Category Archives: Patriarchy

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 A​I 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

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?

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:

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 A​I 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

“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.

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

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?

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:

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​.

PS. You and AI

  • ​Are you worried about ​the impact of A​I 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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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.

I’ve been pondering what I’d like my last post of the year to be about. Below are some ideas that crossed my mind

  • Something that’ll prompt reflection about 2023 or action for 2024? 
  • A personal anecdote? 
  • A client aha moment?
  • An uplifting story? 
  • A cautionary tale?

I was definitely not thinking of discussing women and money. The reason? I’ve talked about women and money extensively since I started blogging. For example, I’ve discussed

  • The UN findings about how women invest 90 percent of their income back into their families, compared with 35 percent for men. 
  • How society profits from the unpaid work of women and how we could rethink it for a better tomorrow. 
  • How salary increases are one of the ways my clients reap the benefits of my coaching and mentoring program.

Three factors made me decide to revisit yet again the topic before the end of the year

  • 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 that I was “removing my coaching hat and putting my mentoring hat on” I exhorted her to negotiate her salary and offered my availability to provide feedback on the compensation package. Her reply clearly showed me that she wasn’t aware salaries were negotiable.
  • Recently, 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 realise that when we talk about how gender influences salaries, often many things get conflated — for example, equal salary and the gender pay gap.
  • Last but not least, this year 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, as well as the main sources of the remaining gender gap.”

In this article, I 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
  • The leverage available during salary negotiations

But first, let’s start with the personal reason I’m so invested in this topic.

My salary story

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. Their bargaining chip was that they knew I was without a job and that it was obvious I was quite inexperienced in negotiating my compensation package. 

My gut feeling was that 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, a year later I learned that I was severely underpaid. That had three consequences

  1. Feeling betrayed by the organisation, I decided to search for another job, which I landed about a year later.
  2. As bonuses, promotions, and pension schemes depended on my salary, that initial negotiation mishap penalised my earnings — and retirement “pot” — for many years.
  3. Given the pervasive practice of asking candidates for their previous salaries, several times it compromised any leverage I could have when negotiating a new role.

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 recognised 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, 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. 

A new EU pay transparency directive, adopted in April 2023, will “ 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. 

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: 

  1. 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”.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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!

Worst case scenario? You get what you got offered in the first place but at least you know you reached the maximum that was 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. Set a salary increase goal for 2024.
  2. Share this article with a woman who will benefit from negotiating her salary in 2024.

Happy New Year!

Upwards & Onwards: The Career Breakthrough Gift You Deserve in 2024

Last Friday, I received an email from a super-smart and ambitious woman that joined my personalised program “Upwards & Onwards”.

This is a 3-month coaching and mentoring package where I work 1:1 with clients to

  • Examine where they are in their careers.
  • Decide on their next bold professional move and ensure that it integrates into the lifestyle they want for themselves.
  • Identify the gaps between where they are and where they want to be.
  • Create a plan.
  • Implement the plan.

When we started the program, this client had been blocked in her career progression for some years and the gap between her situation and the career she dreamed for herself appeared to be insurmountable.

Forwards to last week: In her email, she told me she just accepted a job offer that epitomised the role of her dreams! To her credit, she embraced coaching and mentoring and consistently followed up with the plan.

Through this program, others have succeeded in getting

  • Both a promotion and salary increase during maternity leave.
  • An internal promotion.
  • A more senior job in another organisation.
  • A substantial salary increase.

QUESTION: Are you ready to get the career you deserve? Click on this link to purchase the “Upwards & Onwards” program for £850.00.

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Click on this link to purchase the “Upwards & Onwards” program for £850.00.

QUESTIONS? Book a free call.

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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.

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? 

Upwards & Onwards: The Career Breakthrough Gift You Deserve in 2024

Last Friday, I received an email from a super-smart and ambitious woman that joined my personalised program “Upwards & Onwards”.

This is a 3-month coaching and mentoring package where I work 1:1 with clients to

  • Examine where they are in their careers.
  • Decide on their next bold professional move and ensure that it integrates into the lifestyle they want for themselves.
  • Identify the gaps between where they are and where they want to be.
  • Create a plan.
  • Implement the plan.

When we started the program, this client had been blocked in her career progression for some years and the gap between her situation and the career she dreamed for herself appeared to be insurmountable.

Forwards to last week: In her email, she told me she just accepted a job offer that epitomised the role of her dreams! To her credit, she embraced coaching and mentoring and consistently followed up with the plan.

Through this program, others have succeeded in getting

  • Both a promotion and salary increase during maternity leave.
  • An internal promotion.
  • A more senior job in another organisation.
  • A substantial salary increase.

QUESTION: Are you ready to get the career you deserve? Click on this link to purchase the “Upwards & Onwards” program for £850.00.

Purchase “Upwards & Onwards”

NOTE: From January 2nd 2024, I’ll raise the price to £970.00. This price change is a reflection of my commitment to keeping the program affordable whilst making my business sustainable financially.
 
Click on this link to purchase the “Upwards & Onwards” program for £850.00.

#CareerCoaching #CareerPromotion #CareerProgression #CareerSuccess #WorkLifeCoaching #LifeCoaching

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 A​I 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.

WEBINAR RECORDING: From self-criticism to inner wisdom

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?

RECORDING: From self-criticism to inner wisdom

Recently, I ran a one-hour webinar where I demystified confidence for ambitious women who want to thrive in their professional and personal lives.

I shared

  • My personal story about confidence.
  • · The true nature of confidence.
  • Three career traps triggered by self-criticism.
  • A framework to reverse the influence of patriarchal self-criticism so you can benefit from your inner wisdom and redefine confidence in your terms.

BONUS: During the webinar, I also coached two women on how to overcome the patriarchal beliefs that were holding them back from progressing in their careers. 

Click here to access the recording and learn how to develop a healthy relationship with your feeling of confidence.

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.

WEBINAR RECORDING: From self-criticism to inner wisdom

Dear reader,

Each time you’re confronted with a choice to make, 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 life-work 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 life-work 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 looking into each word in this statement “life-work balance”

  • What does the binary life vs work tell you? Maybe that 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 how they are 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 cannot do all the things on 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 that are 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 to be better at time management.
  • You should be “fixed” through hundreds of very expensive programs that promise to teach you the “ultimate time management tools”.
  • You’re rightly patronised about the choices you make — others know better than you what you should do to achieve “work-life balance”.

What would happen if you dared to replace the thought “You should be able to achieve a life-work 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

FREE WEBINAR: From self-criticism to inner wisdom

Women from different ethnicities and ages standing up with their arms crossed looking at the camera.

RECORDING: From self-criticism to inner wisdom

Recently, I ran a one-hour webinar where I demystified confidence for ambitious women who want to thrive in their professional and personal lives.

I shared

  • My personal story about confidence.
  • · The true nature of confidence.
  • Three career traps triggered by self-criticism.
  • A framework to reverse the influence of patriarchal self-criticism so you can benefit from your inner wisdom and redefine confidence in your terms.

BONUS: During the webinar, I also coached two women on how to overcome the patriarchal beliefs that were holding them back from progressing in their careers. 

Click here to access the recording and learn how to

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.

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

What about art?

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?

Work with me — My special offer

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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.

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. 

Work with me — My special offer

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  • 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 insight?
  • What if you could stop the habits that don’t serve you well and have a better work-life balance?

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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?

Next

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

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.

Work with me

Contact me to explore how we can work together

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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 A​I 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?
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Why performative inclusion thrives? Because it’s a win-win billionaire industry

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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?

Three takes on rethinking unpaid care for a better tomorrow

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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?

Book a strategy session with me to explore how coaching can help you to become your own version of success.

Book a free strategy session

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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10 Promotion secrets revealed: The poison of well-meaning advice

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Suprised woman.
Image by Robin Higgins from Pixabay.

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 10 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.
 

Get the other 5 pieces of bad advice — and what to do instead — when you join my newsletter where I share fresh thinking about inclusion, tech, professional success & systemic change through a feminist lens. Sign here to receive the guide “10 Pieces of Bad Career Advice and What to Do Instead”.

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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.

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?

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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?

PS. I can help you to unblock your career 

Book a strategy session with me to explore how coaching can help you to become your own version of success.

Book a free strategy session

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.

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?

Motherboard matters
Picture of a computer motherboard that illustrates my article Motherboard Matters in The Mint Magazine.