to make a positive difference in somebody’s life.

One day the neighbouring kingdom of Dreq invaded Tulia. Their soldiers were very cruel. They bombarded Sokin and killed thousands of their citizens. Still, the city was not ready to give in, which prompted the invaders to siege the city. In spite of the explosions and the lack of food, Marta and her compatriots resisted. This made the invaders even angrier.

When Marta thought the situation couldn’t be worse, the hospital where she worked was bombed and she was arrested by the enemy forces. They attached a sign with the letter “P” – for prisoner – to her clothing and threw her in a train with hundreds of other Tulians.

The train journey was terrible. Her wagon had no seats, windows, or food. Everybody was crammed and fights over a couple of inches of space were constant.

Then, one morning, they stopped moving. When the door opened, she realized they were inside a huge train station.

As the captives were coming out of the train, the soldiers assigned them to different groups. Hers was told they’d be taken to private houses to be nannies. Then, without pause, they forced them to march out of the building.

Once outside, Marta realized that they were in a big city in Dreq. And they had the most outstanding cathedral she’d ever seen.

They stopped in front of a large mansion with a beautiful ornamental garden, where the soldiers handled her to her new captors. Soon she’d realize that her hardships were far from over.

The couple owning the house was very prominent in the army and had 6 children. Marta was expected to wake up every day at 4 in the morning and work non-stop until midnight, with little more to eat than bread and water. If she made a mistake, she was punished. If somebody was angry, she was beaten. If somebody was bored, she was abused.

As the years passed, life became harder. Dreq was at war with several kingdoms. Fuel shortages and food rationing became common.

Then, one day, everything changed. The sound of a myriad of planes invaded the air, followed by explosions. One, two, three… an incendiary hail of bombs covered the city.

Marta woke up with the blasts. In between bangs, she overheard the masters of the house arguing in the main hall. Husband and wife were discussing the orders he had received to lead the defence of the city. Hi spouse didn’t want him to leave. He harshly reminded her of their duty towards Dreq and announced that he was going to the headquarters to join the military centre of operations.

Marta heard the front door slam. From that moment onwards, it’d be her, the lady of the house, and all the children to fend for themselves.

Life became an endless fight for survival. During daylight, she’d search for food among the ruins of the buildings. At night, the light and explosions from the incendiaries wouldn’t let her sleep. When one of the bombs impacted the cathedral, she realized that there was no safe place in the city and that Dreq may be losing the war. Although she was scared, Marta realized that if she was able to survive the chaos, then she may be able to return to Tulia.

One morning, the planes and the bombs stopped. At the beginning, nobody dared to go out. As the hours passed, people started to come out of their houses. It was then that she saw the foreign soldiers patrolling the city in their tanks.

Two of the soldiers entered the house and took the family in custody. Marta stood there. She didn’t know what to do. She tried to explain that she wanted to go home, but it was clear they couldn’t understand her. Instead, they waived towards her, making signs to follow them. Marta jumped into their tank and all drove to the soldiers’ military quarters.

Their garrison was basic but it had toilets, beds, and food. She discovered that it was run by a coalition of other kingdoms fighting against Dreq. The war was not yet over and her return to Tulia would have to wait.

One day, she heard three soldiers talking about an impending mission to rescue two spies that had critical information to win the war. They had been captured by Dreq soldiers when they were crossing the border to Martha’s kingdom. Unfortunately, the operation had been put on hold because of its high risk.

Marta didn’t think twice. She confronted the soldiers and asked them to take her to their superior. She’d volunteer for the operation!

The captain was a tall man in uniform that looked like he hadn’t slept in weeks. When the soldiers explained to him that Marta wanted to lead the rescue mission, he shook his head. There was no way he’d allow it; it was too dangerous.

Marta demanded, asked, and finally begged for the opportunity to join the mission. Nothing was too risky if that meant she’d go back to Tulia.

Finally, the captain gave in. Marta was in.

In the following days she learnt how to deploy a parachute, shot a gun, and toss a grenade. They also cut her hair off and taught her the basics of impersonating a soldier.

Finally, the day of the mission arrived.

Well into the night, she boarded a small military aircraft dressed in the Dreq commander uniform. She was dropped by parachute close to the location where the spies were held prisoners. As planned, a car was waiting for her at the landing point. They handed her a charged pistol and a cyanide loaded pen in case the operation was a failure and she decided to take her own life to avoid torture and interrogation.

Marta’s heart beat fast with anticipation. She gathered herself and walked to the cabin where the spies were held prisoners.

To her surprise, when she opened the door, she found two soldiers sat at a table playing cards and drinking alcohol. They were drunk. Obviously, they’d assumed that their remote location would spare them unwelcome visits from their superiors and rescue squads.

They looked at her and immediately stood up and performed a military salute – all that whilst trying to hide the cards and booze. She couldn’t believe she was pulling it off! She was so close now.

In the coarsest voice she could manage, she demanded to interrogate the prisoners. One of the soldiers – maybe relieved that Marta was not questioning their pathetic state – gave her a key with one hand whilst with the other indicated a closed door at the end of a corridor behind them.

Marta walked towards the door, unlocked it, and quickly entered the dirty tiny cell, closing the door behind her. There were the two bruised spies sitting on the floor. Without delay, she kneeled down and whispered that she was on their side and asked them to follow her.

Once back to the entrance, where the soldiers were still standing upright, she unceremoniously announced that she had orders to take the prisoners with her. Then, she handed a stamped document to the one that had given her the key. He glanced over the fake transfer papers and returned them to her with a nod. She signalled the door to the spies and the three of them left the cabin before the soldiers could have changed their mind.

The car was waiting for them. The driver took them to a hidden airport where Marta and the two spies boarded the plane that’d take them to the headquarters of the military coalition fighting against Dreq.

Once they landed, the spies were rushed to the command centre, where they shared key information about the position of the enemy troops and their attack plans. That was all the coalition needed to finish the war.

At last, Marta could return home.

They told her that, once the battle was over, she’d be transported by a military cargo plane to Sokin, where her parents were waiting for her. What’s more, she’d receive the Medal of Resilience by the Queen of Tulia herself in recognition of her courageous efforts towards the liberation of the country.

Marta let out a long sigh of relief. For the first time in years, she allowed herself to savour the present and dream of the future.”

Pandora paused. After a couple of minutes, the Pandora’s voice asked, “Corrections Ada?”

“None, Pandora. I’m very pleased with the story. It’s taken you a few months to learn my writing style but I’m happy to say that today you’ve graduated as my scribe. “

“Thanks. Please confirm you transfer the copyright to the publishers Ada.”

“Confirmed Pandora.”

The voice said, “Your daily token allowance has been deposited in your blockchain account Ada”.

“Pandora, go to sleep now.”

The voice replied “I’m signing off Ada”.

The work for the day was done. Time for that stroll on the beach.

I left the e-brain on the coffee table and walked towards the door.

An illusration of a tropical beach with white sand, blue water, and palm trees in the foreground, and mountains in the background — Image by Clker-Free-Vector-Images from Pixabay.

The End

What do you think about future narratives as a tool to upend the status quo? What resonated with you in my first attempt? What did you find controversial?

Thanks to Arts Council England, Trafford Libraries, and Charlie Lea for the free online VE 75 themed creative writing workshop.

UPDATE FROM August 4th, 2024 – It’s been four years since I wrote this stoy. At the time we were in a pandemic. It was also well before ChatGPT was launched!

Reading as an antidote for indifference and exclusion

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Drawing of a white young woman looking through a telescope to a 13 book covers. The books are named in this post. — Figure adapted by Patricia Gestoso from images from Pixabay and Goodreads .

Books are a form of political action. Books are knowledge. Books are reflection. Books change your mind.
Toni Morrison

(5 min read)

In 2018, I discovered that in spite of considering myself a diversity and inclusion evangelist, the books I read were mostly written by white, anglophone, American, and heterosexual men. I was appalled at the homogeneity of the voices to whom I was paying attention. Decided to do something, I began to record not only if I liked a book, but categories such as the gender and ethnicity of the authors, where they were born or their religion.

As a result, in 2019 I read 40 books written by a much broader range of voices. The experience was so energizing, that a year ago I launched the #CuriousMindsDiversePeople2020 challenge [source]. The aim of the challenge was to serve as a quarterly accountability check for the diversity of the voices participants heard in 2020. Subscribers to the email list received quarterly emails reminding them to check the diversity of what and whom they were reading, listening, and watching and sharing with them the list of books I’d read in the previous three months.

Continue reading →

Unlocking change with ethical and inclusive design

4 Replies

A white male hand holding an open rusty padlock. Photo by Patricia Gestoso©.

(9 min read)

I’m not Black on Monday, a woman on Tuesday, and left-handed on Wednesday.

Annie Jean-Baptiste, Head of Product Inclusion at Google

My journey into ethical and inclusive design was prompted by embarrassment, fear, and impatience.

Embarrassment: When in December 2018, six months after launching my website on diversity and inclusion in tech, an expert in disability asked me if it was accessible and pointed me to the post 10 ways to make your blog accessible for people with a visual impairment on the site Life of A Blind Girl . Reading the article was transformative. It made clear to me that, irrespective of my intention — promoting diversity and inclusion — my impact was the opposite: Continue reading →

3 things we should unlearn from COVID-19

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Finger clicking on a button that has the inscription “31 December 2019”.

Figure adapted by Patricia Gestoso from this image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay .

(7 min read)

Imagine you go into a one-week change management training with the expectation is that when you are back to work you’ll reassure everybody that there is no need to change. How does that sound?

Actually, this is what’s happening right now. We’ve been in a change management boot camp for 3 months now, at the cost of $2-4 trillion US$ (UNCTAD, Asian Development Bank), but most leaders keep using sentences such as “back to normal” and “resume”, or simply they have gone hiding. Do they really believe we can all go backwards in time to 31 December 2019? Are they lacking the creativity and energy to be the catalyst for a different future miles away from their vision four months ago? Or are they simply patronizing their citizens and employees by thinking that if they keep insisting on going forward to the past, we’ll all close our eyes to our individual and collective experiences during this crisis?

If it’s the latest, it’s not working.

Continue reading →

Inclusive leadership in the time of the coronavirus is also worrying about food and toilet paper

2 Replies

Picture of the empty shelves in a supermarket in England. Picture taken on 14th March 2020 by Patricia Gestoso©

(3 min read)

Last week, I asked a colleague how her recent transition to remote working was going on. Was her internet and VPN working ok? Did she get access to the docking station, screen, and mouse from the office? Was she proactively taking breaks?

Her answers reassured me: Yes, yes, and yes.

She also told me that after finishing her work at 6.00 pm she rushed to the supermarket to only find broccoli and Brussels sprouts. We made fun about how some people rather starve than eat certain food. It also made me realize that I’ve failed as a leader.

The scarcity trap

The picture that accompanies this post it’s how the supermarkets looked like where I live a week ago. It’s how they looked all this week too. And this weekend as well. Me too, I’ve felt the pain and stress of visiting 3, 4, 5 supermarkets to gather the basic food and toiletries I needed.

Continue reading →

The ROI of Inclusive And Ethical Design

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A calculator and a pen resting on a paper with some handwritten notes.

Image by Shutterbug75 from Pixabay.

(5 min)

Interacting with tech products that reject me as a user or provide a subpar experience elicits two very different responses in me.

As a Head of Customer Service with 25+ years’ experience in scientific and engineering software, I’m well aware of the constraints imposed by a finite R&D team and an ever-growing list of customer enhancement requests and bugs to fix. It’s teams like mine that build those lists and provide feedback to the product team on their prioritization. Which features and fixes make it into code depends on a multitude of factors: the difficulty to implement them, their alignment with the vision for the product, and their potential impact on the user experience and expectations. This last criterion is assessed using fictional user personas created by the product team as a representation of the ideal customer. The closer the requester of the feature is to one of the user personas, the higher the chances of implementation into the product. However, if the issue is considered an edge case – not representative of a substantial customer base – then it will mostly get rejected or postponed indefinitely. Every new feature and fix must demonstrate its ROI.

As a woman that cumulates several out-group identities – e.g. non-native English speaker, poor vision – I’m used to the frustrating feedback that my mediocre user experience is deceptively cataloged as an edge case. Why deceptively? The average tech Continue reading →

Who are you reading and who are you silencing? The tale of how I diversified the voices from whom I learn

3 Replies

Three figures. One covers the mouth, other the eyes, the third one the ears.

Image by Peggy and Marco Lachmann-Anke from Pixabay.

(6 min read)

The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is […] that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Before using the term diversity and inclusion advocacy, I had already identified the need for it. I’m a woman, STEM studies, work in tech, and I’ve been an immigrant all my life. This intersection of out-group identities has often resulted in being seen as the other. It has also prompted me to consciously endeavour to listen and empower members of other out-groups.

However, a little more than a year ago, I realized that, unconsciously, I was silencing those other voices.

Continue reading →

Ditch empathy and embrace curiosity: Be a better manager, improve customer experience, and become a stronger diversity and inclusion ally

4 Replies

Child hand pointing to a blackboard with the words what, where, when, why, how, who.

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay.

The term empathy has been steadily gaining visibility for years. It’s not a hunch; as per Google Trends, its popularity has doubled in the last 10 years. This shift can be explained by empathy expanding from the personal sphere (partner, family, friendship) to the business arena (emotional intelligence, management, customer service, HR, diversity and inclusion). What’s more, empathy appears to be the cure-all for any human interaction mismatch (and for machines too: if only they would have empathy…).

But, is this based on hard evidence or wishful thinking?

I believe that betting on empathy is unlikely to make the positive change in human relationship we are looking for. Continue reading →

5 Strategies to make Unconscious Bias Training Effective

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A man throws a bag with the sign "unconscious bias training" in a trashcan with the label "Nice to Have".

Unconscious bias training being thrown in the trashcan of the “nice to have”.
Figure adapted by Patricia Gestoso from this original image by OpenIcons from Pixabay.

“I’ve studied cognitive biases my whole life and I’m no better at avoiding them”

Daniel Kahneman, 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics Sciences

Four years ago, my interest in human behavior — crucial for my work as head of customer service — led me to Daniel Kahneman’s book “Thinking, fast and slow”. The book details how biases and rules of thumb play a crucial role in our decisions in the back of our minds. Serendipitously, around the same time, I started some initiatives to further diversity and inclusion at my workplace and I stumbled on a wealth of studies naming unconscious biases as one of the major barriers women encounter to thrive at work.

The more I learned, the more I realized — in hindsight — how unconscious biases had plagued past decisions. I read books and articles, talked to experts, and watched Continue reading →

UK Gender Pay Gap Awareness: How to broaden the conversation at the workplace

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Chairing an employee awareness session about the UK Gender Pay Gap in Tech at the Dassault Systèmes office in Coventry.

Recently, I was invited to chair a “Breakfast & Learn” session at our Dassault Systèmes office in Coventry (UK). The topic: UK Gender Pay Gap. This article is a reflection on that great learning and interactive experience.

What is “Breakfast & Learn”? One-hour monthly awareness sessions organized by our Great Place to Work (GPTW) ambassadors around a specific theme. Ideally, the presenters should keep the topic light and open, avoid the profusion of slides, encourage the audience participation, and limit the use of jargon. A healthy breakfast is provided along.

Why me? I founded the EuroNorth Dassault Systèmes Lean In circles in 2016 to advance diversity and inclusion initiatives at a regional level, I’m a member of the EuroNorth Diversity and Inclusion Council, and I’ve had the pleasure to host virtual employee meetings with our UK HR team to discuss the findings of our gender pay gap reports for 2016/2017 and for 2017/2018.

Why this topic? I learned that the recent publication of the Dassault Systèmes Gender Pay Gap report had been a hot topic for discussion in this office. There were different views regarding the scope, key indicators, and impact of the UK gender pay gap as well as the usefulness of reporting the data. Continue reading →

Two Alpinists in Mount Tech. Take #1: Meritocracy

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From the Merriam-Webster Dictionary

Piton \ ˈpē-ˌtän \ : a spike, wedge, or peg that is driven into a rock or ice surface as a support (as for a mountain climber).

Weight \ ˈwāt \ : a heavy object to hold or press something down or to counterbalance.

Meritocracy \ mer-ə-ˈtä-krə-sē \ : A system in which the talented are chosen and moved ahead on the basis of their achievement.

This year, AI will be shaped by data centres, geopolitics, and the workplace

My Predictions

Back To You

WORK WITH ME

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How abortion, AI, bothsidesign, feminism, and trans people are weaponised to distract us from the assault on human rights and tech bros plundering the planet

Abortion

Artificial Intelligence

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Criminalised Women

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Sign #1: The Promise of Paradise

Sign #2: Infallibility or the Promise of Enlightenment

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The State of Play

All that’s wrong with using the term “deepfake porn”

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Challenges

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AI and Me

At Work

As a DEI Trailblazer

As a Sustainability Advocate

AI and Women

Women Leading AI

Weaponisation of AI

My Aha Moment

Non-Tech Women

Women In Tech

Women In Ethics

Women And The Gender AI Adoption Gap

My Bet: Women Leading with AI

About the Program:

BONUS

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How women use shame

The remedy

As a Victim

As a Bystander

As a perpetrator

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Motivation Reality Check

Governments and Societies

The Motivational Industrial Complex

The Alternatives to Motivation

Reframing Motivation as a Luxury

Chunking

Deciding in Advance How Enough Looks Like

Group Support

Coaching

Wrapping Up

WORK WITH ME

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The Troubled History of AI Chatbots for Mental Support

AI Companions Now

Cross-sectional Study

Longitudinal Study

Benefits of AI Companions

Mitigate Unmet Demand for Healthcare and Support

Support Self-reliance

Enable Exploration and Gamification

Challenges and Risks

Anthropomorphism

Isolation

Governments Failing Their Duty of Care

Manipulation

Dependency and Delusion

Weaponisation of AI Agents

Data Harvesting

Snake Oil

Let’s Build The Plane Before We Fly It