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The Truth About Women, AI, and Confidence Gaps

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AI and Me

At Work

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

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

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

Then, all changed a few years ago.

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

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

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

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

As a DEI Trailblazer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As a Sustainability Advocate

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

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

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

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

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

AI and Women

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

Women Leading AI

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LinkedIn testimonial.

Weaponisation of AI

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

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

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

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

And chatbots are great enablers of propagating biases.

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

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

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

My Aha Moment

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

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

Non-Tech Women

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

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

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

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

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

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

Women In Tech

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

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

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

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

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

Women In Ethics

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

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

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

But is that true? Yes, and no.

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

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

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

Women And The Gender AI Adoption Gap

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

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

When compared to men, women are more likely to

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My Bet: Women Leading with AI

Through my July of AI breakthroughs, I learned that

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

This coalesced in a bold idea:

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

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

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

About the Program:

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

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

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

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

BONUS

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

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

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

Why attend?

• Uncover key barriers women face in using AI.

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

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

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

Date: Tuesday 12th August 

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

You can register following this link.

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

How to Reclaim Your Voice After Female Shaming

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why did this feel so bad?

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

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

What I could have done differently?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Download HERE

How women use shame

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

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

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

Examples are sentences like;

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

Shaming as a weapon is most effective when;

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

But it doesn’t need to be this way.

Pink painkiller pills.
Image by Petr from Pixabay

The remedy

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

As a Victim

Depending on the context, you can,

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

As a Bystander

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

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

As a perpetrator

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

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

Before

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

During

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

After

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

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

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

How Resilience Became the New Gaslighting

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Photo by Mehmet Turgut Kirkgoz.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Neither can I.

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

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

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

The Resilience Sellers

The “grow your resilience” business

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

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

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

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

Continue reading →

How to Build Inclusive Tech Workplaces That Retain Women Leaders

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

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

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

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

About Me

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

I can categorise them into five buckets.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

About Others

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

I have three pieces of advice

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

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

Download HERE

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

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

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

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

There are four key actions

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

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

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

Back to You

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

WORK WITH ME

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And I came up with 10 precepts.

1.- Recycle

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

The kick? The photos were stolen.

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

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

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Seven Ways Big Data Leaves Women Out of the Equation

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Photo by Rada Aslanova.

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

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

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

“F*ck data. Data does f*ck all.

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

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

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

Cindy Gallop

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

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

Still, Cindy’s post triggered an epiphany.

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

Let’s show you what I found.

Gender Data Myths

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

W. Edwards Deming

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

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

Because we’ve been using data against women.

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

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

Lack of data

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

Brené Brown

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Photo by cottonbro studio.

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

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

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

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Beta Leaders: How Software Development Can Inspire Better Leadership

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alpha Animals

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

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

Wikipedia


Attributes of alpha animals in some species are

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

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

The Alpha Myths

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alpha Human Leadership

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

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

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

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

And scanning Google doesn’t help clarify matters.

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

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

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

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

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

Morgan Phillips Group, Recruitment and Talent Consulting Services


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

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

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

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

Harvard Business Review

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

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

Harvard Business Review


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

Female Alpha Leaders

As for female alpha leaders, HBR is skeptical…

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

The reasons?

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

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

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

Alpha Leaders Bottom Line

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

Their solution? “Teach” those leaders to

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

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

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

What could go wrong?

Other Leadership Styles

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

The Mutating Leader

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

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

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

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

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

The Virtuous Leader

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

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

The problem? 

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

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

* * *

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

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

Software Development: Alpha and Beta Versions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There are critical differences between alpha and beta releases

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not bad for a piece of code, is it?

Beta Leadership

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

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

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

Beta Societies

I posit that beta leadership would make patriarchy lose ground.

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

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

Beta Workplaces

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

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

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

Beta Investing

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

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

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

Which in turn would result in 

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

What’s not to like?

Let’s Be More Beta

We’ve been sold lies about leadership:

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

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

Overconfident · Toxic · Disrespectful · Patronising · Irresponsible

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

Let’s embrace beta leadership.

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

How do they do it? 

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Five Uncomfortable Truths About Being an Inclusion Advocate in Tech

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My journey as a diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) advocate started in 2015 when I learned two hard lessons

  • I got the memo that my tech career had reached a diamond ceiling —appealing from the outside, unbreakable from the inside. Although I was consistently rated as a top performer, my managers were unable to see my professional potential as I was perceived as “too different” to be a tech leader.

Once I realized the systemic nature of those issues, I decided to “fix” them. I aimed to create an employee resource group (ERG) on gender, learn everything I could about the topic, and sort out gender inequality at my workplace by making the business case for management change. Problem solved.

Just writing the paragraph above has made me smile. I feel both compassion and admiration for that younger version of myself who was bold enough to reach out from the UK to our regional and worldwide leadership teams and talk to them about DEI. Some of them didn’t answer. One — based in France — replied to me.

“Diversity and inclusion? Is this an American thing, Patricia?”

Some supported me, like the regional Manager and HR Director for Northern Europe, which included the UK. With their backing, I created the ERG, learned everything I could about DEI, and made the business case for change. But that wasn’t enough to get the business to change its behaviour. So, I kept working.

Nine years later, I’m a proud, award-winning inclusion strategist. My efforts spearheading and supporting countless initiatives to promote diversity and inclusion in tech products and workplaces were recognized with the UK 2020 Women in Tech Changemakers award. I’ve also been featured in the 2022 and 2023 longlist of most influential women in UK tech.

But it’s still not enough. I haven’t “solved” homogeneity, exclusion, or inequality at my workplace, and definitively not in tech.

Paradoxically, that apparent “failure” hasn’t decreased my commitment to the DEI cause; it is the opposite. It has strengthened my resolve to make teams, organizations, products, and societies more inclusive.

How have I managed to keep going?

First and foremost, because of my unwavering conviction that harnessing diversity, inclusion, and equity is the key to a flourishing society.

Second, by accepting five uncomfortable truths about my imperfect DEI advocacy.

Let me share them with you.

I Love People Who Don’t Believe in My DEI Values

Somehow, I unconsciously assumed that everybody in my close family circle espoused my DEI values. They are such a lovely and kind group; how could it be different?

About 20 years ago, I had a terrible argument with a family member close to me. The person was visiting my house, and as we were chatting over lunch, they began to disparage Black people.

I dissented. I tried to convince them. It didn’t work. They left the house very upset — I was too — and we didn’t rekindle the relationship until a year later when we met again for a family reunion.

That event was so painful that for years, I tried to sugarcoat it. I’d tell myself that the person was “kind but a little racist,” like racism was spice, where you can have a sprinkle without being too much. It was only one of many situations. Every time, the pattern repeated. They’d blame a group of the population for something, and I’d try to persuade them how that was unfounded. They tried to convince me I was being gullible, and we parted, angry, hurt, and disappointed. I’d rewrite those events in my head with qualifiers minimizing the incident: “This is a one-off,” “They’ve had a hard life,” or “They’ll change their minds.”

As I embarked on my DEI journey, I realized that I was kidding myself. There is no “being a little” racist, sexist, or anti-Semitic.

Moreover, as the world we live in was confronted with extreme events such as terrorism, pandemics, and war, weaponizing other groups — Muslims, disabled people, immigrants — for our misfortunes had become the norm. That meant that those themes would come up over and over… No more pretense that everyone believed that everybody was equal or had the same rights.

I was torn. Should I cut ties with all those I loved who didn’t endorse my values, as other brave people I knew did?

For friends, the choice was obvious — walk away — but I had to make a decision for family.

It was hard. I felt like a traitor. A liar. A coward.

With a heavy heart, I made an imperfect decision: When people within my close family circle are discrediting or belittling somebody only because they are part of an underrepresented group, depending on the situation.

  • I’ll state my position and won’t try to convince them.
  • If they already know my opinion, I won’t engage in the discussion.

I don’t see this as a “happy medium” or “optimal” solution, far from it. My heart aches every time.

But I discovered that my heart also has its “own” mind, that I love my family, and that I can only hope that something in this “pacifist” resistance spurs some reflection.

I Cannot Understand All Human Experience 

The arms and hands of two men shaking hands. One of the men has vitiligo.
Photo by Armin Rimoldi.

Since I can remember, I’ve loved learning. The feeling that I get to understand new concepts, processes, and systems gives me a huge dopamine rush.

And that includes DEI. I thoroughly enjoyed plunging into behavioural science textbooks about how biases work. I sent myself down a rabbit hole to understand the roots of the racial correction and how it operates. And I spent months researching for my systems map of the Factors Accounting for the Low Representation of Women in Leadership Positions in Tech Companies.

It was when I was mentored by a trans woman that I finally grasped that there are limits to what I can understand from others’ experiences. 

I remember listening to her describe how, as a small boy, she thought something was amiss and that, as puberty arrived, she felt that “things were going in the wrong direction.” I realized I’d deluded myself into believing that “learning” was the magic bullet toward inclusion. No amount of studying could bridge the “experience gap” between us.

Then, I finally grasped that understanding didn’t always matter. I was not asked to recreate that journey in my head by trying to assimilate it into something I’ve experienced myself. That’d be akin to telling somebody with cancer, “I know what you feel; it reminds me of when I broke my leg,” i.e., combining two unrelated experiences to sound empathic.

Instead, as a DEI advocate, I was asked to believe that somebody can know their gender is different from their assigned sex at birth — even if I never get to experience it myself.

In summary, I may not be able to understand all human experience, but I can still believe it.

I’ll Always be Uncomfortable with my Past

As I progress in my journey, I sometimes feel uncomfortable — and even ashamed —  of things I thought, said, or wrote in the past. 

For example, it’s hard to believe that years ago I thought of myself as well-informed about feminism but didn’t know what intersectionality was. Or that six months after launching my website about the intersection of tech and diversity I discovered that my website was inaccessible to people using screen readers. Or that I thought unconscious bias training was the one-size-fits-all solution to all DEI challenges.

Moreover, I now know that bias is inherent to human brains, so there is no cure other than being vigilant and experimenting with processes to mitigate that bias.

For example, I’ve developed a structured hiring approach involving individual interviews, hard and soft skill grid assessments, and pushing for diverse candidate slates. While this is a considerable improvement compared to how I hired people 15 years ago, I’ll never be done improving it.

I now provide alt text to the images in my posts and use nest headings to organize the content I write, all intending to make my writing more accessible to disabled people. However, I’m sure there is plenty of room for improvement, and that’ll continue to uncover ways in which my website, my processes, and my language unknowingly exclude groups I want to include.

But shouldn’t I be given a pass at some point? Don’t I have the right to slack a bit? After all, they say, “Ignorance is bliss.”

My answer: I don’t think that applies to DEI.

When discussing diversity and inclusion, ignorance is often presented as an alibi to justify discrimination and prejudice, “They didn’t know” or “They haven’t had that lived experience.”

In my book, my ignorance is my responsibility. And with that, I don’t mean the disempowering and humiliating responsibility.

Instead, I see it as a responsibility that encourages me to search for answers, question the status quo, and share what I’m learning with others.

I Must Embrace the Cassandra in Me

Cassandra in Greek mythology was a Trojan priestess dedicated to the god Apollo and fated by him to utter true prophecies but never to be believed. In modern usage her name is employed as a rhetorical device to indicate a person whose accurate prophecies, generally of impending disaster, are not believed.

When the COVID-19 pandemic spread to Europe, people told me

“Patricia, your work advocating for women in tech is done. Now women can work from home — problem solved.”

I was convinced that the problem was not fixed but rather amplified — confinement meant that women had to do their paid jobs, perform their household chores, school their children, and care for their elders 24/7. To prove it, I surveyed over 1,300 professional women worldwide to assess the impact of the pandemic on their unpaid work and published a report confirming my worst fears.

In 2021, I warned about hybrid work as the “cure” to the lack of women in tech.

I’ve also denounced how my own sector, tech, focuses on an “ ideal” user — white, able, wealthy, cisgender, male — and considers everybody else as an “edge” case not worth designing for.

Moreover, when I successfully contributed to lobbying for increasing the maternity leave benefits for employees in the UK in my organisation, rather than resting on my laurels, I went to support extended paternity leave for workers in our Dutch offices. Since then, each time we talk about our company’s gender pay gap, I’ve made the point that we need to go far beyond the statutory 2 weeks of paternity leave for our UK employees if we’re serious about making a dent in this problem.

Looking at all the evidence above, it’s not surprising that people—myself included—have wondered if I’m wired to be a contrarian, see only the gaps, or simply unable to celebrate the wins.

There may be some truth in all those assertions. It continues to be a struggle for me to balance savouring progress with pushing for change.

I May Not Be Doing Enough

Black laptop open on a table besides a black ceramic mug. The laptop screen shows the text “Do More.”
Photo by Remy_Loz on Unsplash.

I often get accolades when I share my DEI advocacy work with others. They praise how my articles and keynotes have touched them or how amazed they are that I devote time to be a trustee of a charity focused on people affected by homelessness, volunteer as a coach for female leaders in Manchester who cannot afford coaching, lead UK partnerships for European Women on Boards; and contribute to We and AI, a British NGO working to encourage, enable, and empower critical thinking about AI.

This feeling of accomplishment is compounded by receiving awards recognizing my efforts to make tech workplaces more inclusive and being featured among amazing women in tech.

What’s not to like?

But the reality is that I live in a world where a series of random facts have automatically given me outstanding privileges over other people. For example

  • I’m white, able, heterosexual, and cisgender. I also have a family that cared for me when I was a child and has repeatedly shown me how much they love me.
  • Whilst I’m an immigrant, I have a Spanish passport — one of the most powerful in the world — and although I carry two genetic diseases, we have a free National Health Service in the UK and I have access to private healthcare too.

I’ve also benefited from the advocacy done by incredible women before me. As I consequence, I’ve been able to vote, access contraception, open a bank account in my own name, and go to the university where I earned a BSc and MSc in Chemical Engineering and a PhD in Chemistry.

And then, there are incredible DEI role models with less privilege and means than me who are smashing it. They

  • Publish inspiring books — I’m still searching for a publisher for my book about “How Women Succeed in Tech Worldwide.”
  • Have a thoughtful weekly newsletter — this year I started publishing a new article every weekend and now the cadence has decreased to one every three weeks.
  • Have created thriving communities of thousands of members — I struggle to get 15 people to attend our gender ERG bimonthly meetings.

So I wonder at what point I’ll feel I’m doing “enough.” Will I ever get there?

I don’t know. Maybe that’s the way is supposed to be.

“I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.”

​Audre Lorde

What about you?

As I’m finishing this article, I’m beginning to second-guess my decision to share this less inspirational part of my DEI journey.

Should I keep these reflections for myself and hope somebody else voices them so I can learn from them?

My brain also catastrophises about who will retort back, unsubscribe, or even be hurt by this piece.

But in the end, a question makes me finally press the “Publish” button

Am I the only one grappling with those issues?

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How to be a Better Coach: 7 Best Practices to Deliver Inclusive Coaching Experiences

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Photo by Christina @ wocintechchat.com on Unsplash.
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Since 2015, I’ve spearheaded several initiatives to promote diversity and inclusion in tech products and the workplace that were recognized with the UK 2020 Women in Tech Changemakers award.

An inflection point in that trajectory was when, in June 2018, I launched my website focused on diversity and inclusion to broaden my audience as a DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) advocate, a role I’d been actively playing alongside my corporate job as Head of Customer Support.

Six months later, I shared my website with an assistive technology expert whom I met during a MOOC. She asked me if my site was accessible and shared a post from The Life of a Blind Girl blog where the author — a blind woman who uses a screen reader — shared her frustration about people making their websites inaccessible and ten tips easy tips to mitigate the problem.

As I was reading her accessibility tips, I realised my website was inaccessible. I was floored and disappointed with myself because I hadn’t thought about it. I had assumed that because I considered inclusion one of my values, the result of my actions would automatically reflect it. At that moment, I realized the gap between intention and impact.

Moreover, when I broadened my focus beyond women’s equity to other aspects of identity — ethnicity, disability, age — and began understanding intersectionality’s role in exacerbating the oppression some individuals or groups experience, I discovered two things.

First, “Inclusion is a practice, not a certificate.” You need to continuously update your knowledge about diversity and inclusive and equitable practices.

Second, DEI is at play in every interaction that involves two or more persons. And that includes coaching.

In this article, I distill seven practices you can incorporate as a coach to deliver more inclusive experiences to your coachees. Many of them are transferable to other activities, such as mentoring and consulting. They can also help managers to create better experiences for hiring candidates and direct reports. 

Why you should care

Coaching is a partnership between the coach and the client, meaning that the rapport between coach and coachee is non-hierarchical — the client is an expert on their life, and the coach is an expert on the coaching process.

However, the client and the coach live in the real world, where biases, stereotypes, and privileges exist. Therefore, the coach must intentionally address the impact of differences with the coachee that may create power asymmetry and exacerbate the systems of oppression the client already endures. Some of those characteristics are gender, social level, sexual preference, ethnicity, (dis)ability, and age, to mention a few.

As Trudi Lebron states in The Antiracist Business Book, 

“The more diversity you have, the more inclusion you need to facilitate to achieve equitable outcomes.”

How coaches can facilitate inclusion

Let’s look at several best practices you can implement to offer clients an inclusive coaching experience.

Onboarding

We must ensure our clients feel welcome when they start working with us. In coaching, we may be tempted to focus only on the onboarding of a new client on explaining our coaching approach and program— how many sessions, the frequency, and pricing — as well as ensuring that there is a good alignment with the client about the kind of transformation they want out of coaching.

However, DEI is at play in every interaction that involves two or more persons. And that includes coaching.

One often overlooked consideration in onboarding is creating a welcoming atmosphere for the client’s physical body and mind. This could be through a conversation or by creating an onboarding form where you ask your client about the following:

  • Their pronouns
  • Special requirements (e.g. captions, avoiding using specific colours, etc.)
  • If they have been coached or mentored before
  • What approaches have motivated them to achieve a goal
  • What approaches have discouraged them from taking action
  • What activities help them to think? Some examples are journaling, listening to music, drawing, creating mind maps, and walking.

I prefer to use an onboarding form and follow up with a conversation as needed. One advantage of the form is that it allows clients to decide what they want to disclose before you meet them. 

Also, establishing certain reciprocal disclosures may help to level the playing field. This is how it works in my case

  • My email signature has my pronouns
  • I inform clients that, as a non-native English speaker, automated captioning may not work as well for English speakers
  • I share that my coaching practice is anchored in feminist theory, specifically on acknowledging the effects of intersectionality, systemic oppression, and lived experiences.

Logistics

As with all professionals, coaches have their preferences — virtual versus in-person coaching, phone versus video, etc. But what about our clients’ preferences and needs?

If your client is Deaf or hard of hearing, coaching them over the phone may not be an option. Chances are that they prefer to meet in person or use a video meeting application that provides on-the-fly captioning.

What about a dyslexic client? Maybe your lengthy emails and requests for daily journaling are a deterrent rather than an enabler of their transformation. A client in the autism spectrum may prefer to keep the video off to reduce the sensory stimulus or feel more at ease with asynchronous communication such as email.

And what about the role of technology? Especially after the pandemic, we assume everybody is comfortable jumping into a Zoom meeting, sending emails, or using PayPal. That’s not always the case, and it’s on the coach to ensure their clients feel at ease with the tech applications that underpin their coachees’ partnership.

Your preparation as a coach

How do you prepare for a new client? Maybe you review your notes about how you coached “similar” clients. Maybe you realize you’ve never coached a client with that goal or background, which triggers feelings of inadequacy and anxiety.

The reality is that, consciously or unconsciously, your brain has already made a “picture” of your client before the coaching engagement starts.

From the first interaction, even if it’s an email from a person with a non-gendered name — Alex, Rowan, Courtney — your mind is already filling in the gaps about characteristics such as gender, ethnicity, sexual preferences, age, etc. And what your brain “decides” is not random but informed by your biases — conscious and unconscious — cultural stereotypes, and even your mood.

How do we counter those rules of thumb? Being intentional. Here are some ways to bring consciousness to your practice:

  • Understanding your triggers. Maybe you have strong views on politics or religion that, left unchecked, may bias the kind of questions you ask.
  • Knowing your limitations. If you feel uncomfortable around people with different backgrounds to yours, don’t use your client as your resource to learn about their ethnicity, country of birth, or disability. Instead, refer your client to another coach and increase your knowledge in that area of diversity.
  • Anticipating your reaction. How would you react if, during an executive coaching session, your client shared that they have been cheating on their partner? Or that they’ve learned they have a terminal condition? Your brain may default to a flight, fly, or freeze response when faced with an unexpected situation. One of the best ways to mitigate an unwanted reaction is to think about how you would respond to it.

Finally, when preparing to meet a new client, I invite you to reflect on the following prompts and welcome the answers with curiosity:

  • What do you expect them to look like?
  • What do you expect their problems to be like?
  • What can you do to prepare?

Be willing to ask for help

Certifications, continuous education, and years of experience practicing coaching are invaluable assets, but they can also make you feel overconfident. For example, your long list of curated coaching questions is enough to tackle anything your thinking partner may bring to the session.

Unfortunately, that’s not true.

In many cases, providing ongoing inclusive coaching experiences to disabled people, those with a history of trauma, or people weighing the decision to come out as LBTQAI+ employees at work requires specific practices.

It’s your duty to search for support through supervision, peer groups, and training to fill in those gaps. Moreover, you should be willing to refer the client to another colleague or service if you anticipate that you won’t be able to minimize those gaps in your coaching practice fast enough that they don’t hinder your client’s transformation.

Factor systems of oppression

Most coaching approaches rely heavily on the power of our minds to shape our reality.

However, helping your client to gain awareness about their limiting beliefs, strengths, and internal resources doesn’t mean assuming that privilege and opportunity are equally distributed.

When a client shares experiences of sexism, racism, or ageism in the workplace and you offer them that “it’s all a thought,” you’re not helping them to access their inner wisdom but instead you’re gaslighting them. More precisely, you’re denying your client’s lived experience and the systems of oppression at play.

Instead, coaching can be a great tool to explore those systemic imbalances, more precisely, an opportunity to help your client to uncover epistemic injustice, a term coined by Dr. Miranda Fricker that describes injustices done against someone “specifically in their capacity as a knower.”

Examples of epistemic injustice are when somebody is not believed because of their identity — testimonial injustice — or when their experiences are not understood, so they are minimized or diminished — hermeneutical injustice.

What if coaching could help your client to get insights into the role biases, patriarchal structures, and privilege play in their life?

Overreliance on training within your coaching program

The coaching spectrum of Miles Downer invites us to consider how different activities are more directive than others. Some, like telling, instructing, and giving advice, are more hierarchical, whereas paraphrasing, reflecting, and listening to understand are less directive. Hence, a more directive style can further inequity if left unchecked.

By monitoring your usage of directive activities and understanding the reasons behind your chosen techniques, you’ll ensure they align with your values around equity rather than come from a place of perceiving your client as “helpless.”

Inclusive pricing

You may rely on coaching as your main and only source of revenue. As such, it may be difficult to consider reviewing your pricing scheme to offer your skills at a lower price or for free.

However, you may be fortunate enough to have some spare cycles to make coaching accessible to those who are less financially privileged. If that’s the case, you could consider the following ideas:

  • Volunteering with an association that provides free coaching to a certain group that may have limited access to paid coaching.
  • Providing a certain number of scholarships to your programs to people from underrepresented groups.
  • Offering coaching at a reduced price to those with less financial means. You can also use pricing scales for your offering. This episode of the “I Am Your Korean Mum” podcast discusses ways to incorporate more equity into your pricing when serving people with diverse financial circumstances.
  • Creating free content such as podcasts and articles.

Final thoughts

Once you go through this list, I invite you to apply an inclusion lens to other areas of your coaching practice. For example

  • How well does your website comply with web accessibility guidelines?
  • What about your social media? 
  • How can you embed inclusion, diversity, and equity into your continuous professional development?

And remember, “Inclusion is a practice, not a certificate.”

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Upwards & Onwards: The career breakthrough gift you deserve in 2024

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Four women of different ethnicities and ages in business casual attire in an office. They are standing up and have their arms crossed. They smile.

One of the things I’m proudest of this year is the launch of my “coachering” — coaching & mentoring — program “Upwards & Onwards”. 

Through this program, women and people from underrepresented groups have got

  • An internal promotion.
  • A job in another organisation more aligned with their career goals.
  • A more senior job in another organisation.
  • Applied for internal promotion and received detailed feedback on the skills and experiences needed to get the promotion next time around.
  • A substantial salary increase.
  • Both a promotion and salary increase during maternity leave.
  • Transitioned from a post-doctoral position at the university to a permanent role in a corporation.

What makes this program different from any other career program? 

This program provides both coaching and mentoring because we need both to succeed in a career that is also integrated with our personal life.

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

My background gives me unique insights into technology, bias, inclusion, equity, management, career growth, and behavioural science to help women and people from underrepresented groups to become successful on their terms whilst embracing kindness, joy, and self-compassion.

In addition to my coaching certification, I bring to the table

  • 18+ years mentoring and coaching women and people from underrepresented groups such as ethnic minorities, disabled people, and immigrants.
  • 15+ years of experience as a manager (including hiring, onboarding, promoting, firing, and layoffs).
  • Experience spearheading numerous initiatives to promote diversity and inclusion in tech that was recognized with the UK 2020 Women in Tech Changemakers award.
  • Featured in the Computer Weekly 2022 and 2023 longlist of the most influential women in UK tech.
  • DEI advisor for We and AI, a British NGO with the mission of making artificial intelligence work for everybody.
  • UK Committee Member for European Partnerships & Memberships for European Women on Boards, an NGO that supports the European Union’s Directive that introduces a binding objective of at least 40% of board members of each gender by 2026.
  • STEM degree (B.Sc., M.SC in Chemical Engineering, Ph.D. in Computational Chemistry)
  • A global perspective acquired by living in 6 countries on 3 continents and building professional and personal relationships with nationals of more than 50 countries.
  • Trilingual: English, French, and Spanish.

Imagine yourself a year from now. 

  • You have a new role that aligns with your definition of success.
  • Your work and personal lives are integrated rather than fighting each other.
  • You feel you’re fairly compensated for the work you do.

What between you and that future self? 

  • Self-doubt.
  • Self-criticism.
  • Limiting beliefs.
  • Fear of uncertainty.
  • Misinformation about how to advance your career.
  • Unawareness about how office politics work.

In this program, you will

  • Examine where are you in your career
  • Decide on your next bold professional move and ensure that it integrates into the lifestyle you want for yourself.
  • Identify the gaps between where you are and where you want to be.
  • Create a plan.
  • Implement the plan.

Let’s talk

Want more details? Keep reading!

Three women on their 20-30s of different ethnicities sat around a table smiling. Two of them are high fiving each other.

Upwards & Onwards: Coaching and mentoring program

Are you tired of waiting for the Powers that Be in your organisation to recognise the amazing work you?

Do you have enough of seen less skilled people to get promoted ahead of you?

Do you feel overworked and underappreciated?

That’s my story too and this is how I changed it.

My career promotion story

The idealized version of my career path is that I started as a training scientist for a mid-size tech company and I’m now Global Director of Scientific Support and Customer Operations for a Fortune Future 50 tech corporation. Wow!

The real version is much less dreamy. To get where I am now, I changed departments twice. I was passed over for promotion several times. I wasted precious time — especially at the beginning of my career — working extremely hard and waiting for others to realise the great work I was doing.

Maybe, the most interesting fact is that despite being a person who spent many years in the university learning how to do things — I have a Chem. Eng. B.Sc, M.Sc., Ph.D. as well as a post-doc — I simply assumed I knew how to get promoted, even if nobody had taught me how to do it!

What could I have done better?

Life is not a movie or Instagram, so we should expect challenges along the way.

Still, the major problem was that I assumed I had to figure it all out by myself. Or at most, with the advice of one or two friends or peers who wanted to help me out but didn’t have more direct experience than I had.

Through the years, I discovered that whilst I confronted my share of bias in my career, I had also internalised a long list of limiting beliefs. Uncovering them and putting a plan to neutralise them took coaching, mentoring, sponsoring, and, above all, time and effort towards understanding how to showcase my strengths and value to the business.

In addition to progressing faster in my career, by knowing what to expect, I could have enjoyed more the ride and felt less frustrated.

How can you go faster and make it easier?

I know that for me it wasn’t enough to discover the career promotion myths or how to counter them. It has taken mentoring, coaching, learning about behavioural science, my experience as a manager for 15+ years, and very time-consuming trial-and-error experiments.

I wish my past self could have learned from my present self how to get the next promotion.

That’s why I’ve created the 3-month “Onwards & Upwards” Career Promotion Breakthrough Program so you claim your power back and thrive in your career in 2024.

Get in touch
Smiling Asian businesswoman working at women and making a video call.

What’ll you get from “Upwards and Onwards”?

In this program, you will

  • Get clarity on your career goals and your next career move.
  • Examine your limiting beliefs, understand how they impact your career progression, and how you can overcome them.
  • Learn to befriend uncertainty to embrace new challenges.
  • Understand how to build your professional and personal support ecosystem.
  • Gain awareness about your negotiation comfort zone and enrich it with complementary approaches to enhance your career prospects.
  • Experiment with powerful communication styles that are aligned with your strengths and values and resonate with your interlocutors.
  • Reframe office politics as a tool to help you get things done, build relationships, and access opportunities.
  • Build the habit of lifting others as you climb.
  • Embrace self-coaching as a tool to build resilience.

Through our 1:1 work, you’ll gain interpersonal skills and learn tools that will strengthen your professional career.

What if you’re just starting a new role?

Getting promoted is a process. The earlier you start putting in place a strategy and acting on it, the higher the chances of success once you’re ready to get that promotion.

What’s the scientific evidence that this method works?

As somebody with an engineering, master, and Ph.D. degree, in addition to my years coaching individuals in my role as manager, it was important to get a certification that accredited me. Not only for the “title” but because I wanted to add further skills to my toolkit and get supervision.

Also because of my academic background, I’m keen on scientific evidence that proves the methods I use.

That’s the reason I was delighted to learn recently that the methodology I was certified on has been backed up by two peer-reviewed articles published in 2022 and 2023

“Effect of a Novel Online Group-Coaching Program to Reduce Burnout in Female Resident Physicians A Randomized Clinical Trial” JAMA Netw Open. 2022;5(5):e2210752.

Findings: In this pilot randomized clinical trial of 101 female resident physicians, participants who were randomly assigned to a 6-month group coaching program and a follow-up survey had a statistically significant reduction in emotional exhaustion and self-doubt, and an increase in self-compassion.

“Online Well-Being Group Coaching Program for Women Physician Trainees A Randomized Clinical Trial” JAMA Netw Open. 2023;6(10):e2335541.

Findings: In this randomized clinical trial of 1,017 women trainee physicians, participants randomly assigned to a 4-month group-coaching program had a statistically significant reduction in all scales of burnout, moral injury, and impostor syndrome, as well as improved self-compassion and flourishing, compared with the control group.

Testimonials

“I am happy that I’ve met Patricia in time. I am going through a career change period, which has become less frightening and more strategic.

She helped me see the patterns of how my mind is holding me back, and by the end of the coaching program, I noticed a shift in my self-confidence and resilience. In our sessions, we uncovered the root causes of my inaction, and solutions emerged naturally from her insightful questions. She also shared her wisdom and vision when I needed it.

She is passionate about coaching and empowering women and has all the necessary expertise to help. I enjoyed every session. Thank you, Patricia!”

Alena Sheveleva, Research Fellow

“Patricia has excellent knowledge and expertise on mentoring / coaching, in particular leadership for women. I greatly benefited from working with Patricia and found the experience & learnings extremely valuable for my own personal development and overall career growth.”

Aisling Mulhall, Events Senior Manager, Software company

“Patricia knows how to ask the right questions to let you come to the right conclusion and decide on next step in the journey. Patricia dared me to step out of my comfort zone”

Jolanda Bussner, Project Manager, Software company

I had the opportunity to work with Patricia through a coaching scheme at work. I personally got a lot out of the joint coaching sessions. Patricia has the skill to come across as supportive so you feel safe but she also will challenge you about why you think that way or what made you approach it from that angle, not this. There’s no judgment from her as she questions you, you can tell she’s just trying to understand everything. I hope to have the opportunity to work with her in the future.

R.B., Senior product designer

Patricia is an extremely knowledgeable and caring coach. In my short session with Patricia, she helped me to envision a future I want for myself and create a plan for that by myself. For a senior university student, Patricia was an insightful companion who supported me in navigating my career choices and living a happy life.

T.T., 4th year Economics Honours student at the University of British Columbia

Patricia was able to look at my experience, and then where I was right now. It literally felt like she was weaving together different strands to then hone in exactly on career blocks and give me some ideas to move past them.

Her style was to ask questions rather than give me a simple a to-do list, I also liked the way I felt I could trust her professional experience. She knew what I was talking about from inside my chosen sector.

Ruth Westnidge, Software Engineer

Patricia’s empathetic approach enabled me to work through my difficulties and find new ways of approaching my work projects.

The dedication and commitment she brought to our sessions gave me the confidence and encouragement to identify what was holding me back and to find possible solutions. Her insights always kept me focused on putting into action steps that would achieve results.

I gained enormously from my sessions with Patricia. Her experienced questioning guided me through a difficult period of transition from a career in the television industry to a new phase in my working life.

Bren Simson. TV director, author, local historian and guide

For more testimonials, go here.

Questions? Get in touch.

Myth-Busting Women’s Careers: The Truth About Collaboration and Empathy

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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?

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Theft of the Mind: When Women’s Ideas Become Men’s Triumphs

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Photo by Kalpit Khatri.
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Generative AI — and more precisely ChatGPT and text-to-image tools like Midjourney — have prompted a flurry of strikes and pushback from visual and writing professionals. And rightly so.

The reason? Book authors, painters, and screenwriters feel that’s unfair that tech companies earn money by creating tools based on scrapping their work result of many years spent learning their craft. All that without acknowledging intellectual property or providing financial compensation.

They say that this is “the first time in history” this has happened.

I dissent. This has been happening for centuries — to women. Let me explain.

There are three reasons that typically come up to explain why there haven’t been more women artists and scientists through the centuries:

  • Women have been too busy with children and house chores to dedicate time — and have the space — to scientific and artistic pursuits.
  • In many cultures, men have been priorised to go to school and university over women.
  • To avoid bias against their work, some women decided to publish their work under a male pen name or to disguise themselves as men

But there is a fourth cause. When women’s outstanding work has been credited to a man. So although the work itself may have won a Nobel prize or be showcased in museums, libraries, and galleries, it has been attributed to a man instead of the rightful female author.

​Hepeating​: When a man takes credit for what a woman already said

Let’s review some unsung sheroes of science and art.

Science and art — a land with no women?

Let’s start with science

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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From the Bible to the Football Field: Harassment in the Workplace

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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.

Let’s work together

90 days to the end of the year: Four strategies to achieve your 2023 goals

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Image of an analog alarm clock with a picture of a girl superimposed giving the impression that she's trying to climb the numbers in the clock.
Image by ThePixelman from Pixabay.
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Apologies to those of you who were expecting an article last week. Ten days ago my personal computer decided that it had given it all. I now have a new computer and I’m back to writing. Disaster adverted!

One of the things I was mulling over while I was sorting my computer was that from today, Sunday, October 1st, I have 3 months (roughly 90 days) left until the end of 2023. 

I was in shock first, thinking who stole my year. Then, I shifted to mentally assess how well I was doing with achieving my goals. I did that randomly, which, of course, triggered anxiety because my mind went straight to the things that I hadn’t accomplished. 

And finally, I calmed down.

I started by remembering all the things I’ve done and especially thanking my past self for writing a post before the summer compiling my achievements to date.

Next, I asked myself what were the top 3 things I wanted to accomplish before the end of the year.

Finally, the juicy question I want to share with you today: How do I get them? 

I came up with four different strategies that have helped in the past. I hope they work for you too.

Four ways to get what you want this year

#1 Ask for help

You may have been expecting something like “do a Google search”, “get a certificate”, “make a list” or any other satisfying way to proactively procrastinate. Don’t-you-dare.

Get comfortable with being uncomfortable and ask for help. In my experience, this is going to be especially difficult if you’re a giver. You’ll try to talk yourself out of it. Examples

“People are going to think I’m needy”.

“I cannot bother others with my problems”.

“Nobody can do this but me”.

Then, think about all the times you’ve helped people. Out of your goodwill, simply because you’re a kind person. Then, think that others are kind too.

And now it’s when it becomes uncomfortable for me because I’m going to do what I’m preaching…

HELP: I want to grow my coaching business so I’m looking for more clients. There are two ways people can work with me

One-on-one: I have two programs. The first focuses on becoming your own version of success The second is geared towards helping people who have experienced — or are experiencing  — hardships to move forward again and face life in a more healthy and sustainable way.

Last week I got a fantastic testimonial from somebody who finished one of the programs

I am happy that I’ve met Patricia in time. I am going through a career change period, which has become less frightening and more strategic.

She helped me see the patterns of how my mind is holding me back, and by the end of the coaching program, I noticed a shift in my self-confidence and resilience. In our sessions, we uncovered the root causes of my inaction, and solutions emerged naturally from her insightful questions. She also shared her wisdom and vision when I needed it.

She is passionate about coaching and empowering women and has all the necessary expertise to help. I enjoyed every session. Thank you, Patricia!

Alena Sheveleva, Research Fellow 

Group coaching: I’ve developed a 6-month program for people managers to give them tools to better handle the pressures of their work and move from stressed employees to satisfied professionals. The program is designed such that the managers can use the tools with their reports as well.

If you’re interested or you know somebody who may be, please connect with me.

Ufff. I did it. I asked for help.

#2 Be like a toddler

Through my years of being a coach and coaching others, a tool that comes up often is using our imaginary future self to help us unstuck ourselves.

Some examples

  • Write a letter to your future self.
  • Write yourself a letter from the future asking for advice.
  • Use visioning to meet with your future self.
  • Imagine yourself in 20 years receiving a prize, what will be your acceptance speech?

And so on.

They can be helpful to open ourselves to possibilities but they can also offer so many choices that we get trapped in analysis-paralysis limbo.

Also, sometimes it can be difficult to get inspired by a “version” of ourselves that we may not find particularly enticing.

For example, I found that some of my clients in their 60s and 70s are not super excited to ask for advice to their 80 or 90-year-old version of themselves. For some of them, it’s triggering since they wonder if they’d even be alive by then.

To prompt myself into action my trick is actually the reverse — what a toddler would do?

Because toddlers

1.- Have a great focus.

2.- Are very persistent.

3.- Make very clear what they want. .. and they are happy to let go of it if they find something better.

4.- They are open to experimenting with everything as “play”.

5.- They are extremely self-confident.

(6.- And they ask for help — see point #1 above)

So, when I’m stuck on inaction, rather than asking my future self for advice, I appeal to my “toddler energy” to get me moving.

Let me know in the comments how you’ll apply #ToddlerEnergy this week.

#3 Get a sponsor

I’ve been a mentor for years. Also, I’ve had many mentors. And as a woman tech, I’m reminded several days a week of the importance of mentors.

Let me tell you a secret: Get a sponsor.

Whilst a mentor is somebody who talks to you about their career and gives you advice based on their experiences, a sponsor is somebody who talks about you in rooms where you aren’t present (yet).

A sponsor

  • Makes introductions to people who can help you achieve your goals.
  • Recommends you to key stakeholders for projects, initiatives, and roles.
  • Uses their clout to help you to get what you want.

In summary, a sponsor actually puts themselves in the line for you — they vouch for you. 

Top tip: Unlike mentors, you cannot ask somebody to be a sponsor. You earn it. How do you know if somebody is your sponsor? 

Share with the person what you want to achieve and make an ask, for example, an introduction to somebody who they have told you can help you. If they are willing to do it, they believe in you — they are your sponsor. If they avoid committing to it, then you may want to explore if the person is more of a mentor only.

#4 Get a coach

After reading the title, some of you may be thinking that this is a rehash of point #1. It isn’t.

I’ve been a “consumer” of coaching since 2018. And it’s been life-changing. I’ve experimented with several coaching modalities — group, 1:1, Time to Think, The Model, Playing Big — and these are some of the things I achieved through coaching

  • Launching my website after talking myself out of it for 2 years.
  • Launching my business whilst keeping my full-time position at a tech company after shattering the limiting beliefs that I couldn’t have both.
  • Holding more space for my team to co-create solutions after realising that my value as a manager was not tied to “knowing more” than my direct reports.
  • Asking for more recognition at work whilst regaining a life-work balance.
  • Writing posts more regularly after learning how to calm down my perfectionist impulses.
  • Being more conscious about the manuals I have for others and how patriarchy influences my decisions.
  • Gaining awareness of when I’m catastrophising about a situation and reducing overwhelm caused by uncertainty.
  • Benefiting from a non-judgemental accountability partner.

Recap

In summary

  1. You have three months to the end of 2023.
  2. Decide on the top 3 things you want to accomplish before the end of the year (they can be less than 3 but no more).
  3. Try the strategies below
  • Ask for help
  • Be like a toddler
  • Get a sponsor 
  • Get a coach

Let me know in the comments how it goes.

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

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Collage by Patricia Gestoson from Images by Gerd Altmann on Pixabay and Sharon Pittaway on Unsplash.

I’m back after a hectic and unpredictable summer break. More about it soon.

In the meantime, I want to share with you an article that I published in the economics journal The Mint Magazine about the industrial complex behind diversity, inclusion, and equity initiatives and who really gets the benefits. In it, I uncover the economic and strategic interests behind the “fixing women” programs, unconscious bias training, and allyship overload.

The great pretenders

In 2013, the then-chief operating officer of Facebook, Sheryl Sandberg, published her book: Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead. It was a cultural phenomenon that prompted discussions about women and their professional ambitions as well as the additional barriers they had to surmount to get to the top compared to men. 

The book also reassured organisations that it was not their responsibility if they didn’t have enough women in leadership. It was the women’s fault. They were not leaning in, not putting themselves out for a promotion, they were not confident enough. As a consequence, the “fixing professional women” industry boomed. 

An indicator of this boom is the exponential growth in Google searches for imposter syndrome since 2015. Increasingly, workshops, programmes, and newsletters have been relentlessly targeting women in male-dominated sectors like tech and finance with the promise of giving them confidence as a means to reach leadership positions. A peek into the publishing industry proves that imposter syndrome has also colonised our bookstores in the last few years.  

However, unconfident women alone couldn’t explain the whiteness of executive and board teams. So training in unconscious bias came to the rescue. It was appealing to organisations because again it focused on individuals rather than on the organisation’s processes and culture. Moreover, it exculpated leaders too, who could blame their “primitive” brains for the inequities in the workplace.

Workshops, programmes, and newsletters have been relentlessly targeting women in male-dominated sectors like tech and finance with the promise of giving them confidence.

It was a marketing success. In 2017, McKinsey estimated the annual spending in the US on unconscious bias training at $8 billion. This despite researchers reporting in 2001 that training initiatives focused on changing employees’ attitudes and behaviours that reflected more subtle forms of discrimination and exclusion rarely led to the desired long-term changes.

Ironically, as most organisations made those trainings optional, the typical attendees were employees bearing the brunt of unconscious biases – women and people from underrepresented groups – which reinforced the obvious conclusion: unconscious bias training was a lovely ticking box for organisations because it was quantifiable in terms of money spent and number of events but let key stakeholders get out of jail free.

Unfortunately, it didn’t result in the effective diversity and inclusion game-changer that we were led to believe it would deliver. This was not a surprise since it rested on the premise that learning about unconscious bias and its impact on decision making was enough to solve it, while ignoring that by design, most of our mental processes are unconscious. Even Dr Daniel Kahneman, who was awarded a Nobel Prize for his work on heuristics and biases, has been vocal about his inability to keep his unconscious bias in check. 

Diversity training needed a revamp and the murder of George Floyd in May 2020 brought a revival of the word “allyship”. In 2021, Dictionary.com named it the word of the year.

This “allyship continuum” is very attractive to organisations and leaders. First, it reinforces the lack of accountability at the senior level by equally distributing the responsibility of building inclusive organisations among all employees .

In the Global North, “allyship” and “allies’ are words that bring memories of the World Wars, being on the right side, and sacrifice. In the workplace, it has become an all-encompassing term for framing the interactions between a person in a position of privilege and a targeted person or group. From simply becoming aware of oppressive actions on less privileged groups, to deploying institutional change to tackle the discrimination of protected categories, all can be considered an act of allyship.

This “allyship continuum” is very attractive to organisations and leaders. First, it reinforces the lack of accountability at the senior level by equally distributing the responsibility of building inclusive organisations among all employees . Second, it’s self-congratulatory. Under a premise that we could summarise as “every little helps”, it enables us to embody the identity of an ally with minimal effort. Finally, it reiterates the belief that diversity, inclusion, and equity (DEI) are under-represented group problems that allies can help to mitigate from the margins.

And allyship training excels at marketing. Some of its promises are building empathy, addressing biases when they arise, and even helping those suffering the burden of discrimination to stop complaining about microaggressions and instead listen without getting defensive – a big relief to human resource departments.

But overpromising is not the only problem. Our obsession with rebranding all DEI strategies as allyship also waters down powerful initiatives by drowning them in a sea of sameness. For example, recently, the Mayor of London office announced that it is investing £1 million in an allyship training package available to every secondary school in London to educate and empower young Londoners to take a stand and help prevent violence against women and girls. The package – a teacher’s toolkit titled, Ending gender-based violence and abuse in young people’s relationships – doesn’t contain the words ally, allies, or allyship. Still, the mayor’s press office felt the need to rebrand it as allyship training. 

Regarding effectiveness, the key problem is that reported measures of success are typically based on people’s perceptions of themselves – or others. Research shows that men are worse allies than they think. For example, 77% of executive and c-suite males think that most men within their organisation are “active allies” or “public advocates” for gender equity but only 45% of women at that level agree. This gap in perception increases at lower management levels.

Is tackling imposter syndrome, reducing unconscious bias, or promoting allyship useless?

Would replacing allyship with a different word boost the commitment of employees and organisations to make workplaces more equitable? Suggestions abound: advocate, champion, co-conspirator, co-liberator – the list goes on. Moreover, is tackling imposter syndrome, reducing unconscious bias, or promoting allyship useless? I posit that they are mostly a distraction from tackling systemic inequalities at work and the responsibility of leaders to drive those changes. 

For example, whilst we throw money into addressing underrepresentation or making privileged employees feel good, the UK gender pay gap has increased by 3.8% from 2021 – black African, Bangladeshi, and Pakistani women earn, respectively, 26%, 28%, and 31% less than men and disabled employees earn a sixth less than non-disabled workers. And organisations dodge responsibility for the fact that 50% of women who take a tech role drop it by the age of 35 or that 20% of British businesses get away with lacking policies to support LGBT staff.

How do we move away from sympathy for the hardships of under-represented groups to embedding equity in organisations? How can we escape the trap of DEI-washing?

Organisations need to shift from the comfort of snapshot statistics such as annual diversity audits, to measure the progression of women and underrepresented groups through the ranks.

For example, asking themselves how they can attract brilliant women in their 20s and keep them until they retire, and realising that’s much more than thinking about maternity leave. It involves mapping the journey of employees such as a neurodiverse, female software engineer until she becomes chief technical officer, or a black, nonbinary person joining as a junior sales manager and reaching vice president level. This will uncover blockers to accessing opportunities and career progression within the organisation and provide insights into the initiatives needed to overcome them. 

Individuals are not off the hook either. It’s paramount we teach people how to transgress boundaries such as gender, ethnicity, class, age, or disability to achieve the collective gift of freedom. Building inclusive and equitable workplaces is a practice, not a certificate.

As Aboriginal elder, activist and educator, Lilla Watson, said, “If you have come here to help me you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.” 

QUIZ: Patriarchy and You

How much is patriarchy ruling your life and career?

We believe that we make choices based on logic and objective criteria.The reality is that the patriarchal rules embedded in our socialisation often decide for us.

This 3-minute quiz will tell you how much patriarchy impacts your life and career choices.

QUIZ: How much is patriarchy ruling your life and career?

Mid-year review 2023: Savouring my DEI wins in a world not made for me

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Toddler girl looking up while holding candy spiral in a garden party.
Photo by Douglas J S Moreira on Unsplash.

As an inclusion strategist, I always have the impression that I’m behind. The inspiring Audre Lorde – who defined herself as “black, lesbian, feminist, socialist, mother, warrior, poet”- captured my feelings very well in the following quote:

“Life is very short and what we have to do must be done in the now.”

Audre Lorde

So much to do and so little time!

I also find it difficult to reflect on and savour my accomplishments. Although DEI and women in tech are topics where many people doing an amazing job, the progress is slow or sometimes akin to a Whac-A-Mole game, the moment you think an area is improving, then something else pops up.

For example, I was very glad to see that the Black Lives Matter movement had put DEI are the forefront and that many organisations were prioritising it. But the relief has lasted only for a while. With the redundancies in the tech sector and the inflation, the roles related to DEI are the first bearing the brunt of the layoffs.

Unlike in my corporate job, my “identity” as an inclusion strategist has much more fluid KPIs. Part is paid work and part is probono. It’s also a match-up of several areas: coaching, public speaking, and writing, to mention a few.

So, what’s enough? Is savouring successes a path to conformity? 

Comparison

We are told that comparison and feedback make us better. That without criticism, we’ll all be slackers and underperformers.

And that’s reinforced every year when we commit to annual goals, KPIs, and scorecards. 

We’re told that we need to do more and better and that the path is to continuously measure ourselves against others — and surpass them. Only then, we can be sure we’re doing our best.

The problem that is not often discussed is how this drives dissatisfaction, frustration, and disappointment with ourselves.

“Comparison” comes often in my coaching sessions. Amazing individuals that create and deliver impactful work feel that they’re not enough when they measure themselves up against others — colleagues, family, friends, influences, and even random people on social media.

I tell them that I see comparison at three levels:

  1. Upward social comparison  — When we compare ourselves to those who we believe are better than us.
  2. Downward social comparison — When we compare ourselves to people who we believe are worse off than us.
  3. Comparison to ourselves — When we compare ourselves against a version of our persona.

Upward and downward comparisons typically provide either transitory self-esteem boost— e.g. I’m better than individual X — or in the long run, generate emotions like jealousy and envy — my career hasn’t progressed as fast as that of colleague Y.

But comparing to ourselves is not the panacea always. And that became clear to me last week.

QUIZ: How much is patriarchy ruling your life and career?

Savouring our wins

I joined a journaling virtual session focused on mid-year reflection. It sounded harmless but I was dreading it — a little bit like when you know the medicine you’ll take is going to be bitter. 

My brain catastrophised about all the things on my “2023 to-do list” that I hadn’t accomplished yet. Still, I saw the value of joining the session because I thought it helped me focus and prioritise activities and tasks during the last part of the year.

In hindsight, I see that I went to the session thinking about comparing myself with an aspirational version of myself that I imagined on January 1st, 2023.

And that became clear during the first 10 min of the session. The facilitator asked us to focus on the past 6 months and think about what we were most proud of, what we had to celebrate. We were urged to look for all kinds of accomplishments and experiences — big and small.

Even the smallest victory is never to be taken for granted. Each victory must be applauded…

Audre Lorde

So, instead of comparing myself to that idealised version that I had set at the beginning of the year, I was asked to go back in time to January 1st, 2023 and compare myself to that version of Patricia.

And that did the trick. By comparing my current self with that of 6 months ago, I was able to see progress without judging myself. We were given less than 5 minutes but I couldn’t stop writing. 

Writing

Podcasts

I did my first podcast of the year! I was a guest on the podcast “Ophelia On Fire!”. In the episode, I talked about 

  • Self-worth vs Confidence
  • Confidence vs Competence
  • Strategies to avoid our feeling of confidence holding us back in our careers

Talks

Coaching

  • After a 6-month training and passing two exams, I’ve got certified as a life coach by The Life Coach School.
  • Following my impossible goal for 2023 of coaching 50 women and underrepresented people to get the promotion they deserve, I’m happy to report that I’ve already coached 42 of them towards getting the professional recognition they merit.

Book

I’m writing a book about “how women succeed in tech worldwide” for which we run a survey worldwide. Last June, we reached the milestone of 400 responses from women in tech living in 50+ countries.

If you’re a woman in tech, you can still share your experience by answering the 7-min survey here. 

Testimonials
Patriarchy instructs women to downplay our achievements, experiences, and skills. That’s why I find testimonials from clients a way to fight against that indoctrination. 

  • I created a page on my website to collect clients’ testimonials.
  • I was especially touched by four of the testimonials I received this year

Over 6 coaching sessions, Patricia’s empathetic approach enabled me to work through my difficulties and find new ways of approaching my work projects.

The dedication and commitment she brought to our sessions gave me the confidence and encouragement to identify what was holding me back and to find possible solutions. Her insights always kept me focussed on putting into action steps that would achieve results.

I gained enormously from my sessions with Patricia. Her experienced questioning guided me through a difficult period of transition from a career in the television industry to a new phase in my working life.

Bren Simson. TV director, author, local historian and guide

I participated in the Ada’s List coaching programme, a 6-month development programme for women and non-binary people in tech at Citizens Advice. We focused on leadership, diversity, equity and inclusion within technology and ways to develop your career. We shared insights and challenges, discussed different approaches and identified opportunities to learn and develop.

Sarah Gallacher, Product Manager, Citizens Advice

Patricia was able to look at my experience, and then where I was right now. It literally felt like she was weaving together different strands to then hone in exactly on career blocks and give me some ideas to move past them.


Her style was to ask questions rather than give me a simple a to-do list, I also liked the way I felt I could trust her professional experience. She knew what I was talking about from inside my chosen sector.

Ruth Westnidge, Software Engineer

Patricia joined our Feminist AI and Digital Policy Roundtable discussion in April and presented her view on “how do decolonize AI with feminism”. I am impressed with her deep insights from the various, socio-technological perspectives of AI that she backed up with professional and personal experiences. Highly recommended speaker!

Alexandra Wudel, Co-Founder & Geschäftsführerin FemAI GmbH | Political Advisor | Speaker | MBA

Back to the journaling session, the effect of writing this laundry list of accomplishments was cathartic. 

As for the rest of the session? The usual. We were told to come up with our list of priorities for the year, identify the barriers, and look for enablers.

My takeaway? Whilst comparing ourselves to our future selves can help us think big, it can also lead us to burnout and permanent dissatisfaction.

Back to you

Put a 5 min alarm on your phone and give yourself permission to pause and journal about all the things you’re proud of in the last 6 months.

And then, savour them.

“You are the one that you are looking for.”

Audre Lorde

Let me know in the comments what 2023 accomplishments and experiences you celebrating.

QUIZ: Patriarchy and You

How much is patriarchy ruling your life and career?

We believe that we make choices based on logic and objective criteria.The reality is that the patriarchal rules embedded in our socialisation often decide for us.

This 3-minute quiz will tell you how much patriarchy impacts your life and career choices.

QUIZ: How much is patriarchy ruling your life and career?

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

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Suprised woman.
Image by Robin Higgins from Pixabay.
Click here to learn how you can you accelerate your tech career

I’ve been a mentor for many years and I’ve had the privilege of receiving advice from fantastic mentors. 

But I’ve had also tons of bad career advice. Advice that has derailed my professional progression, robbed me of opportunities to stretch myself, and fostered patriarchal thinking.

The problem is that because it comes from well-meaning people around us, we’re conditioned by patriarchy to think others know better than us, and we’re trained to want to be liked — to “do as we’re told” — damaging our career in the process.

Here are my top 5 pieces of bad career advice and what to do instead so you save yourself time, energy, and frustration.

[Bad career advice #1] Women don’t help other women

This is patriarchal advice at its best. Are you really saying that 4 billion human beings won’t help their own group?

Yes, there have been some women that have hindered my progression or didn’t help me when it could have made a massive difference for me….

BUT

I’ve found many other women that have supported my career progression, made warm introductions, amplified my work, and highlighted my achievements and skills in rooms where I was not present. They have been my mentors, coaches, and sponsors.

What to do instead? If you’re a woman, connect two other women in your network that would benefit from knowing each other.

[Bad career advice #2] If you do a great job, you’ll be promoted

I have bad news for you: doing an impactful job that deserves a promotion is not enough to get promoted. That’s a sad truth that I’ve confirmed over and over throughout my career and from people that I’ve mentored, coached, and sponsored. It’s also well-documented in leadership books and articles.

There are multiple reasons for that. Some of them are:

  • Others may not be aware of your work.
  • They may be aware but don’t understand what it takes to deliver those results.
  • They may know about your work but don’t remember it at the promotion time.
  • Maybe only your manager knows about your achievements.
  • You deliver great value on key initiatives that are perceived as “one-offs”. That is, the value doesn’t fit the “typical” checkboxes for promotion.
  • Your work has reset the baseline of what people expect from you: You consistently deliver fantastic work so, by doing so in each project, you’re perceived as not doing anything “extraordinary” worth of a promotion.
  • You are perceived as a “commodity” worker: The business believes you won’t leave.

And there are many more.

What to do instead? Two actions you can start implementing right now to visibilise your great work:

1.- Record your wins — For example, create a “win folder” in your inbox to record your achievements, including those that appear “small”. That especially includes positive feedback from customers and colleagues. This information will be invaluable at the annual assessment time.

2.- Socialize your wins — Make your manager aware of your achievements… and everybody else that can support your promotion or may raise an objection about it. That includes your peers and especially other senior leaders in the organisation.

[Bad career advice #3] If you minimize your work, you’ll be more likeable and get promoted

Since I was little, I was taught by society to minimize and diminish myself and my contributions at each opportunity.

If they’d say “You’re intelligent”, the answer was “I work hard”.

To a professor telling me “Great work, Patricia”, I’d reply, “It was easy”.

Even to somebody praising how well a dress looked on me, I’d learned to reply “Really? It was not that expensive”.

And this pattern of diminishing my contributions and work continued through my early career. I felt the “right” answer to somebody acknowledging I had done great work was something like “It’s nothing”, “Anyone could have done it…”, or “Thanks but…”.

I also learn to caveat my comments with “I’m not an expert”, even if I was, because I internalised that otherwise I won’t be liked.

What’s the problem with that? I’ll answer with another question: How are you going to build a case for your promotion if you keep minimizing your contribution during the year? You cannot spend 365 days deflecting every praise on your work and then pitch during the annual and mid-year reviews that you’ve done outstanding work.

What to do instead? When somebody compliments your work, simply reply “Thank you” or, even better, stress what was the most difficult part. E.g. “Thanks. It entailed non-negligible strategic thinking/collaboration among teams/risk-taking. I’m glad to hear the project/initiative/presentation met your high standards “.

[Bad career advice #4] Everybody knows you want to be promoted

Nope. The world doesn’t turn around you!

During my academic years, the path was very clear. I was studying Chemical Engineering to get a diploma in Engineering. The same with my Master, and Ph.D. in Computational Chemistry. I didn’t need to spell out my goals. They were clear to everybody and that made it easy for people to support me, mentor me, and coach me.

Then, during my post-doc, the goal was much more fluid. It was like being in limbo. People assumed I wanted to be a professor at university — that’s what everybody wanted in the lab but I was not sure anymore… And then I knew that I wanted to work for a commercial company. Still, because I didn’t tell anybody, none knew, and obviously they didn’t think to recommend me if a commercial opportunity came along.

I did get a position to work for a company in France after my post-doc but it was all on my own. I had to look for open positions and apply to them. No warm introductions or help to prepare the interviews. Still, my post-doc advisor was very supportive once I asked for a recommendation to finalise my hiring at that company… I wish I’d communicated to him my intentions earlier.

I learned my lesson. Since then, I’ve been transparent with my managers about my career goals and where I see the next step for me. This kind of conversation helped me to understand the gaps between my perception and theirs about my career ambitions.

What to do instead? Spell out exactly what you want. Do you want to be promoted? Do you believe you deserve it? Say it. Explicitly. Don’t simply say “I want to be promoted” but “I have now the skills, achievements, and experience to be promoted to Sr. Support Engineer”, “Operations Sr Manager” or “Principal Software Engineer”.

And if you haven’t started to discuss it with your manager, don’t leave it to the annual review. Bring it to your next 1:1 meeting!

[Bad career advice #5] If you go after a promotion, you may let other people down

At one point when I was looking for a job early in my career, I reached out to quite a lot of organisations with my CV. One of them replied that they wanted to hire me. The position was not starting until several months later but I was over the moon.
 
About a month later I got the previous message, I was contacted by another of the organisations to which I’d applied. They were also interested in my CV. What’s more, they were even a better opportunity than the one I had accepted.
 
I was torn. I didn’t want to let the first organisation down but it was such a good opportunity…
 
 I reached out to my only mentor at the time and she told me I should be cautious. I didn’t want to be known as somebody that was untrustworthy… Long story short, I declined the second offer.
 
 In the very long run, all went well with my first option but I regret that my decision was based on “not letting others down” and not on “this is the best choice for me”.
 
What to do instead? Every time your brain goes into the “I may be letting others down” rabbit hole, question if you’re letting yourself down instead. Also, I invite you to examine the long-term effect of your decision. In my story, the decision was life-changing for me — it affected my career path — whereas for my employers it would have been an inconvenience but definitely, it wouldn’t have changed the organisation.
 

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How patriarchy teaches you to talk yourself out of what you want

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Patricia Gestoso delivering a talk in front of a screen that reads: Career vs Patriarchal version. Under career, there is a workflow that starts with goal, plan, people, implement, and ends with achieve. Under the patriarchal version, the workflow starts with play small, magnify obstables, do one test, judge ourselves, and ends with conform.

Some time ago, I gave a talk at the University of Manchester titled “How Patriarchy fosters your Perfectionism, Self-criticism, and Self-doubt and what you can do about it.” To my surprise—and maybe yours—the title was not suggested by me but by the event organisers after reading some of my articles.

During the keynote, I shared with the audience how, for three years, I talked myself out of launching my website focused on the intersection between technology and DEI.

Reasons I gave myself:

Lack of role models: At the time, I hadn’t met anybody who worked in tech and had a personal blog about diversity, inclusion, and equity. Without proof that somebody else had done it before, I denied myself the opportunity to do it.

Perfectionism: As a non-native English speaker, I catastrophised about the possibility of a typo on the website or that my grammar may not be flawless.

Validation: Patriarchy had taught me that my worth depended on others’ validation. I was concerned that my colleagues and acquaintances would see me as “less” for having my own blog.

Credibility: I have a Ph.D. in Computational Chemistry, not HR or DEI. At the time, I felt my lived experiences and work advocating and spearheading diversity and inclusion initiatives weren’t “enough” to grant me permission to write about DEI publicly.

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

Download HERE

The Mighty Obstacles

I’d love to tell you that I “cured” myself by repeating in my head, “ Fake it until you make it” or “ Be confident.” Unfortunately, that didn’t work.

Instead, I had to neutralise three powerful enemies.

The first was my brain. All human brains are wired for survival and hate anything new. My brain knows me well, so it would always throw me “thoughts” to discourage me from pursuing this stretch goal.

The second was patriarchy, which is an even bigger adversary. Over the years, it had “inspired” my own big encyclopaedia called “ Good Girl Rules for Patricia.” It carefully detailed the few things I was allowed to think, feel, and do, as well as all the other things I couldn’t even dream about because “good girls don’t do that.”

The third was the “role model” myth. This “theory”, which has been highly successful at minimising women and people from underrepresented groups, states that we need a “role model” to be able to do something. It’s the perfect self-fulfilling prophecy.

Take women in tech.

Society says, “Women need more role models in STEM.” That leads women to think they need a role model to have a career in tech. And if they don’t find one, they abandon the idea because “you can’t be what you can’t see.”

Not only that, if you’re indeed a woman in tech who has succeeded, society imposes on you the “obligation” to act as a role model on top of your full-time job. This can go all the way from agreeing to be the company’s speaker at STEM events to sponsoring the female employee network. All that whilst the men around you prioritise their careers.

How convenient.

The Alternative

I told the audience that instead, they should cherish the opportunities when they don’t have a role model. That means they are creating original work, that they are trailblazers.

I also shared with the audience a tip and a quote

The tip is that you must learn to move while feeling fear. There is no “imposter syndrome” vaccine. Fear will always be there when you attempt greatness, when you disrupt the status quo. The trick is to acknowledge it and explore the techniques that will allow you to continue despite the discomfort.

The quote is mine

“If someone is unhappy with your career, it shouldn’t be you.”

Patricia Gestoso

BACK TO YOU: How are you talking yourself out of doing what you want?

WORK WITH ME

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

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

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

DM to discuss how I can help you achieve the success you deserve.

Are You Falling for Weaponised Incompetence at Work? Here’s How to Stop

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Senior Caucasian man holding a blank empty banner covering his mouth with a hand, looking shocked and afraid because of a mistake.
Photo by krakenimages on Unsplash.

I’ve written in the past about how women – especially non-White women – are expected to do the office housework: Those administrative tasks that are important for the business to keep moving but that are undervalued and not likely to result in a promotion.

And last week I learned that office housework has an ally: Weaponised incompetence.

Definition:

“Weaponised incompetence or “strategic incompetence” as it’s sometimes called ― is the act of faking incompetence at any one task (though usually an unpleasant one) to get out of doing it.”

Examples:

  • Your partner claims they are “not good” at household chores so you do them.
  • Your family says that they are rubbish at planning, so you get stuck with organising family gatherings.
  • Your roommate consistently does a poor job at cleaning the toilet so you step in and do it yourself.

But it’s also alive and well in the workplace.

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

Download HERE

How do you identify weaponised incompetence at the workplace?

By the task

They are typically mundane tasks or activities perceived as low-value – taking the minutes, planning office events, handling conflict among colleagues, or soothing unhappy customers.

By what they tell you

  • You’re praised by how well you do the task, e.g. “You’re naturally good at taking notes during the meetings”.
  • They make you responsible for their faked incompetence and delegate the task to you, e.g. ” Remember last time how bad it was when I did it? You’re so much better than me at this”.
  • They say they don’t know how to do it, e.g. “It’s so difficult to update the Excel spreadsheet with the new leads”.

By what they do

Some strategies to deal with weaponised incompetence

  • Recognise you’ve been manipulated.
  • Communicate the patterns you’ve noticed.
  • Set boundaries AND STICK TO THEM.
  • Leave them on their own to figure things out
  • Coach them through doing the task themselves.
  • Take the opportunity to start a discussion about how valuable is the task, who should be doing it, and how it should be rewarded.

Are you a “perpetrator” of weaponised incompetence?

It’s also important that women – and people belonging to other protected categories – check if we are using weaponised incompetence against other people. For example, as I mentioned above, non-White women are expected to do more office housework than White women.

We, White women, need to step up and help break the cycle rather than reinforce it.

The first step is awareness.

  1. Look at the low-value tasks you convince yourself “you’re not to be good at” or that you don’t want to learn.
  2. Reflect on the reasons why you don’t want to learn to do them or why you think you’re not good at them.

Next, think about to whom you deflect that task.

  1. Is it always the same person?
  2. Is there a reason why the task shouldn’t be rotated among other people?

If it’s always the same person and the task is not core to the person’s role, step up and break the cycle of weaponised incompetence.

Final reflections

During an insightful discussion, Rose Cartolari challenged the use of weaponised incompetence as an expression that may further the divide between the giver and the receiver of the action. Instead, she offered the less violent and loaded term learned helplessness for reflection.

The American Psychological Association defines learned helplessness as “a phenomenon in which repeated exposure to uncontrollable stressors results in individuals failing to use any control options that may later become available. Essentially, individuals are said to learn that they lack behavioral control over environmental events, which, in turn, undermines the motivation to make changes or attempt to alter situations”.

I wonder if a term like strategic helplessness could be used instead of weaponised incompetence. I love to get your feedback on the comments on this expression.

BACK TO YOU: What do you do when co-workers use weaponised incompetence to get you to do low-value/unpromotable tasks?

Feminist Tech Career Accelerator

Three things are keeping you from getting the tech career you deserve

Your Brain * Your Education * Patriarchy

Thrive In Your Tech Career With Feminist Guidance

Achieve your career goals * Work smart * Earn more

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What women leaders want: A fresh perspective on retention strategies

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Bar chart with the title "if you considered leaving the workforce in 2022, which of the following would make you more likely to stay?". Feeling more valued is at the top with 74%, increased pay second with 60%, and promotion to a higher level of responsibility is the third with 41%.
Results from Chief’s Make Work Work survey.
Click here to learn how you can you accelerate your tech career

I’m so tired of bland business advice about how to retain women in leadership positions

  • Talk about the purpose.
  • Given them flexibility.
  • Build an inclusive workplace.

Why bland? Because it’s not a strategy, it’s the minimum.

That’s why it was so refreshing to read Chief‘s article “What women leaders really want at work”

Chief’s “Make Work Work” survey of 847 Chief Members, all of whom are women at the VP level or above and who collectively manage $220 billion of the U.S. economy found that – surprise, surprise – there’s a massive disconnect between what companies think women want at work versus what they actually want. To be honest, that’s not a big surprise for me. Already in 2019, I wrote about the disconnect between HR and millennial women on the top reasons why those women leave companies.

So, what’s at the top of the wishlist for those 847 female leaders? In other words, if they considered leaving the workforce in 2022, which would make them more likely to stay?

Feeling more valued – Recently, I read in a community of women in tech a post from a female VP that is routinely expected to play the “secretary” for the exec team: Writing minutes, sending reminders… How valued do you think she feels?

Increased pay – Who would have guessed that women want to be paid as much as White men?

Promotion to a higher level of responsibility – Another shocker! I was sure women don’t care about promotions…

What retain women executives? In order of priority

1.     Power

2.     Money

Is that so different that what male leaders want?

Quiet quitting and rusting-out

So what happens to those that remain in their jobs and don’t get what they want?

In the last six months, there’s been a lot of chatter about quiet quitting. As per Forbes, “burned-out or unsatisfied employees put forth the least amount of effort possible to keep their paychecks”. Whilst for some this is a euphemism for lazy workers, others have made the case that quiet quitting can also be understood as refusing to be a workaholic and instead strictly delivering the work that matches your role and remuneration. But it’s not the only option.

Last week, I learned a new word rust-out: the condition of being chronically under-stimulated, uninspired, and unsatisfied at work. 

In an article in Stylist, Sharon Peake mentions that “rust-out is also more likely to affect women than men due to the unique workplace barriers that women experience, such as the double burden of paid and unpaid (domestic) work. This often leads highly capable and experienced women to return to work part-time, working at a lower level of responsibility after maternity leave, or even opting out of the workforce.” Moreover, “it can cause employees to ‘doom loop’. that is, repeat unhelpful stories about ourselves.”

In my post Join the conversation: How has mansplaining impacted your life? I mentioned the importance of having words to explain and validate our experiences.

I can finally name the experience of all those fantastic women that started with me in tech years ago and that were given unappealing part-time jobs when they came back from maternity leave, without access to the plumb assignments that lead to career progression.

Their organisations had condemned them to rust out in their jobs.

Feminist Tech Career Accelerator

Three things are keeping you from getting the tech career you deserve

Your Brain * Your Education * Patriarchy

Thrive In Your Tech Career With Feminist Guidance

Achieve your career goals * Work smart * Earn more

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The DNA of Tech Unveiled: Patriarchy, Exceptionalism, Meritocracy

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Brown woman in casual attire with a laptop in her lap typing software code.
Photo by Christina Morillo from Pexels.
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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?

Feminist Tech Career Accelerator

Three things are keeping you from getting the tech career you deserve

Your Brain * Your Education * Patriarchy

Thrive In Your Tech Career With Feminist Guidance

Achieve your career goals * Work smart * Earn more

Click below to learn more about the Feminist Tech Career Accelerator

Check the Feminist Tech Career Accelerator

3 things we should unlearn from COVID-19

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Finger clicking on a button that has the inscription “31 December 2019”.

Figure adapted by Patricia Gestoso from this image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay .

(7 min read)

Imagine you go into a one-week change management training with the expectation is that when you are back to work you’ll reassure everybody that there is no need to change. How does that sound?

Actually, this is what’s happening right now. We’ve been in a change management boot camp for 3 months now, at the cost of $2-4 trillion US$ (UNCTAD, Asian Development Bank), but most leaders keep using sentences such as “back to normal” and “resume”, or simply they have gone hiding. Do they really believe we can all go backwards in time to 31 December 2019? Are they lacking the creativity and energy to be the catalyst for a different future miles away from their vision four months ago? Or are they simply patronizing their citizens and employees by thinking that if they keep insisting on going forward to the past, we’ll all close our eyes to our individual and collective experiences during this crisis?

If it’s the latest, it’s not working.

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Inclusive leadership in the time of the coronavirus is also worrying about food and toilet paper

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Picture of the empty shelves in a supermarket in England. Picture taken on 14th March 2020 by Patricia Gestoso©

Picture of empty shelves in a supermarket in England. Picture taken on 14th March 2020 by Patricia Gestoso ©.

(3 min read)

Last week, I asked a colleague how her recent transition to remote working was going on. Was her internet and VPN working ok? Did she get access to the docking station, screen, and mouse from the office? Was she proactively taking breaks?

Her answers reassured me: Yes, yes, and yes.

She also told me that after finishing her work at 6.00 pm she rushed to the supermarket to only find broccoli and Brussels sprouts. We made fun about how some people rather starve than eat certain food. It also made me realize that I’ve failed as a leader.

The scarcity trap

The picture that accompanies this post it’s how the supermarkets looked like where I live a week ago. It’s how they looked all this week too. And this weekend as well.  Me too, I’ve felt the pain and stress of visiting 3, 4, 5 supermarkets to gather the basic food and toiletries I needed.

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