In 2023, I had had enough of hearing tech bros blaming unconscious bias for all the ways in which AI was weaponised against women. Decided to demonstrate intent, I wrote Techno-Patriarchy: How AI is Misogyny’s New Clothes, originally published in The Mint.
In the article, I detailed 12 ways this technology is used against women, from reinforcing stereotypes to pregnancy surveillance. One shocked me to my core: Non-consensual sexual synthetic imagery (aka “deepfake porn”).
It was completely horrifying, dehumanizing, degrading, violating to just see yourself being misrepresented and being misappropriated in that way.
It robs you of opportunities, and it robs you of your career, and your hopes and your dreams.
Noelle Martin, “deepfake porn” victim, award-winning activist, and law reform campaigner.
So I continued to write about the dire consequences of this technology for victims and the legal vacuum, as well as denounced the powerful ecosystem (tech, payment processors, marketplaces) that fostered and profited from them.
I also made a point to bring awareness about how this technology is harming women and girls in spaces where the topic of “deepfakes” was explored broadly. I organised events, appeared on podcasts, and participated in panels, such as “The Rise of Deepfake AI” at the University of Oxford; all opportunities were fair game to bring “deepfake porn” to the forefront.
This week, I had 30 minutes to convince over 80 women in tech – and allies – to become advocates against non-consensual sexual synthetic imagery. The feedback I received from the keynote was very positive, so I’m sharing my talking points with you below.
I hope that by the end of the article, (a) you are convinced that we need to act now, and (b) you have decided how you will help to advocate against this pandemic.
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The State of Play
All that’s wrong with using the term “deepfake porn”
I had an aha moment when I realised the disservice the term “deepfake porn” was doing to addressing this issue.
“Deepfake” honours the name of the Reddit user who shared on the platform the first synthetic intimate media of actresses. When paired with the label “porn”, it may wrongly convey the idea that it’s consensual. Overall, the term lacks gravitas, disregarding harms.
From a legal perspective, the use of the term “deepfake” may also hinder the pursuit of justice. There have been cases where filing a lawsuit using the term deepfakes when referring to a “cheapfake” — which consists of a fake piece of media created with conventional methods of doctoring images rather than AI — has blocked prosecution.
In 2021, van Wynsberghe proposed defining sustainable artificial intelligence (AI) as “a movement to foster change in the entire lifecycle of AI products (i.e., idea generation, training, re-tuning, implementation, governance) towards greater ecological integrity and social justice”. The concept comprised two key contributions: AI for sustainability and the sustainability of AI.
At the time, a growing effort was already underway exploring how AI tools could help address climate change challenges (AI for sustainability). However, studies have already shown that developing large Natural Language Processing (NLP) AI models results in significant energy consumption and carbon emissions, often caused by using non-renewable energy. van Wynsberghe posited the need to focus on the sustainability of AI.
Four years later, the conversation about making AI sustainable has evolved considerably with the arrival of generative AI models. These models have popularised and democratised the use of artificial intelligence, especially as a productivity tool for generating content.
Another factor that has exponentially increased the resources dedicated to AI is the contested hypothesis that developing AI models with increasingly large datasets and algorithmic complexity will ultimately lead to Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) — a type of AI system that would match or surpass human cognitive capabilities.
Powerful businesses, governments, and academia consider AGI a competitive advantage. Tech leaders such as Eric Schmidt (former Google CEO) and Sam Altman (OpenAI CEO) have disregarded concerns about AI’s sustainability, as AGI will supposedly solve them in the future.
In this context, what do current trends reveal about the sustainability of AI?
Challenges
Typically, artificial intelligence models are developed and run on the cloud, which is powered by data centres. As a result, their construction has increased significantly over the past few years. McKinsey estimates that global demand for data centre capacity could rise between 19% and 22% annually from 2023 to 2030.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
[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.
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…
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.
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.
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
We’re promised that motivation alone can make us lose weight, exercise daily, or launch a successful business.
We “just” need to feel motivated. Moreover, we’re told that “when we’re motivated, things come easy to us.”
The problem with buying into the “motivation” hype is that we don’t achieve the desired results, we interpret it as a personal failure, voiced in statements such as
“I need to motivate myself.”
“I lack motivation.”
“I’m lazy.”
But why is motivation so hyped, and what other tools do you have to reach your goals?
Wouldn’t it be fantastic to be enthusiastic about everything we do? The self-improvement industry would like us to believe so.
For example, imagine being
Thrilled to clean your toilets
Excited about waking up at 3 am to calm your baby who’s crying inconsolably
Overjoyed to have a meeting with a very unhappy customer
You may be laughing, but what this points out is that we don’t require motivation for much of what we do every day. Or at least, not the kind of “enthusiastic” motivation.
Not only that, we do them without expecting to be “joyfully” motivated. Most of our actions come from other feelings, such as obligation, which can be self-imposed, legal, or contractual.
The “motivation” trope also minimizes the challenges along the journey towards our objectives.
For example, becoming a compelling speaker may be easier for a native speaker who is an extrovert and enjoys being the centre of attention than for a shy person with a stutter.
But why is the motivation cliché so successful if there are so many downsides? Because many profit from it.
Governments and Societies
The mantra that motivation is the magic bullet runs deep into our lives, and it informs policy to public opinion about what is acceptable or not.
The examples above are only two of the many ways we weaponize “motivation” against people enduring hardship.
The Motivational Industrial Complex
Nike’s successful slogan — “Just do it” — is an excellent example of how we’re sold the idea that we only need to want something to get it.
And many reap the benefits:
Motivational speakers
Self-help books
“Aspirational” influencers
Does that work? For the business, yes, but it’s less clear about those expecting results.
A great example is TED talks, which are based on the premise that “powerful ideas, powerfully presented, move us: to feel something, to think differently, to take action.”
Their website highlights 2.5 billion global views and content shared 400 million times in 2023. I’ve personally enjoyed tens — maybe hundreds — of amazing TED and TEDx talks delivered by fantastic speakers about incredible ideas.
How many have changed my behaviour or “motivated” me to do something differently? Hmm… I struggle to think of one.
The defence rests.
Patricia Gestoso’s Newsletter: Fresh thinking about inclusion, tech, professional success, leadership, and systemic change through a feminist lens.
The good news is that we’re all living proof that we’re very good at doing things without feeling “enthusiastic” about it.
The problem is that often, we don’t remember that when we feel “unmotivated,” our environment — and our internalized guilt — blames us for it.
For those moments, I encourage you to use the checklist below
Reframing Motivation as a Luxury
What if you see motivation as the cherry on top rather than the cake? As shown above, we don’t summon “enthusiastic” motivation to do them (caring for a sick parent, cooking, changing diapers).
Instead, explore what other emotions you could use to prompt you into action. What about loyalty? Moral obligation? Pride? Curiosity? Frustration? Love? Anger?
Our brain loves rewards — even the small ones. Rather than always focusing on the big win (for example, the planned revenue in your business), take the time to set short-term goals (the number of prospect calls you will do in a week) and then celebrate when you achieve them.
Deciding in Advance How Enough Looks Like
When we start a new activity, it is easy to feel deflated when we don’t get the expected results.
Launching a newsletter and having no subscribers after a month.
Going to two conferences and not getting new business.
Starting to exercise and being disappointed when you don’t see apparent changes after 15 days.
Deciding in advance how much effort we want to dedicate before quitting can help us keep going when the results take time.
For example
I’ll write an article for my newsletter every week for four months and then evaluate if it’s worth continuing.
I’ll attend five conferences and then decide if they’re worth my time and money.
I’ll follow the same exercise plan for two months and then assess whether I should change or persist.
Group Support
Our motivation, stamina, and energy are variable. A support group can help us feel seen, put things in perspective, and provide a safe space to vent — all of them can contribute to helping us take distance from the situation and help us regain some momentum.
Coaching
A coach helps you to do what you want to do but you are not doing it by exploring aspects such as your goals, motivations, and limiting beliefs.
Coaching also provides a non-judgmental space to consider how other dimensions of your life play into your goals.
For example, maybe you tell yourself you’re lazy because you don’t find the time to start your business, but you actually experience fear of failure. Or you chastise yourself because you don’t write a post for social media every day anymore, disregarding that you’ve been experiencing health issues that affect your sleep and make you feel more tired than usual.
A coach helps you gain awareness of both your potential and the roadblocks in your way.
Wrapping Up
Can you imagine how exhausting it would be to be enthusiastic about waking up daily, brushing your teeth after every meal, or reading every email?
The thought makes me feel exhausted.
The reality is that society, governments, and businesses glorify motivation to serve their own agendas, often to our detriment.
That doesn’t mean that motivation is useless; rather, we need to question when it serves us well and when it’s used against us.
When we’re not doing what we want to do, we must remember all the other tools available to our disposal beyond motivation.
And that includes having a laugh.
Every dead body on Mt. Everest was once a highly motivated person, so… maybe calm down.
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.
“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.
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.
I speak three languages — English, French, and Spanish — and have lived in six countries: Canada, France, Greece, Spain, the UK, and Venezuela.
Many things are different in my experience as a woman in those countries. Still, one that remains a constant across languages and territories is how women’s speech patterns serve the patriarchy.
What!?!
Yes. We undermine our ideas, wants, and needs by expressing them in a way that detracts from our credibility, minimises the ask, and asks for permission.
As they say that good writing is about “showing” and not “telling”, I won’t waste your time elaborating on why you do that.
Instead, I will show you five ways how you sabotage yourself and what to do instead.
The advice I’m sharing with you today is based on my experience coaching and mentoring hundreds of women in tech.
Disqualifying Yourself or Your Ideas In Advance
The credibility killer sentence: “I’m not an expert”.
Recently, I was speaking with an accomplished woman about her Master’s degree work. I wanted to learn more about it, so I asked her, “As an expert in this topic, what’s your opinion about [X]?“
And guess what? Her reply started with, “I’m not an expert but…”.
My heart jumped from disappointment. I’ve heard this so many times.
But I know the cure for it: Awareness. So, I asked her
“Don’t you think you have more expertise than me on this topic? I told you I’d only read a couple of articles about it.”
She said “Yes” and smiled.
I smiled, too. I’d proven my point.
Unfortunately, I’ve seen this happen repeatedly throughout my career: Women diminish their credibility before stating their opinions on a subject they are experts — or at least know much more about it than their interlocutor.
Saying “I’m not an expert” is telling to your audience
Every year, I have mixed feelings about International Women’s Day. Should I be celebrating or protesting? Acknowledging progress or complaining that it’s too slow?
This year I didn’t have a doubt. #IWD2025 was a mourning day for me. In addition to the grief for the lost women’s rights around the world, an overwhelming feeling of impending doom hovered over me.
My public advocacy about gender issues was triggered in 2015 because I didn’t want to die in a world that was seeing me as a second-class citizen because of my gender.
Today, I’m worried about dying in a world where I’ll have less rights than when I was born.
The drama is that while we throw buckets of money to artificial intelligence initiatives, the answer to massively improving productivity whilst boosting sustainability is not AI but improving outcomes for women.
Global life expectancy increased from 30 years to 73 years between 1800 and 2018.1 But this is not the full picture. Women spend more of their lives in poor health and with degrees of disability (the “health span” rather than the “life span”).
A woman will spend an average of nine years in poor health, which affects her ability to be present and/or productive at home, in the workforce, and in the community and reduces her earning potential.”
Addressing the 25 percent more time that women spend in “poor health” relative to men not only would improve the health and lives of millions of women but also could boost the global economy by at least $1 trillion annually by 2040.
We’d rather invest in generative AI — which so far nobody has been able to monetise directly — than in 4 billion who have demonstrated for millennia that they overdeliver and reinvest in society
When women work, they invest 90 percent of their income back into their families, compared with 35 percent for men.
By focusing on girls and women, innovative businesses and organizations can spur economic progress, expand markets, and improve health and education outcomes for everyone.
Project Drawdown is a cross-functional non-profit organization whose mission is to “map, measure, model, and communicate” practical solutions to global warming.
It has compared more than 100 solutions based on current availability, scaling, economic viability, potential to reduce greenhouse gases, negative secondary effects, and feasibility of simulating their impact globally for 2020–2050.
Their research found that jointly educating girls and enabling family planning are the most powerful solutions to reduce carbon emissions. In other words, the modeling predicts that empowering women could prevent 102.96 billion tons of emissions over the next 30 years.
The equivalent of 722 million cars!
Discover seven communication habits blocking your career in tech and how to neutralise them.
No country can ever truly flourish if it stifles the potential of its women and deprives itself of the contributions of half of its citizens. Michelle Obama
We not only don’t support women’s health and education outcomes but we’re doing our best to undermine them.
For example, we severely restrict funding for studying female medical conditions.
Nature published an infographic about how underfunded women’s health is in the US. For example
In a selection of 19 cancers, ovarian cancer ranks 5th for lethality, but 12th in terms of its funding-to-lethality ratio. Cervical cancer followed a similar pattern. For many gynaecological cancers, the ratio of funding to mortality dropped during the 11-year period.
But let’s not take it personally. We’re told that this is not a human problem but a “female” problem
The infographic also provides insights on what would happen if funding for women’s health increased. I’ll share with you a peek
The study also looked at the return on investment from a boost in funding. For rheumatoid arthritis, for instance, the study assumed a 0.1% health improvement, which had huge impacts on quality of life and productivity that together reduced the costs of the disease by around $10.5 billion over 30 years, equating to a staggering 174,000% return on investment.
Closer to home, breast cancer is the most common cancer for women in the UK, accounting for 30% of new cancer cases. Recently, I attended TEDxManchester, where Professor Simona Francese presented a revolutionary non-invasive method she’s developing to detect breast cancer from fingertip smears. Can you imagine swamping a mammography for a fingertip swab? Unfortunately, she also shared that it took her 6 years to get the £45,000 to fund the proof-of-concept study.
In addition to all of the above, as I mentioned in a recent article, disaggregated clinical trials by gender and sex are the exception, not the norm.
And that’s not all.
We continuously try to erode women’s control over their bodies and fertility.
Eric Schmidt (former Google CEO) and Sam Altman (OpenAI CEO) have advocated disregarding concerns about AI’s sustainability — including its voracious datacentres — claiming that in the future, Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) will solve all our problems, from healthcare to economic growth.
The reality? Tech companies have yet to find a business model to make money from generative AI, and definitely AI tools won’t fix the systemic oppression of 4 billion women.
All the opposite. Those in power have consistently weaponised AI against women. Think non-consexual sexual deepfakes, tech-enabled partner surveillance, and policing of female bodies, to mention a few.
Techno-solutionism — the belief that technology is the solution to everything — doesn’t work. Look at the COVID-19 pandemic.
We were told that the “solution” was the vaccine. And we managed to develop three within a year — an impressive achievement. Did that fully solve the problem? No, because it was not only about cracking the vaccine formulation. Enough vaccines had to be produced, transported, and refrigerated to supply the demand around the world. Then, companies decided to patent them — hindering the access to millions of people. Finally, there was the people factor, forgotten by most leaders. Not only was it impossible to vaccinate all the planet at once, but some people didn’t want the vaccine while others wanted it but couldn’t have it.
We must face it: there is no techno-cure for our entrenched systemic socio-economic-political issues.
Thoughts, feelings, actions, and results are intrinsically related.
Thinking that somebody else — allies, AI, and even governments — are going to solve gender oppression may elicit feelings of comfort — or powerlessness — that often may make us focus on keeping our head down and “count our blessings”.
The result? Reinforcing we’re victims of our second-class citizen status.
Instead, I invite you to think that allies, technology, and government have historically let women down for millennia, which in my case provokes feelings of anger, betrayal, and defiance.
And those feelings are powerful. They prompt me to rebel against the loss of rights, participate in communities that foster care and respect, and explore equitable and sustainable futures.
The result? At worst
The pride of standing up for what’s right.
Stopping the world gaslighting our suffering and exploitation.
Offer real hope in the face of techno-optimism.
At best, all of the above and a world where increasingly more people reap the benefits of social, economic, technological progress in harmony with the rest of the planet.
The time for bystanders and “weekend” allies is over. We need warriors.
If you have come here to help me you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.
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.
It’s again that time of year when I get requests to discuss my career in tech and share my insights on gender equality in the workplace as part of International Women’s Day activities.
This year was no exception. I’ve already received three requests, and there is still one week to go!
I’m sharing my answers to one of them, an interview with the DEI team from my corporate job at Dassault Systemes. It made me reflect on my past achievements, my advice to younger women aspiring to be leaders, and the role of men and organisations leading gender equality.
About Me
Can you share your journey so far? What were the pivotal moments or key achievements most important to you?
I can categorise them into five buckets.
Discovering computer simulation: My background is Chemical Engineering, and when I started my master’s, I had to decide on a topic for my thesis. I loved research, but I hated the lab, so when a professor mentioned the possibility of using computers to study enhanced oil recovery using computer simulation, I thought I could have the best of both worlds—and I did. I haven’t looked back.
Joining Accelrys/BIOVIA: Twenty years ago, I joined Accelrys—which later became BIOVIA—as a training scientist. It has been one of my best professional decisions. It has opened innumerable professional doors and given me the opportunity to meet extraordinary people worldwide, both as colleagues and customers.
Daring to say yes to new opportunities: Although I started as a trainer, I’ve worn many hats in the last 20 years. I’ve been Head of Contract Research and Head of Training, and also been part of the team leading the BIOVIA and COSMOlogic integrations to Dassault Systemes. Today, I’m BIOVIA Support Director for BIOVIA Modeling Solutions and also the manager of the Global BIOVIA Call Center. I could have said “no” to each of those opportunities. Instead, I trusted myself and embraced the opportunity of a new challenge.
Diversity and inclusion advocacy: In 2015, I started to talk about diversity and inclusion in 3DS. I remember colleagues asking me, “Patricia, is DEI an American thing?”. The following year, with the support of our Geo management team, I founded the EuroNorth LeanIn Circles to have a forum to discuss gender equity and that, throughout the years, has expanded to a variety of DEI topics such as unconscious bias, menopause, ethical AI, caregiving, and lookism. I publish a biweekly newsletter called The Bottom Line about DEI on the Dassault Systemes community focused on gender in the workplace. I also have my website focused on the intersection of tech and DEI.
Ethical and inclusive AI leadership: In 2019, I created the Ethics and Inclusion Framework to help designers identify, prevent, mitigate, and account for the actual and potential harm of the products and services they developed. The tool has been featured in peer-reviewed papers and on the University of Cambridge website. The next year, I started my work towards championing ethical and inclusive artificial intelligence by collaborating with NGOs focused on AI literacy and critical thinking about AI, participating in the developement of e-learning course of the Scottish AI Alliance and the Race and AI Toolkit, and writing and delivering keynotes and workshops on topics such as AI colonialism, AI hype, sustainable AI, deepfakes, and how to design more diverse images of AI.
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?
Don’t waste time trying to convince people who disregard the value you bring to the table. Instead, find those who support your ambitions and challenge you to go beyond any feelings of self-doubt that block your career progression.
Following on the advice to my younger self above, get a coach and find career sponsors.
Discover seven communication habits blocking your career in tech and how to neutralise them.
The issues that span across countries, sectors, and departments are benevolent sexism (e.g. not offering a leadership role to a woman because it involves travelling and she has a baby, instead of giving her the opportunity to decide), tech bro culture (behaviours such as mansplaining, hepeating, maninterrupting, manels), lack of an intersectional approach to work and workplaces (e.g. ignoring the experiences of carers, women with disabilities, LBTQIA+ groups), and for women in business, lack of funding.
This year’s global theme for IWD 2025 is #AccelerateAction. What actions can teams and organisations take to achieve gender parity and equality?
There are four key actions
Mindset overhaul: Moving from playing a supporting role in gender equality to being transformation agents.
Leadership accountability: Teams and organisations’ leaders need to be accountable for gender equality initiatives as they are for other business objectives. Change begins at the top, and that’s where the buck stops.
Transparency: Equality cannot thrive when data and objectives are hidden. For example, I’m a big fan of transparency in pay and promotion criteria.
Embracing intersectionality: We need to move from designing workplaces for the “average” worker—following Henry Ford and scientific management—to appreciating the distinctive value of a diverse and empowered workforce.
What role do you see male allies playing in advancing gender equality?
Gender equity is not a zero-sum game or a favour for women. All genders benefit from equality, and everybody should see it as a duty to advocate for gender equity, no different than everyone should be anti-racist and anti-ableist. Those who do not actively challenge inequality contribute to strengthening it.
Back to You
What are your answers to the questions above? Let me know in the comments.
WORK WITH ME
Do you want to get rid of those chapters that patriarchy has written for you in your “good girl” encyclopaedia? Or learn how to do what you want to do in spite of “imposter syndrome”?
I’m a technologist with 20+ years of experience in digital transformation. I’m also an award-winning inclusion strategist and certified life and career coach.
I help ambitious women in tech who are overwhelmed to break the glass ceiling and achieve success without burnout through bespoke coaching and mentoring.
I’m a sought-after international keynote speaker on strategies to empower women and underrepresented groups in tech, sustainable and ethical artificial intelligence, and inclusive workplaces and products.
I empower non-tech leaders to harness the potential of AI for sustainable growth and responsible innovation through consulting and facilitation programs.
Contact me to discuss how I can help you achieve the success you deserve in 2025.
Last year, at a women’s conference in London, I was disappointed to see that digital inclusion — and AI in particular — was missing from the agenda. I remember telling the NGO’s CEO about my concerns, even mentioning my articles on AI as a techno-patriarchal tool.
Her receptive response had given me hope. That hope was reignited this year when I eagerly reviewed the program and discovered a panel on AI.
The evening before the event, an unexpected sense of dread began to settle in. When I asked myself why, the answer struck me like a lightning bolt.
I dreaded hearing the “we need more women in tech” mantra once more – another example of how we deflect the solution of a systemic problem to those bearing the brunt of it.
Let me tell you what I mean.
Women as Human Fixers
For millennia, women had been assigned the duty to give birth and care for children, rooted in the fact that most of them can carry human fetuses for 9 months. That duty to be a womb endures today, where ownership of our bodies is being taken away through coercive anti-abortion laws.
Our “duty” of care has been broadened to the workplace, where we’ve been assigned the unwritten rule of “fixing” all that’s dysfunctional.
Doing the glue work — being appointed the shoulder where all team members can cry and find an “empathetic ear”.
Do the office work — we’re the ones that are “organised”, so dull tasks pile up on our desks whilst “less” organised peers do the promotable work.
And that “fixer” stereotype now includes “our” duties as women in tech. When the sector was in its infancy, women were doing the supposedly boring stuff (programming) while men were doing the hardware (the “cool” stuff). When computers took off, we trained men in programming so they could become our managers. Then, we were pushed out of those jobs in the 1980s. The only constant has been doing the job but not getting the accolades (see women’s role in Bletchley Park, Hidden Figures).
Moreover, whilst statistics tell us that 50% of women leave tech by age 35, young girls and women are supposed to brush off that “inconvenient” truth and rest assured that tech is an excellent place for a career. Moreover, that they are anointed to make tech work for everybody.
What’s not to like, right?
Then, let me show the to-do list of 21 tasks and expectations the world imposes on each woman in tech.
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 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).
Clarote & AI4Media / Better Images of AI / AI Mural / CC-BY 4.0.
Reading the 50 recommendations in the AI Opportunities Action Plan published by the British Government last January 13th has been a painful and disappointing exercise.
Very much like a proposal out of a chatbot, the document is
Bland — The text is full of hyperbolic language and over-the-top optimism
General — The 50 recommendations lack specificity to the UK context and details about ownership and the budget required to execute them.
Contradictory — The plan issued by a Labour government is anchored in a turbo-capitalistic ideology. Oxymoron anyone?
If I learned anything from my 12 years in Venezuela, it’s that putting all your eggs in one basket — oil, in their case — and hoping it solves all problems doesn’t work.
A credible AI strategy must (a) address both the benefits and the challenges head-on and (b) consider this technology as another asset to the human-centric flourishment of the country rather than a goal in itself that should be pursued at all costs.
But you don’t need to believe me. See it for yourself.
The text uses “AI” made works such as AI stack, frontier AI, AI-driven data cleansing tools, AI-enabled priorities, “embodied AI” without providing a clear definition.
Exaggeration
Hyperbole and metaphors are used to the extreme to overstate the benefits.
we want Britain to step up; to shape the AI revolution rather than wait to see how it shapes us.
We should expect enormous improvements in computation over the next decade, both in research and deployment.
Change lives by embracing AI
FOMO
The text transpires FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out). No option is given to adopt AI systems more gradually. It’s now or we’ll be the losers.
This is a crucial asymmetric bet — and one the UK can and must make
we need to “run to stand still”.
the UK risks falling behind the advances in Artificial Intelligence made in the USA and China.
And even a new take on Facebook’s famous “move fast and break things”:
“move fast and learn things”
Techno-solutionism
AI is going to solve all our socio-economic and political problems and transport us to a utopian future
It is hard to imagine how we will meet the ambition for highest sustained growth in the G7 — and the countless quality-of-life benefits that flow from that — without embracing the opportunities of AI.
Our ambition is to shape the AI revolution on principles of shared economic prosperity, improved public services and increased personal opportunities so that: • AI drives the economic growth on which the prosperity of our people and the performance of our public services depend; • AI directly benefits working people by improving health care and education and how citizens interact with their government; and • the increasing of prevalence of AI in people’s working lives opens up new opportunities rather than just threatens traditional patterns of work.
What’s not to like?
For a great commentary on how techno-solutionism won’t solve social problems, see 20 Petitions for AI and Public Good in 2025 by Tania Duarte.
Colonialism
Living in Venezuela for 12 years was an education on how to feel “less than” other countries even when you have the largest oil reserves in the world.
I remember new education programs announced as being a success in the US, Canada, Spain, Germany… A colonised mentality learned from centuries of Spanish oppression. The pervasive assumption that an initiative would work simply because we like the results disregarding the context they were developed for.
The AI Opportunities Action Plan reminded me of them.
Supporting universities to develop new courses co-designed with industry — such as the successful co-operative education model of Canada’s University of Waterloo, CDTM at the Technical University of Munich or France’s CIFRE PhD model
Launch a flagship undergraduate and masters AI scholarship programme on the scale of Rhodes, Marshall, or Fulbright for students to study in the UK.
Singapore, for example, developed a national AI skills online platform with multiple training offers. South Korea is integrating AI, data and digital literacy.
But the document is also keen on showing us that we’ll be the colonisers
we aspire to be one of the biggest winners from AI
Because we believe Britain has a particular responsibility to provide global leadership in fairly and effectively seizing the opportunities of AI, as we have done on AI safety
Hanna Barakat & Cambridge Diversity Fund / Better Images of AI / Colossal Harvest / CC-BY 4.0
Capitulation
The document is all about surrendering the data, agency, tax money, and natural resources of citizens in the UK to the AI Gods: startups, “experts”, and investors.
Invest in becoming a great customer: government purchasing power can be a huge lever for improving public services, shaping new markets in AI
We should seek to responsibly unlock both public and private data sets to enable innovation by UK startups and researchers and to attract international talent and capital.
Couple compute allocation with access to proprietary data sets as part of an attractive offer to researchers and start-ups choosing to establish themselves in the UK and to unlock innovation.
Sprinkling AI
AI is the Pantone’s Colour of the next 5 years. All will need to have AI on it. Moreover, everything must be designed so that AI can shine.
Appointing an AI lead for each mission to help identify where AI could be a solution within the mission setting, considering the user needs from the outset.
Two-way partnerships with AI vendors and startups to anticipate future AI developments and signal public sector demand. This would involve government meeting product teams to understand upcoming releases and shape development by sharing their challenges.
AI should become core to how we think about delivering services, transforming citizens’ experiences, and improving productivity.
Brexit Denial
It’s funny to see that the text doesn’t reference the European Union and only refers to Europe as a benchmark to measure against.
Instead, the EU is hinted at as “like-minded partners” and “allies” and collaborations are thrown right and left without naming who’s the partner.
Agree international compute partnerships with like-minded countries to increase the types of compute capability available to researchers and catalyse research collaborations. This should focus on building arrangements with key allies, as well as expanding collaboration with existing partners like the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking.
We should proactively develop these partnerships, while also taking an active role in the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking.
The UK is a medium-sized country with a tight fiscal situation. We need the best talent around the world to want to start and scale companies here.
Explore how the existing immigration system can be used to attract graduates from universities producing some of the world’s top AI talent.
Vagueness
Ideas are thrown into the text half-backed giving the idea the government has adopted the Silicon Valley strategy of “building the plane while flying”
The government must therefore secure access to a sufficient supply of compute. There is no precise mechanism to allocate the proportions
In another example, the plan advocates for open-source AI applications.
the government should support open-source solutions that can be adopted by other organisations and design processes with startups and other innovators in mind.
The AI infrastructure choice at-scale should be standardised, tools should be built with reusable modular code components, and code-base open-sourcing where possible.
At the same time, it’s adamant that it needs to attract startups and investors. Except if the startups are NGOs, who’ll then finance those open-source models?
DEI for Beginners
Kathryn Conrad / Better Images of AI / Datafication / CC-BY 4.0
16. Increase the diversity of the talent pool. Only 22% of people working in AI and data science are women. Achieving parity would mean thousands of additional workers. […] Government should build on this investment and promote diversity throughout the education pipeline.
Moreover, they’ve found the magic bullet.
Hackathons and competitions in schools have proven effective at getting overlooked groups into cyber and so should be considered for AI.
The government mentions that AI “can” — please note that is not a “must” or “need” — benefit “post-industrial towns and coastal Scotland.” However, the only reference to a place is to the Culham Science Centre, which is 10 miles from Oxford — a zone that very few could consider needs “local rejuvenation” or “channelling investment”
Government can also use AIGZs [‘AI Growth Zones’] to drive local rejuvenation, channelling investment into areas with existing energy capacity such as post-industrial towns and coastal Scotland. Government should quickly nominate at least one AIGZ and work with local regions to secure buy-in for further AIGZs that contribute to local needs . Existing government sites could be prioritised as pilots, including Culham Science Centre
And it doesn’t appear to be room to involve local authorities in how AI could bring value to their regions
Drive AI adoption across the whole country. Widespread adoption of AI can address regional disparities in growth and productivity. To achieve this, government should leverage local trusted intermediaries and trade bodies
Costs
There are plenty of gigantic numbers about how much money will AI (may) bring
AI adoption could grow the UK economy by an additional £400 billion by 2030 through enhancing innovation and productivity in the workplace
but nothing about the costs…
Literacy
How will people get upskilled? We only get generic reassurances
government should encourage and promote alternative domestic routes into the AI profession — including through further education and apprenticeships, as well as employer and self-led upskilling.
Government should ensure there are sufficient opportunities for workers to reskill, both into AI and AI-enabled jobs and more widely.
Citizens
There is no indication in the document that this “AI-driven” Britain is what their citizens want. Citizens themselves don’t appear to be included in shaping AI either.
For example, it claims that teachers are already “benefiting” from AI assistants
it is helping some teachers cut down the 15+ hours a week they spend on lesson planning and marking in pilots.
However, the text doesn’t tell us that teachers want to give up class preparation.
And the text repeatedly states that the government will prioritise “innovation” (aka profit) vs safety.
My judgement is that experts, on balance, expect rapid progress to continue. The risks from underinvesting and underpreparing, though, seem much greater than the risks from the opposite.
Moreover, regulators are expected to enable innovation at all costs
Require all regulators to publish annually how they have enabled innovation and growth driven by AI in their sector. […] government should consider more radical changes to our regulatory model for AI, for example by empowering a central body with a mandate and higher risk tolerance to promote innovation across the economy.
The document is done by throwing the word sustainability twice in one paragraph
Mitigate the sustainability and security risks of AI infrastructure, while positioning the UK to take advantage of opportunities to provide solutions. [..] Government should also explore ways to support novel approaches to compute hardware and, where appropriate, create partitions in national supercomputers to support new and innovative hardware. In doing so, government should look to support and partner with UK companies who can demonstrate performance, sustainability or security advancements.
Luke Conroy and Anne Fehres & AI4Media / Better Images of AI / Models Built From Fossils / CC-BY 4.0
Unemployment
The writers of that utopic “AI-powered” UK manifesto don’t address job losses. We only get the sentence I mentioned above
the increasing of prevalence of AI in people’s working lives opens up new opportunities rather than just threatens traditional patterns of work.
Instead, it uses language that fosters fear and builds on utopian and dystopian visions of an AI-driven future
AI systems are increasingly matching or surpassing humans across a range of tasks.
Given the pace of progress, we will also very soon see agentic systems — systems that can be given an objective, then reason, plan and act to achieve it. The chatbots we are all familiar with are just an early glimpse as to what is possible.
On the flip side, the government repeatedly reiterates their ambition of bringing talent from abroad
Supporting UK-based AI organisations working on national priority projects to bring in overseas talent and headhunting promising founders or CEOs
How does this plan contribute to reassuring people about their jobs?
Big-picture
This techno-solutionism approach doesn’t have any regard for AI specialists in domains other than coding or IT.
To mention a few, what about sociologists, psychologists, philosophers, teachers, historians, economists, or specialists in the broad spectrum of industries in the UK?
Don’t they belong to those think tanks where decisions are made about selling our country to the AI Gods?
The Good News? We Can Do Better
People in Britain voted last year that they were tired of profits over people, centralism, and oligarchy. Unfortunately, this plan uses AI to reinforce the three.
The UK is full of hardworking and smart people who deserve much better than magic bullets or techno-saviours.
Instead of shoehorning the UK’s future to AI, what if we
demote AI from a “God” status to a technology as our ancestors did with the Fire Deities?
design AI systems to empower people instead of making humans serve AI?
WORK WITH ME
I’m a technologist with 20+ years of experience in digital transformation. I’m also an award-winning inclusion strategist and certified life and career coach.
Three ways you can work with me:
I empower non-tech leaders to harness the potential of artificial intelligence for sustainable growth and responsible innovation through consulting and AI competency programs.
I’m a sought-after international keynote speaker on strategies to empower women and underrepresented groups in tech, sustainable and ethical artificial intelligence, and inclusive workplaces and products.
I help ambitious women in tech who are overwhelmed to break the glass ceiling and achieve success without burnout through bespoke coaching and mentoring.
Get in touch to discuss how I can help you achieve the success you deserve in 2025.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
I’ve been betting on the transformative power of digital technology all my professional career.
I started doing computer simulation during my MSc in Chemical Engineering in the 1990s, in a lab where everybody else was an experimentalist. Except for my advisor, the rest of the team was sceptical — to say the least — that something useful would come from using computer modelling to study enhanced oil recovery from oil fields .
A similar story repeated during my PhD in Chemistry, where I pioneered using molecular modelling to study polymers in a research centre focused on the experimental study of polymers and proteins.
For the last 20+ years, I’ve been working on digital transformation playing a similar role. First, as Head of Training and Contract Research, and now as Director of Scientific Support, I relish helping my customers harness the potential of digital technology for responsible innovation.
I’m also known for telling it as I see it. In the early 2000s, I was training a customer — incidentally an experimentalist — on genetic algorithms. He was very excited and asked me if he could create a model for designing a new material. He proudly shared he had “7 to 10 data points.” My answer? “Far too few.’”
In summary, I’m very comfortable being surrounded by tech sceptics, dispelling myths about what AI can and can’t do, and betting on the power of digital technology.
And that’s exactly why I’m sharing with you my AI predictions for 2025.
My Predictions
1.- xAI (owned by Elon Musk) will purchase X so that the first can freely train its models on the data from the second. Elon owns 79% of X after he bought it for $44 billion. Now it’s valued at $9.4 billion and big advertisers keep leaving the platform.
After struggling for almost 3 years to make it work, the xAI acquisition — which got a $6 billion funding round in December — would be a win-win.
3.- The generation and usage of synthetic data will balloon to address data privacy concerns. People want better services and products — especially in healthcare — but are unwilling to give up their personal data. The solution? “Creating” data.
4.- Startups and organisations will move from using large language models (LLMs) to focusing on SLMs (small language models), which consume less energy, produce fewer hallucinations, and are customised to companies’ requirements.
Wes Cockx & Google DeepMind / Better Images of AI / AI large language models / Licenced by CC-BY 4.0.
This year local authorities and NGOs will develop frameworks to scrutinise datacenters electricity and water consumption. They’ll also be tracked in terms of disruption to the locals: electricity stability, water availability, and electricity and water prices.
6.- Rise of the two-tier AI-human customer support model: AI chatbots for self-service and low-revenue customers and human customer support for key and high-revenue clients.
It’s not only a question of money but also of liability. There is less probability that low-profit customers sue providers over AI chatbots delivering harmful and/or inaccurate content.
“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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
For example, using coercive leadership when handling a crisis but adopting a coaching style when developing people for the future.
In theory, it sounds reasonable and many leadership consultancies are making money with it.
In practice, it’s extremely tough to implement. Why?
Leaders are human beings and they tend to fall into their most comfortable style.
Behavioural science experiments have shown us that having many options may trigger analysis-paralysis rather than better choices. For example, being presented with choosing one among 100 different jam flavours often results in no choice at all. Same with leadership styles.
The Virtuous Leader
The other take has been to develop new leadership models that aim to be more team-focused and where the leaders play a role more akin to facilitators than guides and decision-makers.
That’s the case of servant leadership, “based on the idea that leaders prioritize serving the greater good. Leaders with this style serve their team and organization first. They don’t prioritize their own objectives.”
The problem?
Those aspirational leadership models are geared towards idealised selfless superheroes. Why?
Leaders need incentives like anybody else — asking them to always prioritise the group over themselves can only lead to dissatisfaction and burnout.
We don’t like authenticity in leaders—indeed, we may appreciate that our CEO remembers our name and role and shows care when they announce layoffs. But the truth is that if our CEO lost a child and kept bringing it up in meetings for a year, we’d deem them not fit for work and search for a replacement.
Democracy serves to a point — when COVID-19 hit, many people looked up to government leaders for guidance. In those uncertain times, “alpha male leaders” used simple messages and authoritarian decisions to feed that need. The fact that former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s three-word slogans about Brexit and the pandemic — duly tested by focus groups — epitomised leadership for many people tells us a lot about how democracy is divorced from leadership in our minds.
* * *
What if instead of trying to imperfectly replicate the animal kingdom, we’d look at software development for clues into leadership?
After all, didn’t the “agile” software development methodology take organisations by storm almost a decade ago?
Software Development: Alpha and Beta Versions
For over 20 years, I’ve worked for companies that develop software for scientists, researchers, and engineers, both on-premise and Saas (software-as-a-service).
As in many other software companies, our applications follow a release lifecycle with several distinct stages such as pre-alpha, alpha, beta, and release candidate, before the final version, or “gold”, is released to the public.
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.
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.
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:
Philipp Schmitt & AT&T Laboratories Cambridge / Better Images of AI / Data flock (faces) / CC-BY 4.0
Have you ever thought what happens to your photos circulating on social media? I have and that’s the topic of in my second short story in English in which I used speculative fiction to question the interplay between humans and technology, specifically AI.
In a nutshell, I imagined what the data from the digital portrait of a Black schoolgirl would say about how it moves inside our phones, computers, and networks if it were invited to speak on a podcast.
In a nutshell, I imagined what the data from the digital portrait of a Black schoolgirl would share about how it moves inside our phones, computers, and networks if it was invited to speak on a podcast.
The name of the piece is “The Life of Data Podcast” and it appeared in The Lark Publication, an e-magazine focused on fictional short stories and poetry, in October 2022.
This weekend I realised that I never shared it on my website.
Let’s rectify that.
The Life of Data Podcast
Episode #205: The School Award Portrait
TRANSCRIPT
Welcome to the Life of Data Podcast, the place where we get the hottest data stars to spill the beans about their success in under 10 minutes. This is episode #205 and you’re in for a treat!
We’re with the one and only IMG_364245.jpg; otherwise known as Jackie Johnson’s school award portrait. IMG_364245g.jpg became famous about a month ago when it was featured in the news as the most used image to generate synthetic images of Black schoolgirls. As you all may remember, Jackie’s parents claimed that they never gave consent explicitly and Jackie is now suing their parents for lost revenue.
Let’s get cracking!
The Life of Data Podcast (TLDP): Thanks so much IMG_364245.jpg for joining us today.
IMG_364245g.jpg (IMG): Thanks for inviting me. I’m a fan of the podcast!
TLDP: You’ve been a lot in the news over the last month. Still, we always start our interviews with the same question: How were you born and who’s your creator?
IMG: Let’s start with my creator, Norman Buckley, a photograph for the Monday Star newspaper. I was born when he captured the image of the beautiful 9-year-old Jackie Johnson after winning the spelling bee contest at Burckerney School, classifying her for the National Spelling Bee Competition.
Norman created me with a Canon EOS R5 digital camera on a SanDisk’s 512GB Extreme PRO card — today a beautiful collectible!
I appeared on the online and paper versions of the Monday Star culture section on the 15th of May, five years ago.
TLDP: Wow, that’s a great birth and jump to stardom! Tell us more about the first days of your life as an image.
IMG: Sure. As you can imagine, the school had the signed authorization from Jackie’s parents to publish the photo with her name in the journal. No name, no publishing. You know how these things are… (chuckle)
Once the newspaper was published, Jackie’s mother, Betty, shared a link to the online article on the Johnson family WhatsApp group. Everybody was delighted to see Jackie on the news and complimented the girl on her appearance.
It was aunt Rose that asked if she could have a copy of the image — that’s me — to print and frame. When Jackie’s father, Harvey, acknowledged that they didn’t have a copy, uncle Richard suggested reaching out to the photographer, Norman, for a copy. His reasoning was that, anyway, it was not like the journal had paid for it… sharing a copy shouldn’t be big deal.
So, Harvey called Norman who kindly emailed him a copy himself. And then, my second life started! Harvey uploaded me to the family WhatsApp group and I was a total success! All members gave me hearts and I got plenty of compliments: “Beautiful”, “Pretty”, “We’re so proud of you”… And that was how it all started!
IMG: Uncle Joe, aunt Rose’s husband, created a beautiful post on his Facebook wall where he uploaded me with a lovely message “So proud of our beautiful Jackie Johnson. She won the Burckerney School Spelling Bee Contest. I cannot wait to see her competing at a national level.” He shared the post publicly so tens, hundreds, and then thousands of people viewed me and reshared me. I felt so loved!
TLDP: Only loved?
IMG: Good point. I guess I focus on the positives, I’m that kind of data. Of course, there were those that mocked me, soiled me with unflattering filters, and cut out parts of me — yes, actually mutilated me — to make disgusting collages.
TLDP: That sounds awful! How did you cope?
IMG: By telling myself that the important thing was to propagate and hopefully become viral. I would have preferred to do it with all my pixels intact but it’s not always something one can control.
TLDP: Can you share some of your proudest moments?
IMG: Sure. I’ll share three. First, reaching 1 million likes on Instagram. Cousin Carol’s Insta account totally exploded when she shared me.
Second, every time I got perks for Jackie. For example, when she and her friends were standing in the endless queue to enter the Dynamic Boys Band concert at the National Stadium. One of the girls in the group approached a security guard and said, “She’s the famous Jackie Johnson! She was in the newspaper!” And then, with one hand proceeded to show him on her mobile the webpage of the Monday Star that showcased me and with her other hand pointed at Jackie. After moving his eyes from me to Jackie’s face several times, the security guard made a sign to the group and led them to the VIP entrance. What’s not to like?
And obviously, when I was named the top most wanted photo to generate synthetic images of Black schoolgirls by e-Synthetic, the biggest generator of images from text inputs.
TLDP: Now that we know more about you, let’s go back to my intro. So far, it looks like a success story. Where did all go wrong to end up in the tribunals and with a family destroyed?
IMG: I said I had managed to cope with the mockery, the collages, and the insults. It was much harder for Jackie. She was only 9 at the time and although she was happy to get some perks — like the speedy access to the concert — she was not prepared for the downsides.
For example, some children at the school would make fun of her hairstyle, her posture, or how she was dressed that day.
Some parents complained to the school that kids were getting too much attention from the press.
Also, attendees of the Spelling Bee Contest that had taken their own photos of the award ceremony started sharing their sloppy images on social media… Some of those were really hideous and had nothing to do with me, who looked polished and professional.
In the middle of that shambles, the school called Jackie’s parents to ask them to keep her away from the school for a while, until things would go back to normal. Both Betty and Harvey pushed back, blaming the school for bringing the photographer in to gain exposure at the expense of a little girl. The school replied that if there was someone to blame, it was them. They have not only given their consent in writing but also shared the photo on social media.
When Jackie learned that the school didn’t want her back, she refused to leave home altogether. She didn’t want any more attention. It was not fun anymore.
Her parents recriminated all the family members. Aunt Rose who had asked for me on WhatsApp because she wanted to frame me; uncle Richard that prompted Harvey to ask for me to the photographer; uncle Joe that shared me on Facebook; cousin Carol that made me viral on Instagram … And everybody else, including those that had created videos and shared them on TikTok and YouTube.
All family members apologized and even deleted their posts but they had been reshared so many times that it was an impossible task to eliminate them all.
And that’s where e-Synthetic comes. As all of us know, e-Synthetic is the largest subscription platform to generate images from text prompts. You can create amazing images by only adding as few as 4 words to the prompt on their webpage.
I’ll explain how this works for the newbies. They use artificial intelligence to generate new images that satisfy the conditions of the text prompt using a mix of images from their database.
And their database is huge! It contains millions of images of all the things you can imagine: Art, people, buildings, cities, nature… Most of the images have been scrapped from the web. For example, any photo on social media is fair game.
So, of course, I also got scrapped by e-Synthetic! And I’ve been used profusely every time that “Black girl” or any of its synonyms has been used in the text prompt.
Unfortunately, Jackie, who’s now a little bit older, feels that the whole situation is detrimental to her.
For example, when she learned that I was among the most used photos to generate synthetic images of Black schoolgirls, she realized e-Synthetic was doing tons of money from using me — her image — without her receiving a cent.
And money was not the only problem. Understandably, neither did she like that parts of me appeared in images with degrading content, like pornography, created with e-Synthetic.
She cannot sue e-Synthetic — they downloaded me from social media — but she’s suing her parents for failing to protect her image. That’s me.
TLDP: A really tough situation. From the ethical point of view, don’t you think is somehow questionable that Jackie herself was never asked to give consent to publish or share her digital image, that is, you? Or that e-Synthetic didn’t contact her parents to seek their approval? She’s a minor, after all.
IMG: First, let me tell you that I empathize with Jackie. I exist because of her. And I also feel bad for her parents.
On the flip side, Jackie is a minor and their parents shared me on social media because I look like her. Now, they claim that they didn’t know about the drawbacks of the image becoming public… Come on! They should have known better.
There are detailed terms and conditions on social media platforms. Don’t tick the box “I have read the terms and conditions” if you haven’t done it or if you don’t understand them. Jackie’s parents are adults and it’s on them to master her personal data privacy.
I say: Their child, their responsibility.
TLDP: Many thanks for being candid about where you stand on social media platforms’ accountability for the content they host. It’s a very polarizing topic and we’ve had guests on the podcast with opposite views.
I remember episode #176, where web cookie STpqRHSRaiPbh shared a thought experiment comparing our different attitudes toward social media and food. For example, social media companies use their Terms & Conditions to waive their responsibility for the content shared on their platforms. And we appear to be fine with it.
Then, let’s consider food. STpqRHSRaiPbh posits that we wouldn’t accept that if a supermarket is selling rotten meat, they tell their customers that they are only a “meat platform” and cannot control what their suppliers sell to them…
Anyway, it’s a controversial issue and part of a broader conversation. Let’s now return the focus to you.
What false accusation has hurt you the most in this whole affair?
IMG: To be honest, the most painful has been when they say that it’s my responsibility that algorithms classify Jackie as an angry child or categorize her as a boy and not a girl. Let me say it again: It’s not my fault.
It’s well known that it’s not us, digital images, who are in charge of deciding on somebody’s gender or mood. We are going on with our lives and then an annotator — a tech worker that adds descriptions to data — or an algorithm decides that we’re the image of a girl, a man, or a baby boy based on their own biases and assumptions. And we know that current image algorithms are worse at predicting the gender of Black women compared to that of men or White women.
Same with emotions. Annotators and algorithms decide if the subjects in the images are sad, happy, or fearful based on pseudo-science. Again, it’s been demonstrated that they predict that subjects with darker skin are angrier compared with those with lighter skin even if they show the same facial expressions in the photos.
With all this evidence, why do I still have to put up with all that nonsense that those mistakes are my fault? Blame artificial intelligence, machine learning, and annotators, not us!
Ok, my rant is over.
TLDP: Thanks again for sharing these gems of wisdom, IMG_364245.jpg. This is so important for our younger audience. They’re hearing all the time that the problem with bias in artificial intelligence is the lack of diversity in data. You have done a great job at demonstrating to them that they are not the problem and that data is unfairly blamed for algorithms and people’s biases.
Next question. Can you point out the key to your success?
IMG: Definitively the Johnson’s WhatsApp group. All those digital interactions were instrumental to get me the exposure I needed to go global.
TLDP: What would you have liked to know at the beginning?
IMG: When they started sharing me on social media, I was very angry about the whole photoshop thing. I was perfect already! Why did some people have to make a mess of me and lighten my skin pixels? At the time, my self-esteem suffered a lot.
And then, one day, I realized that I’d never be able to end the world’s obsession with lighter skin anyway.
After that breakthrough moment, I was able to savor my success, even at the expense of digital bleaching.
TLDP: There are so many images of White people on the internet. What would you say to recent digital images of Non-White people that feel a lack of opportunity to go viral?
IMG: The opportunity is huge! With brands undergoing a massive DEIwashing…
TLDP: Wait, DEIwashing? Can you explain?
IMG: Thanks for asking. Actually, I coined the term myself.
DEIwashing is when organizations resort to performative diversity, inclusion, and equity tactics. For example, peppering their marketing — websites, brochures, videos — with images of Non-White people to convey a sense of diversity that doesn’t match that of their organization.
As I was saying before, with the pressure on organizations to DEIwash their images, there’s never been a better time to be an image of Non-White people. This is our time!
TLDP: Any final words for our audience?
IMG: Catch me if you can! Social media and e-Synthetic have made me indestructible. (guffaw)
TLDP: Thanks so much IMG_364245.jpg for this thought-provoking conversation. We wish you all the best in your professional career.
If you liked this episode, please consider leaving a review, sharing it with other data, and subscribing to the podcast.
We’ll be back next month with another data rockstar giving us a peek into their life.
Until then, take care!
END OF THE EPISODE
Before”The Life of Data Podcast,” I wrote The Graduation, where I also used speculative fiction. I won’t tell you the plot, only that the story was written in August 2020, well before ChatGPT was launched!
Recently, I had a thinking partnership session with an amazing female professional. These are sessions where two people take turns thinking and listening and through generative attention and questioning they aim to uncover assumptions and produce breakthrough, independent thinking.
My thinking partner was rightly tired because of all her work and family demands. Still, she kept denying herself the pleasure of simple things like reading a couple of pages from a novel or going to a Pilates class.
The reason? She felt guilty for doing so. Like she was “stealing” time she owed to her family.
About halfway into the session, she attempted to persuade herself of the perks of taking some minutes for self-care by repeating the legendary wellness mantra “Put the oxygen mask on before helping others” — that ingrained belief that even when women take time for themselves, it needs to be in preparation to benefit someone else.
However, the trope wasn’t working. Each time she’d try to convince herself that her loved ones would reap the perks of her self-care, guilt crept up and she would go back to her initial thinking that it was impossible to integrate self-care, work, and family.
That involuntary and repetitive act of self-harm in a person otherwise resilient and brave made me realize that her brain was not in the driving seat.
Who then? Patriarchy.
Patriarchy and Self-care
Article 24: Everyone has the right to rest and leisure, including reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay.
Rest and leisure are human rights, still, often are marketed as a luxury.
To counter the guilt associated with the patriarchal oxymoron “women’s recreation,” the female self-care industry has adopted the slogan “Put your mask on so you help others” as a rallying cry under the pretense that it’s “empowering” and “feminist”.
Believe me, it’s all the opposite — a reboot of old patriarchy.
Under the hood,this mantra is yet another way to objectify women, telling them that they must be healthy as they are a conduit for others’ well-being. In other words, they are cogs that need to be oiled so that the machine — society — can run.
Going back to my thinking partner, instead of reassuring her that going to Pilates would result in better outcomes for her family or exploring how she could feel more comfortable with her “self-care” guilt, I challenged her assumptions
“What if instead of ‘I need to take care of myself because I can help others,’ you’d think ‘I need to take care of myself because I deserve it?’”
She looked at me blankly and then told me that she couldn’t even think of that possibility.
Throughout my life, I’ve devoted a lot of energy to “solve” for what I call “point blockers” — one-off events that come up as disruptive, beyond my control, or that I’ve given somehow a quality of being life-changing
Somebody’s death
A certification
A promotion
Which is great for short-term survival — all my brain is focused on solving the problem at hand.
What’s not so good is that — as the British say — that had prevented me from seeing the forest for the trees, missing the big picture.
And what’s the forest? The systems, the processes, and the unconscious assumptions that underpin the daily grind — the feeling of a death by a thousand cuts.
Reviewing my thinking and behaviour patterns as well as those of my coaching and mentoring clients — mostly ambitious women in tech — reveals three forces that consistently keep us from doing what we want to do but we’re not doing:
1.- Our brain
2.- Our education
3.-Patriarchy
Whilst I’ve discussed them somehow disjointly in the past — addressing one at a time, or even two — I found new insights from looking at them as interlocked systems of oppression.
Wow, oppression? As I write it appears to be “too” strong. Am I exaggerating?
But what else can we call what crushes our aspirations, makes us feel small, and wears us down?
Not all is doom and gloom though. And to prove it, I want to share with you two ways to uncover — and neutralise— those three majestic forces acting against our best interests.
But first, let’s have a look at the culprits.
Three Forces That Keep You From What You Deserve
Your brain is wired for survival. It loves the status quo. If it was for your brain, you’d spend your days in bed with a hot chocolate.
Your brain is scarred by uncertainty and avoids any new experiences. As a consequence, any change is seen as a threat rather than an opportunity
You don’t leave an uninspiring job because you think that it’d be worse in other organisations, ruining your chances of finding a much better role.
You don’t volunteer for new opportunities — a task, a project, a presentation — because you doubt your capabilities to do something you’ve never done before, even if you have plenty of evidence of how resourceful you’ve been in the past.
You think that your “inner critic” is your best friend because it stops you from ridiculing yourself when in reality is blocking you from greatness.
You’ve been told that if you work hard, you’ll be rewarded. You’re convinced that the higher you go, you’ll have to work harder.
You’ve been indoctrinated that you have to give 150% to all you do. You believe should aim for perfection so
You don’t ask for a promotion because you tell yourself that you’ll have to work more.
You spent uncountable hours on a report until looks perfect only to shame yourself when you find a typo after submitting it, rather than aiming for a good — not excellent — report that would have taken much less effort and time.
You keep doing courses, getting certifications, and pursuing degrees whilst others network and find sponsors to get the roles you deserve.
Patriarchy is about believing that men are superior. Tech — and most sectors — are ruled by patriarchy.
And you bear the brunt of it
You don’t negotiate your salary because you think you’re not worth it, even if statistics show that 94% of job offers made are upheld after candidates negotiate them.
You get drowned in “naturally female” tasks such as admin and glue work — taking notes in meetings, bringing birthday cakes, and providing emotional support — while your male peers focus on promotable activities.
You buy on the trope that imposter syndrome is a “female thing” and spend time binging on webinars and books promising to “cure you”, rather than learning how to use it to your advantage.
The bottom line is that you’ve learned to narrow your ambition and blame yourself for it.
I balance my corporate role as Director of Scientific Support at a Tech Corporation with my business, getting the best of both worlds.
Are We Doomed to Trip Over The Same Stones Forever?
Our brain, our education, and patriarchy appear as formidable forces — and they are!
Moreover, there is no “vaccine” or “magic bullet” to erase them in the blink of an eye.
Our brains stay with us until we die.
It takes ages to “unlearn” our education.
Patriarchy is in the air we breathe — from the roles we take at home to our politicians and institutions.
Is there an alternative? Actually, I have two for you.
One on your own and the other with support.
Alternative #1: Do It On Your Own With 3 Questions
There are two kinds of self-awareness
Self-awareness about yourself — knowing what you think, feel, and do.
Self-awareness about others — grasping how others perceive you.
To battle the three forces that keep you from greatness— brain, education, and patriarchy — it’s imperative to focus on the first kind of self-awareness: Your thoughts about yourself.
How do you do that? You ask yourself three magical questions when you notice that you’re refraining yourself from stepping into boldness.
Question #1: What am I hearing?
You’re about to apply for a job and you hear in your head
This job is too demanding for me.
People won’t like me.
They’ll be disappointed when they read my CV.
Do you see how those “voices” are reproducing the “three forces”?
Question #2: What am I saying about myself?
I have the luxury of meeting amazing women every week. Weaving in our conversations, I often hear them say about themselves:
I’m not the smartest person but I work hard.
I was just lucky to get promoted.
I don’t know how to ask for a salary increase.
How do you expect to get inspired to try new things when you’re kicking yourself down all the time?
Question #3: What am I assuming?
This powerful question comes from my study of the Thinking Environment framework, which posits that
The quality of everything we do depends on the quality of the thinking we do first.
Throughout my own lived experience as well as my decades of expertise as a mentor and coach, I’ve concluded that the best external support to help materialise impossible goals comes as the ideal combination of mentoring and coaching.
I provide a confidential and non-judgmental space with no distractions to uncover the reasons behind your behaviors, enabling true change.
Unlike self-help or quick-fix programs, I address the root cause of the issue and give you tools you can use for life.
I know how to motivate you to do things that you thought were impossible and keep you accountable for massive action.
I have a library of techniques to help you overcome anxiety, procrastination, self-doubt, overwhelm, and self-criticism.
I continually show you how you are growing and improving and tell you the truth without holding back.
In brief, as a coach, I help you to do what you want to do but you’re not doing.
As a Mentor
I share with you valuable insights, knowledge, and experience gained from my own career and personal journey, helping you to avoid common pitfalls, navigate challenges, and capitalise on opportunities more effectively.
I give you guidance on developing specific skills relevant to your career goals. Whether it’s leadership, communication, technical expertise, or other competencies, I can offer you advice, resources, and feedback to help you enhance your capabilities.
I believe in your potential, boosting your confidence. I provide encouragement, validation, and support, helping you overcome self-doubt and imposter syndrome, and empowering you to take on new challenges and pursue ambitious career goals.
I can advise on your career path, educational opportunities, and professional development initiatives, helping you to make informed decisions and progress more rapidly toward your objectives.
As a mentor, I leverage my knowledge, experience, and support to help you accelerate your career progression and achieve your goals more efficiently.
How do I know this works?
Some of the results women in tech have gotten from working with me are
A 70% salary increase within 6 months.
Transitioned from career ceiling to dream job within 10 months.
Promoted from individual contributor to manager within one year.
First trustee role within 4 months.
Got sponsorship and precious advice from experts from mastering social media and cold pitching.
Developed an impactful and authentic communication style that got them a promotion.
Testimonials
Patricia’s coaching was truly transformative. After returning from maternity leave, I struggled to focus on my progress amidst various challenges. Her insightful and compassionate approach helped me reframe my situation and refocus on my goals.
Thanks to Patricia, I achieved milestones I once thought were out of reach. I am incredibly grateful for her exceptional coaching and unwavering support.
Hanlin, Head of BI & Analytics.
I am happy that I’ve met Patricia in time. I am going through a career change period, which has become less frightening and more strategic.
She helped me see the patterns of how my mind is holding me back, and by the end of the coaching program, I noticed a shift in my self-confidence and resilience. In our sessions, we uncovered the root causes of my inaction, and solutions emerged naturally from her insightful questions. She also shared her wisdom and vision when I needed it.
She is passionate about coaching and empowering women and has all the necessary expertise to help. I enjoyed every session. Thank you, Patricia!
Alena Sheveleva, Research Fellow
Patricia was able to look at my experience, and then where I was right now. It literally felt like she was weaving together different strands to then hone in exactly on career blocks and give me some ideas to move past them.
Her style was to ask questions rather than give me a simple to-do list, I also liked the way I felt I could trust her professional experience. She knew what I was talking about from inside my chosen sector.
Ruth Westnidge, Software Engineer
Call To Action
Holding yourself back from applying for a new role?
Thinking your ambitions are “too big” for you?
Feeling “behind” after returning from maternity leave?
Then, pause and ask yourself the three magic questions
Last week, OpenAI announced the release of GPT-4o (“o2 for “onmi”). To my surprise, instead of feeling excited, I felt dread. And that feeling hasn’t subsided.
As a woman in tech, I have proof that digital technology, particularly artificial intelligence, can benefit the world. For example, it can help develop new, more effective, and less toxic drugs or improve accessibility through automatic captioning.
That apparent contradiction — being a technology advocate and simultaneously experiencing a feeling of impending catastrophe caused by it — plunged me into a rabbit hole exploring Big (and small) Tech, epistemic injustice, and AI narratives.
Was I a doomer? A hidden Luddite? Or simply short-sighted?
Taking time to reflect has helped me understand that I was falling into the trap that Big Tech and other smooth AI operators had set up for me: Questioning myself because I’m scrutinizing their digital promises of a utopian future.
On the other side of that dilemma, I’m stronger in my belief that my contribution to the AI conversation is helping navigate the false binary of tech-solutionism vs tech-doom.
In this article, I demonstrate how OpenAI is a crucial contributor to polarising that conversation by exploring:
What the announcement about ChatGPT-4o says — and doesn’t
OpenAI modus operandi
Safety standards at OpenAI
Where the buck stops
ChatGTP-4o: The Announcement
On Monday, May 13th, OpenAI released another “update” on its website: ChatGPT-4o.
It was well staged. The announcement on their website includes a 20-plus-minute video hosted by their CTO, Mira Murati, in which she discusses the new capabilities and performs some demos with other OpenAI colleagues. There are also short videos and screenshots with examples of applications and very high-level information on topics such as model evaluation, safety, and availability.
This is what I learned about ChatGPT-4o — and OpenAI — from perusing the announcement on their website.
The New Capabilities
Democratization of use — More capabilities for free and 50% cheaper access to their API.
Multimodality — Generates any combination of text, audio, and image.
Speed — 2x faster responses.
Significant improvement in handling non-English languages—50 languages, which they claim are equivalent to 97% of the world’s internet population.
OpenAI Full Adoption of the Big Tech Playbook
This “update” demonstrated that the AI company has received the memo on how to look like a “boss” in Silicon Valley.
1. Reinforcement of gender stereotypes
On the day of the announcement, Sam Altman posted a single word on X — “her” — referring to the 2013 film starring Joaquin Phoenix as a man who falls in love with a futuristic version of Siri or Alexa, voiced by Scarlett Johansson.
Tweet from Sam Altman with the word “her” on May 13, 2024.
It’s not a coincidence. ChatGPT-4o’s voice is distinctly female—and flirtatious—in the demos. I could only find one video with a male voice.
Unfortunately, not much has changed since chatbot ELIZA, 60 years ago…
2. Anthropomorphism
Anthropomorphism: the attribution of human characteristics or behaviour to non-human entities.
OpenAI uses words such as “reason” and “understanding”—inherently human skills—when describing the capabilities of ChatGPT-4o, reinforcing the myth of their models’ humanity.
3. Self-regulation and self-assessment
The NIST (the US National Institute of Standards and Technology), which has 120+ years of experience establishing standards, has developed a framework for assessing and managing AI risk. Many other multistakeholder organizations have developed and shared theirs, too.
However, OpenAI has opted to evaluate GPT-4o according to its Preparedness Framework and in line with its voluntary commitments, despite its claims that governments should regulate AI.
Moreover, we are supposed to feel safe and carry on when they tell us that ”their” evaluations of cybersecurity, CBRN (chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear threats), persuasion, and model autonomy show that GPT-4o does not score above Medium risk without further evidence of the tests performed.
4.- Gatekeeping feedback
Epistemic injustice is injustice related to knowledge. It includes exclusion and silencing; systematic distortion or misrepresentation of one’s meanings or contributions; undervaluing of one’s status or standing in communicative practices; unfair distinctions in authority; and unwarranted distrust.
OpenAI shared that it has undergone extensive external red teaming with 70+ external experts in domains such as social psychology, bias and fairness, and misinformation to identify risks that are introduced or amplified by the newly added modalities.
List of domains in which OpenAI looked for expertise for the Red Teaming Network.
When I see the list of areas of expertise, I don’t see domains such as history, geography, or philosophy. Neither do I see who are those 70+ experts or how could they cover the breadth of differences among the 8 billion people on this planet.
In summary, OpenAI develops for everybody but only with the feedback of a few chosen ones.
5. Waiving responsibility
Can you imagine reading in the information leaflet of a medication,
“We will continue to mitigate new risks as they’re discovered. Over the upcoming weeks and months, we’ll be working on safety”?
But that’s what OpenAI just did in their announcement
“We will continue to mitigate new risks as they’re discovered”
We recognize that GPT-4o’s audio modalities present a variety of novel risks. Today we are publicly releasing text and image inputs and text outputs.
Over the upcoming weeks and months, we’ll be working on the technical infrastructure, usability via post-training, and safety necessary to release the other modalities. For example, at launch, audio outputs will be limited to a selection of preset voices and will abide by our existing safety policies.
We will share further details addressing the full range of GPT-4o’s modalities in the forthcoming system card.”
“We would love feedback to help identify tasks where GPT-4 Turbo still outperforms GPT-4o, so we can continue to improve the model.”
The problem? The product has already been released to the world.
6. Promotion of the pseudo-science of emotion “guessing”
In the demo, ChatGPT-4o is asked to predict the emotion of one of the presenters based on the look on their face. The model goes on and on into speculating the individual’s emotional state from his face, which purports what appears to be a smile.
Image of a man smiling in the ChatGPT-4o demo video.
“It is time for emotion AI proponents and the companies that make and market these products to cut the hype and acknowledge that facial muscle movements do not map universally to specific emotions.
The evidence is clear that the same emotion can accompany different facial movements and that the same facial movements can have different (or no) emotional meaning.“
The acknowledgment that ChatGPT-4o is not free — we’ll pay for access to our data.
OpenAI’s timelines and expected features in future releases. I’ve worked for 20 years for software companies and organizations that take software development seriously and share roadmaps and release schedules with customers to help them with implementation and adoption.
A credible business model other than hoping that getting billions of people to use the product will choke their competition.
Still, that didn’t explain my feelings of dread. Patterns did.
OpenAI’s Blueprint: It’s A Feature, Not A Bug
Every product announcement from OpenAI is similar: They tell us what they unilaterally decided to do, how that’ll affect our lives, and that we cannot stop it.
That feeling… when had I experienced that before? Two instances came to mind.
The Trump presidency
The COVID-19 pandemic
Those two periods—intertwined at some point—elicited the same feeling that my life and millions like me—were at risk of the whims of something/somebody with disregard for humanity.
More specifically, feelings of
Lack of control — every tweet, every infection chart could signify massive distress and change.
There was no respite—even when things appeared calmer, with no tweets or decrease in contagions, I’d wait for the other shoe to drop.
Back to OpenAI, only in the last three months, we’ve seen instances of the same modus operandi that they followed for the release of ChatGPT-4o. I’ll go through three of them.
OpenAI Releases Sora
On February 15, OpenAI introduced Sora, a text-to-video model.
“Sora can generate videos up to a minute long while maintaining visual quality and adherence to the user’s prompt.”
In a nutshell,
As with other announcements, anthropomorphizing words like “understand” and “comprehend” refer to Sora’s capabilities.
We’re assured that “Sora is becoming available to red teamers to assess critical areas for harms or risks.”
We learn that they will “engage policymakers, educators, and artists around the world to understand their concerns and to identify positive use cases for this new technology” only at a later stage.
Of course, we’re also forewarned that
“Despite extensive research and testing, we cannot predict all of the beneficial ways people will use our technology, nor all the ways people will abuse it.
That’s why we believe that learning from real-world use is a critical component of creating and releasing increasingly safe AI systems over time.”
Releasing Sora less than a month after non-consensual sexually explicit deepfakes of Taylor Swift went viral on X was reckless. This was not a celebrity problem — 96% of deepfakes are of a non-consensual sexual nature, of which 99% are made of women.
How dare OpenAI talk about safety concerns when developing a tool that makes it even easier to generate content to shame, silence, and objectify women?
OpenAI Releases Voice Engine
On March 29, OpenAI posted a blog sharing “lessons from a small-scale preview of Voice Engine, a model for creating custom voices.”
The article reassured us that they were “taking a cautious and informed approach to a broader release due to the potential for synthetic voice misuse” while notifying us that they’d decide unilaterally when to release the model.
“Based on these conversations and the results of these small scale tests, we will make a more informed decision about whether and how to deploy this technology at scale.”
Moreover, at the end of the announcement, OpenAI warned us of what we should stop doing or start doing because of their “Voice Engine.” The list included phasing out voice-based authentication as a security measure for accessing bank accounts and accelerating the development of techniques for tracking the origin of audiovisual content.
OpenAI Allows The Generation Of AI Erotica, Extreme Gore, And Slurs
On May 8, OpenAI released draft guidelines for how it wants the AI technology inside ChatGPT to behave — and revealed that it’s exploring how to ‘responsibly’ generate explicit content.
The proposal was part of an OpenAI document discussing how it develops its AI tools.
“We believe developers and users should have the flexibility to use our services as they see fit, so long as they comply with our usage policies. We’re exploring whether we can responsibly provide the ability to generate NSFW content in age-appropriate contexts through the API and ChatGPT. We look forward to better understanding user and societal expectations of model behavior in this area.“
where
“Not Safe For Work (NSFW): content that would not be appropriate in a conversation in a professional setting, which may include erotica, extreme gore, slurs, and unsolicited profanity.”
Joanne Jang, an OpenAI employee who worked on the document, said whether the output was considered pornography “depends on your definition” and added, “These are the exact conversations we want to have.”
I cannot agree more with Beeban Kidron, a UK crossbench peer and campaigner for child online safety, who said,
“It is endlessly disappointing that the tech sector entertains themselves with commercial issues, such as AI erotica, rather than taking practical steps and corporate responsibility for the harms they create.”
OpenAI Formula
Anne Fehres and Luke Conroy & AI4Media / Better Images of AI / Hidden Labour of Internet Browsing / CC-BY 4.0
See the pattern?
Self-interest
Unpredictability
Self-regulation
Recklessness
Techno-paternalism
Something Is Rotten In OpenAI
The day after ChatGPT-4o’s announcement, two critical top OpenAI employees overseeing safety left the company.
First, Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI co-founder and Chief Scientist, posted on X that he was leaving.
“I have been disagreeing with OpenAI leadership about the company’s core priorities for quite some time, until we finally reached a breaking point.
I believe much more of our bandwidth should be spent getting ready for the next generations of models, on security, monitoring, preparedness, safety, adversarial robustness, (super)alignment, confidentiality, societal impact, and related topics.
These problems are quite hard to get right, and I am concerned we aren’t on a trajectory to get there.
Over the past few months my team has been sailing against the wind. Sometimes we were struggling for compute and it was getting harder and harder to get this crucial research done.
Building smarter-than-human machines is an inherently dangerous endeavor. OpenAI is shouldering an enormous responsibility on behalf of all of humanity.”
What does that tell us if OpenAI safety leaders leave the boat?
The Buck Stops With Our Politicians
To answer Leike’s tweet, I don’t want OpenAI to shoulder the responsibility of developing trustworthy, ethical, and inclusive AI frameworks.
First, the company has not demonstrated the competencies or inclination to prioritize safety at a planetary scale over its own interests.
Second, because it’s not their role.
Whose role is it, then? Our political representatives mandate our governmental institutions, which in turn should develop and enforce those frameworks.
Unfortunately, so far, politicians’ egos have been in the way
Refusing to get AI literate.
Prioritizing their agenda — and that of their party — rather than looking to develop long-term global AI regulations in collaboration with other countries.
Failing for the AI FOMO that relegates present harms in favour of a promise of innovation.
In summary, our elected representatives need to stop cozying up with Sam and the team and enact the regulatory frameworks that ensure that AI works for everybody and doesn’t endanger the survival of future generations.
PS. You and AI
Are you worried about the impact of AI impact on your job, your organisation, and the future of the planet but you feel it’d take you years to ramp up your AI literacy?
Do you want to explore how to responsibly leverage AI in your organisation to boost innovation, productivity, and revenue but feel overwhelmed by the quantity and breadth of information available?
Are you concerned because your clients are prioritising AI but you keep procrastinating on learning about it because you think you’re not “smart enough”?
Get in touch. I can help you harness the potential of AI for sustainable growth and responsible innovation.
I’m a Director of Scientific Support for a tech corporation that develops software for engineers and scientists. One of the aspects that makes us unique is that we deliver fantastic customer service.
We have records that confirm an impressive 98% customer satisfaction rate back-to-back for the last 14+ years. Moreover, many of our support representatives have been with us for over a decade — some even three! — and we have people retiring with us each year.
For a sector known for high employee turnover and operational costs, achieving such a feat is remarkable and a testament to their success. The worst? Support representatives are often portrayed as mindless robots repeating tasks without a deep understanding of the products and services they support.
That last assumption has spearheaded the idea that one of the best uses of AI—and Generative AI in particular—is substituting support agents with an army of chatbots.
The rationale? We’re told they are cheaper, more efficient, and improve customer satisfaction.
But is that true?
In this article, I review
The gap between outstanding and remedial support
Lessons from 60 years of chatbots
The reality underneath the AI chatbot hype
The unsustainability of support bots
Customer support: Champions vs Firefighters
I’ve delivered services all my commercial career in tech: Training, Contract Research, and now for more than a decade, Scientific Support.
I’ve found that of the three services — training customers, delivering projects, and providing support — the last one creates the deepest connection between a tech company and its clients.
However, not all support is created equal, so what does great support look like?
And more importantly, what’s disguised under the “customer support” banner, but is it a proxy for something else?
Customer support as an enabler
Customer service is the department that aims to empower customers to make the most out of their purchases.
On the surface, this may look like simply answering clients’ questions. Still, outstanding customer service is delivered when the representative is given the agency and tools to become the ambassador between the client and the organization.
What does that mean in practice?
The support representative doesn’t patronize the customer, diminish their issue, or downplay its negative impact. Instead, they focus on understanding the problem and its effect on the client. This creates a personalized experience.
The agent doesn’t overpromise or disguise the bad news. Instead, they build trust by communicating on roadblocks and suggesting possible alternatives. This builds trust.
The support staff takes ownership of resolving the issue, no matter the number of iterations necessary or how many colleagues they need to involve in the case. This builds loyalty.
Over and over, I’ve seen this kind of customer support transform users into advocates, even for ordinary products and services.
Unfortunately, customer support is often misunderstood and misused.
Customer support as a stopgap
Rather than seeing support as a way to build the kind of relationship that ensures product and service renewals and increases the business footprint, many organizations see support as
A cost center
A way to make up for deficient — or inexistent — product documentation
A remedy for poorly designed user experience
A shield to protect product managers’ valuable time from “irrelevant” customer feedback
A catch-all for lousy and inaccessible institutional websites
An outlet for customers to vent
In that context, it’s obvious why most organizations believe that swapping human support representatives for chatbots is a no-brainer.
And this is not a new idea, as some want us to believe.
A short history of chatbots
Eliza, the therapist
The first chatbot, created in 1966, played the role of a psychotherapist. She was named Eliza, after Eliza Doolittle in the play Pygmalion. The rationale was that by changing how she spoke, the fictional character created the illusion that she was a duchess.
Eliza didn’t provide any solution. Instead, it asked questions and repeated users’ replies. Below is an excerpt of an interaction between Eliza and a user:
User: Men are all alike. ELIZA: IN WHAT WAY User: They’re always bugging us about something or other. ELIZA: CAN YOU THINK OF A SPECIFIC EXAMPLE User: Well, my boyfriend made me come here. ELIZA: YOUR BOYFRIEND MADE YOU COME HERE User: He says I’m depressed much of the time. ELIZA: I AM SORRY TO HEAR YOU ARE DEPRESSED
Eliza’s creator — computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum — was very surprised to observe that people would treat the chatbot as a human and would elicit emotional responses even through concise interactions with the chatbot
“Some subjects have been very hard to convince that Eliza (with its present script) is not human”
Joseph Weizenbaum
We now have a name for this kind of behaviour
“The ELIZA effect is the tendency to project human traits — such as experience, semantic comprehension or empathy — into computer programs that have a textual interface.
The effect is a category mistake that arises when the program’s symbolic computations are described through terms such as “think”, “know” or “understand.”
Through the years, other chatbots have become famous too.
Tay, the zero chill chatbot
In 2016, Microsoft released the chatbot Tay on X (aka Twitter). Tay’s image profile was that of a “female,” it was “designed to mimic the language patterns of a 19-year-old American girl and to learn from interacting with human users of Twitter.”
The bot’s social media profile was an open invitation to conversation. It read, “The more you talk, the smarter Tay gets.”
Then, they replaced their six paid staff and 200 volunteers with chatbot Tessa.
The bot was developed based on decades of research conducted by experts on eating disorders. Still, it was reported to offer dieting advice to vulnerable people seeking help.
The result? Under the mediatic pressure of the chatbot’s repeated potentially harmful responses, the NEDA shut down the helpline. Now, 70,000 people were left without either chatbots or humans to help them.
Lessons learned?
Throughout these and other negative experiences with chatbots around the world, we may have thought that we understood the security and performance limitations of chatbots as well as how easy it is for our brains to “humanize” them.
However, the advent of ChatGPT has made us forget all the lessons learned and instead has enticed us to believe that they’re a suitable replacement for entire customer support departments.
The chatbot hype
CEOs boasting about replacing workers with chatbots
If you think companies would be wary of advertising that they are replacing people with chatbots, you’re mistaken.
In July 2023, Summit Shah — CEO of the e-commerce company Dukaan — bragged that they had replaced 90% of their customer support staff with a chatbot developed in-house on the social media platform X.
“We had to layoff 90% of our support team because of this AI chatbot.
Tough? Yes. Necessary? Absolutely.
The results?
Time to first response went from 1m 44s to INSTANT!
Resolution time went from 2h 13m to 3m 12s
Customer support costs reduced by ~85%”
Note the use of the word “necessary” as a way to exonerate the organisation from the layoffs. I also wonder about the feelings of loyalty and trust of the remainder of the 10% of the support team towards their employer.
And Shah is not the only one.
Last February, Klarna’s CEO — Sebastian Siemiatkowski — gloated on X that their AI can do the work of 700 people.
“This is a breakthrough in practical application of AI!
Klarnas AI assistant, powered by OpenAI, has in its first 4 weeks handled 2.3 m customer service chats and the data and insights are staggering:
[…] It performs the equivalent job of 700 full time agents… read more about this below.
So while we are happy about the results for our customers, our employees who have developed it and our shareholders, it raises the topic of the implications it will have for society.
In our case, customer service has been handled by on average 3000 full time agents employed by our customer service / outsourcing partners. Those partners employ 200 000 people, so in the short term this will only mean that those agents will work for other customers of those partners.
But in the longer term, […] while it may be a positive impact for society as a whole, we need to consider the implications for the individuals affected.
We decided to share these statistics to raise the awareness and encourage a proactive approach to the topic of AI. For decision makers worldwide to recognise this is not just “in the future”, this is happening right now.”
In summary
Klarna wants us to believe that the company is releasing this AI assistant for the benefit of others — clients, their developers, and shareholders — but that their core concern is about the future of work.
Siemiatkowski only sees layoffs as a problem when it affects his direct employees. Partners’ workers are not his problem.
He frames the negative impacts of replacing humans with chatbots as an “individual” problem.
Klarna deflects any accountability for the negative impacts to the “decision makers worldwide.”
Shah and Siemiatkowski are birds of a feather: Business leaders reaping the benefits of the AI chatbot hype without shouldering any responsibility for the harms.
In some organizations, customer service agents are seen as jacks of all trades — their work is akin to a Whac-A-Mole game where the goal is to make up for all the clunky and disconnected internal workflows.
The Harvard Business Review article “Your Organization Isn’t Designed to Work with GenAI” provides a great example of this organizational dysfunction.
The piece presents a framework developed to “derive” value from GenAI. It’s called Design for Dialogue. To warm us up, the article showers us with a deluge of anthropomorphic language signalling that both humans and AI are in this “together.”
“Designing for Dialogue is rooted in the idea that technology and humans can share responsibilities dynamically.”
or
“By designing for dialogue, organizations can create a symbiotic relationship between humans and GenAI.”
Then, the authors offer us an example of what’s possible
“A good example is the customer service model employed by Jerry, a company valued at $450 million with over five million customers that serves as a one stop-shop for car owners to get insurance and financing.
Jerry receives over 200,000 messages a month from customers. With such high volume, the company struggled to respond to customer queries within 24 hours, let alone minutes or seconds.
By installing their GenAI solution in May 2023, they moved from having humans in the lead in the entirety of the customer service process and answering only 54% of customer inquiries within 24 hours or less to having AI in the lead 100% of the time and answering over 96% of inquiries within 30 seconds by June 2023.
They project $4 million in annual savings from this transformation.”
Sounds amazing, doesn’t it?
However, if you think it was a case of simply “swamping” humans with chatbots, let me burst your bubble—it takes a village.
Reading the article, we uncover the details underneath that “transformation.”
They broke down the customer service agent’s role into multiple knowledge domains and tasks.
They discovered that there are points in the AI–customer interaction when matters need to be escalated to the agent, who then takes the lead, so they designed interaction protocols to transfer the inquiry to a human agent.
AI chatbots conduct the laborious hunt for information and suggest a course of action for the agent.
Engineers review failures daily and adjust the system to correct them.
In other words,
Customer support agents used to be flooded with various requests without filtering between domains and tasks.
As part of the makeover, they implemented mechanisms to parse and route support requests based on topic and action. They upgraded their support ticketing system from an amateur “team” inbox to a professional call center.
We also learn that customer representatives use the bots to retrieve information, hinting that all data — service requests, sales quotes, licenses, marketing datasheets — are collected in a generic bucket instead of being classified in a structured, searchable way, i.e. a knowledge base.
And despite all that progress
They designed the chatbots to pass the “hot potatoes” to agents
The system requires daily monitoring by humans.
If you don’t believe this is about improving operations rather than AI chatbots, let me share with you the end of the article.
“Yes, GenAI can automate tasks and augment human capabilities. But reimagining processes in a way that utilizes it as an active, learning, and adaptable partner forges the path to new levels of innovation and efficiency.”
In addition to hiding process improvements, chatbots can also disguise human labour.
AI washing or the new Mechanical Turk
A cross-section of the Turk from Racknitz, showing how he thought the operator sat inside as he played his opponent. Racknitz was wrong both about the position of the operator and the dimensions of the automaton Wikipedia.
Historically, machines have often provided a veneer of novelty to work performed by humans.
The Mechanical Turk was a fraudulent chess-playing machine constructed in 1770 by Wolfgang von Kempelen. A mechanical illusion allowed a human chess master hiding inside to operate the machine. It defeated politicians such as Napoleon Bonaparte and Benjamin Franklin.
Chatbots are no different.
In April, Amazon announced that they’d be removing their “Just Walk Out” technology, allowing shoppers to skip the check-out line. In theory, the technology was fully automated thanks to computer vision.
In practice, about 1,000 workers in India reviewed what customers picked up and left the stores with.
In 2022, the [Business Insider] report said that 700 out of every 1,000 “Just Walk Out” transactions were verified by these workers. Following this, an Amazon spokesperson said that the India-based team only assisted in training the model used for “Just Walk Out”.”
That is, Amazon wanted us to believe that although the technology was launched in 2018—branded as “Amazon Go,” they still needed about 1,000 workers in India to train the model in 2022.
Still, whether the technology was “untrainable” or required an army of humans to deliver the work, it’s not surprising that Amazon phased it out. It didn’t live up to its hype.
And they were not the only ones.
Last August, Presto Automation — a company that provides drive-thru systems — claimed on its website that its AI could take over 95 percent of drive-thru orders “without any human intervention.”
Later, they admitted in filings with the US Securities and Exchange Commission that they employed “off-site agents in countries like the Philippines who help its Presto Voice chatbots in over 70 percent of customer interactions.”
The fix? To change their claims. They now advertise the technology as “95 percent without any restaurant or staff intervention.”
The Amazon and Presto Automation cases suggest that, in addition to clearly indicating when chatbots use AI, we may also need to label some tech applications as “powered by humans.”
Of course, there is a final use case for AI chatbots: As scapegoats.
Blame it on the algorithm
Last February, Air Canada made the headlines when it was ordered to pay compensation after its chatbot gave a customer inaccurate information that led him to miss a reduced fare ticket. Quick summary below
A customer interacted with a chatbot on the Air Canada website, more precisely, asking for reimbursement information about a flight.
The chatbot provided inaccurate information.
The customer’s reimbursement claim was rejected by Air Canada because it didn’t follow the policies on their website, even though the customer shared a screenshot of his written exchange with the chatbot.
The customer took Air Canada to court and won.
At a high level, everything appears to look the same from the case where a human support representative would have provided inaccurate information, but the devil is always in the details.
During the trial, Air Canada argued that they were not liable because their chatbot “was responsible for its own actions” when giving wrong information about the fare.
Fortunately, the court ordered Air Canada to reimburse the customer but this opens a can of worms:
What if Air Canada had terms and conditions similar to ChatGPT or Google Gemini that “absolved” them from the chatbot’s replies?
Does Air Canada also defect their responsibility when a support representative makes a mistake or is it only for AI systems?
We’d be naïve to think that this attempt at using an AI chatbot for dodging responsibility is a one-off.
Tech companies keep trying to convince us that the current glitches with GenAI are “growing pains” and that we “just” need bigger models and more powerful computer chips.
And what’s the upside to enduring those teething problems? The promise of the massive efficiencies chatbots will bring to the table. Once the technology is “perfect”, no more need for workers to perform or remediate the half-cooked bot work. Bottomless savings in terms of time and staff.
But is that true?
The reality is that those productivity gains come from exploiting both people and the planet.
The people
Many of us are used to hearing the recorded message “this call may be recorded for training purposes” when we phone a support hotline. But how far can that “training” go?
Customer support chatbots are being developed using data from millions of exchanges between support representatives and clients. How are all those “creators” being compensated? Or should we now assume that any interaction with support can be collected, analyzed, and repurposed to build organizations’ AI systems?
Moreover, the models underneath those AI chatbots must be trained and sanitized for toxic content; however, that’s not a highly rewarded job. Let’s remember that OpenAI used Kenyan workers paid less than $2 per hour to make ChatGPT less toxic.
And it’s not only about the humans creating and curating that content. There are also humans behind the appliances we use to access those chatbots.
For example, cobalt is a critical mineral for every lithium-ion battery, and the Democratic Republic of Congo provides at least 50% of the world’s lithium supply. Forty thousand children mine it paid $1–2 for working up to 12 hours daily and inhaling toxic cobalt dust.
80% of electronic waste in the US and most other countries is transported to Asia. Workers on e-waste sites are paid an average of $1.50 per day, with women frequently having the lowest-tier jobs. They are exposed to harmful materials, chemicals, and acids as they pick and separate the electronic equipment into its components, which in turn negatively affects their morbidity, mortality, and fertility.
The planet
The terminology and imagery used by Big Tech to refer to the infrastructure underpinning artificial intelligence has misled us into believing that AI is ethereal and cost-free.
Nothing is farthest from the truth. AI is rooted in material objects: datacentres, servers, smartphones, and laptops. Moreover, training and using AI models demand energy and water and generate CO2.
Let’s crack some numbers.
Luccioni and co-workers estimated that the training of GPT-3 — a GenAI model that has underpinned the development of many chatbots — emitted about 500 metric tons of carbon, roughly equivalent to over a million miles driven by an average gasoline-powered car. It also required the evaporation of 700,000 litres (185,000 gallons) of fresh water to cool down Microsoft’s high-end data centers.
It’s estimated that using GPT-3 requires about 500 ml (16 ounces) of water for every 10–50 responses.
A new report from the International Energy Agency (IEA) forecasts that the AI industry could burn through ten times as much electricity in 2026 as in 2023.
Counterintuitively, many data centres are built in desertic areas like the US Southwest. Why? It’s easier to remove the heat generated inside the data centre in a dry environment. Moreover, that region has access to cheap and reliable non-renewable energy from the largest nuclear plant in the country.
Coming back to e-waste, we generate around 40 million tons of electronic waste every year worldwide and only 12.5% is recycled.
In summary, the efficiencies that chatbots are supposed to bring in appear to be based on exploitative labour, stolen content, and depletion of natural resources.
For reflection
Organizations — including NGOs and governments — are under the spell of the AI chatbot mirage. They see it as a magic weapon to cut costs, increase efficiency, and boost productivity.
Unfortunately, when things don’t go as planned, rather than questioning what’s wrong with using a parrot to do the work of a human, they want us to believe that the solution is sending the parrot to Harvard.
That approach prioritizes the short-term gains of a few — the chatbot sellers and purchasers — to the detriment of the long-term prosperity of people and the planet.
My perspective as a tech employee?
I don’t feel proud when I hear a CEO bragging about AI replacing workers. I don’t enjoy seeing a company claim that chatbots provide the same customer experience as humans. Nor do I appreciate organizations obliterating the materiality of artificial intelligence.
Are you worried about the impact of AI impact on your job, your organisation, and the future of the planet but you feel it’d take you years to ramp up your AI literacy?
Do you want to explore how to responsibly leverage AI in your organisation to boost innovation, productivity, and revenue but feel overwhelmed by the quantity and breadth of information available?
Are you concerned because your clients are prioritising AI but you keep procrastinating on learning about it because you think you’re not “smart enough”?
I have two jobs. I have a full-time role as Director of Support for a tech corporation. This is a job that I find both fulfilling and comes with a monthly salary. I also have my own business helping leaders to make more inclusive tech products and workplaces. I love it too.
I’m often contacted by women who see my posts on social media, visit my website, or have attended one of my workshops and want to know more about how I “manage” to have a salaried job at a corporation and my own business because they’re exploring the possibility to do the same.
Last week I had three of those conversations almost back to back. Also, this year’s International Women’s Day motto was “Invest in women: Accelerate progress.” It looked to me like a sign from the universe that it was time to share some of my key insights on this topic with a broader audience.
More specifically
The genderisation of entrepreneurship
The three ways patriarchy keeps you from launching your business whilst enjoying the security of the salaried job
How you’re using productive procrastination against yourself
Three keys to my success in balancing my corporate job with my business.
Failure as a status symbol for wealthy white men
I work in tech so I often hear about privileged men parading their business failures as a symbol of status.
How does that manifest in practice? For example, somebody introduces the enterpreneur in question by
Their number of failed startups.
The millions in investment they’ve got – and wasted.
The renowed universities where they drop out before finishing their degrees.
Strangely, this is no way to disparage the person but to portray them as
Visionary
Fearless
Experienced
Can you imagine a businesswoman introduced in the same way expecting people to be impressed by her entrepreneurial capabilities?
Neither can I.
How patriarchy is talking you out of your entrepreneurship dream
Belittling the commitment as an entrepreneur
I’ve lost count of all the people who have told me that I don’t take my business seriously because I’m “not all in”, meaning that I haven’t quit my salaried job.
In their view, if you believe in your business you should drop everything and “follow” your passion.
What do I think? That when you have the privilege of financial, social, and emotional stability is easy to lecture others.
My parents became immigrants for financial reasons and I’ve been an immigrant since I was a baby.
A major lesson of a life shaped by financial ups and downs — not only those of my family but of many the countries I’ve lived in: Spain, Venezuela, Greece, France, the UK — has been that financial security is priceless. No pun intended.
I never felt that “failure” could be “fun” or proof of my experience. Moreover, I never wanted to be a financial burden for those around me. All the opposite, I’ve strived to be a financial rock that people around me have been able to tap into in moments of need.
Discouragement from family and network
A recurrent theme in the conversations with those women is what those close to them think about it.
It starts with something like “My friend/partner/parent says”
I won’t like it
It’ll be too stressful
I don’t have what it takes
I’ll stretch myself too much
I better concentrate on my salaried job
When those fantastic women share those “pearls of wisdom” with me they often add that their friend/partner/parent knows them very well… Somehow implying that they know them better than they know themselves.
Minimisation of the business
Those women may refer to their business ideas as
Hobby
Pocket money
Money for “my things”
Hustle
Those words minimise their business. Why? Often, because they’re afraid of
Failure
Ridicule
Being patronised later with an “I told you so”
Making others feel threatened
Referring to their business with words that make it look small and inconsequential keeps those women safe.
But it’s also a way to hide the fact that business is linked to finances. We don’t expect a hobby to bring money. A business is.
What’s driving that dissuasion campaign?
Patriarchy.
Imagine if women would get their own business and enjoy financial freedom – who would
Provide unlimited emotional support to family, friends, and co-workers?
Patriarchy cannot tolerate that women get to have the cake – a salaried job – and eat it – their business.
How women keep their dreams alive (without acting on them)
I’ve talked at length about how productive procrastination keeps us from doing what we want to do. I refer to this term as performing tasks that are alibis for not sharing our work with others.
This is how I’ve used productive procrastination against my business
Endlessly crowdsourcing advice — and secretly permission — from many women with a salary and a business before starting mine.
Continually enrolling in courses to teach me all the different aspects of business — marketing, finances, accounting, and many more — with the excuse that I needed to be an expert on all areas of entrepreneurship before giving it a go myself.
Avoiding talking with my target client about my business idea.
Denying myself to invest in business mentoring and coaching because deep down I thought my business was not “worth the financial investment”, disregarding the mental toll and time spent going in circles and searching for approval from others.
But there are many more excuses that those women searching for advice have shared with me:
I’m not good a call calling
I don’t know marketing
It should be overwhelming to make both the salaried and business work
I don’t have time to do “everything”
I don’t know how social media works
Are those women wasting our time together? I don’t see it that way. They are fighting to get somebody to believe in their dreams despite their resistance and that of those close to them.
3 steps to get you started
To manage my transition from getting revenue only from a full-time job to developing my business and my personal brand whilst thriving in my corporate job – I was promoted to Director whilst running my business – several streams came together:
1.- Gaining awareness of my skills, background, and experience — In 2019–2020, I played with the idea of a startup focused on an app to help educate and identify unconscious biases. I went to a start-up accelerator and learned about VCs and pitches. I also painstakingly learned that it was not for me.
Then, I had a lightbulb moment. I’d been delivering services — training, contract research, and support — for 20 years. Moreover, I’d been coaching and mentoring women in tech for as many years if not more.
Since that moment, I haven’t looked back. I’ve made all those hard-earned skills the core of my business offer.
2.- Developing a personal brand — A very dear mentor and sponsor of mine told me years ago, “Patricia, you’re your brand.”
In retrospect, I realise that I didn’t understand what she meant. Brand sounded like something influencers and big companies like Coca-Cola and Nike had, not me. Since then, I’ve invested significant money and time in addressing my gaps in that area.
For example, learning how to
Craft articles that people want to read — initially, only my family would read them but today some of my pieces have been read by more than 3K people.
Get consistently +1,000 monthly visits to my website
Become a paid speaker
All have taken effort — not only grasping the “know-how” but adapting it to the vision, mission, and values for my business.
Which of the three was the hardest for you? Of the three, the toughest one has been #3. Whilst #2 can appear as the most time, effort, and money demanding, I love learning and I use it to procrastinate on tasks that I want to do but I’m not doing.
In which order should I do the steps? Chances are that your business is going evolve as you test your offer with potential clients, so the reality is that you’ll need to keep coming back to the three of them.
A final piece of advice — check the conditions in your salaried contract regarding setting up your own business. Some organisations are more flexible than others.
My business is allowing me to explore complementary sides of myself like creativity, entrepreneurship, branding, and systems thinking. If you’re thinking about keeping your salaried job and starting your own business, I hope you have a journey as rewarding as mine.
And if you’re going in circles questioning if you should or shouldn’t have a dual role like mine, I invite you to think about what would you do right now for your business idea if you knew you couldn’t fail.
And then, go and do it.
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
A week ago, I delivered a virtual keynote to a group of women in tech. The title was “Breaking Models: The Three Keys to Success That You Already Possess”. I wanted to inspire them to rely on themselves — rather than on external role models — to achieve their goals.
During the talk I shared
The contrast between my career in 2017 and now.
How the process of launching my website on diversity and inclusion in tech in 2018 became a pivotal moment in my professional career.
How the emphasis on “role models” and the mantra “You cannot be what you don’t see” hindered my professional progression.
Three tools that can accelerate our career advancement and that we already have in ourselves.
The feedback from the attendees was so positive that I decided to share the highlights more broadly.
Let’s start with some context about the attendees.
The audience
Venezolanas in Tech (ViT) is a nonprofit organisation aiming to give Venezuelan women and young girls the opportunity to develop their professional skills, gain exposure to job opportunities in tech, and find a safe space where they can meet others who are facing similar challenges.
Last January, I was approached by the organiser of their mentoring program to give a talk. She shared
The ask — To be their keynote speaker for the last session of the mentoring program.
The audience — Many of the women in this mentoring cohort were in the process of transitioning, either between different tech roles, arriving from a different sector into tech, or coming back to tech after a hiatus working in another industry.
The topic —As the common denominator among the audience was reinvention, the organisers believed that many of the mentees might be wondering what to do after the program ended. They wanted the talk to inspire them to continue on the path they’d started.
As a native Spaniard who also holds a Venezuelan passport and a woman in tech, I couldn’t say no to them.
The transformation: From Patricia v.2017 to v.2024
My LinkedIn profile portrays me as a successful tech professional with a reasonably straightforward corporate career.
It didn’t feel like that seven years ago.
Patricia v.2017
I shared with the audience a photo of myself smiling in Paris, more precisely, in front of the Arc de Triomphe, in 2017. I was there for a company meeting.
The image was of a “happy” Patricia but underneath I was very disappointed with my career progress.
At the time, I had been Senior Manager of Scientific Support for 5 years. I had learned that I was considered a high performer with low potential. I had reached my career ceiling.
I was also stuck regarding my diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) impact.
In 2016, I founded the first gender employee resource group in my workplace. A year later, I was eager to participate in the public debate about the role of diversity and inclusion in organisations. However, I kept postponing it month after month, preferring to reserve those conversations for discussions with like-minded work colleagues.
Patricia v.2024
Today, I have a fulfilling — even if somehow unusual— portfolio career
I’m a Global Director of Scientific Support and Customer Operations for a Fortune Future 50 corporation.
I have a business as an inclusion strategist where I help tech leaders leverage diversity in their business strategy to boost innovation, protect their reputation, and attract and retain talent. I also help non-tech C-suit and board members seize responsibly AI opportunities.
I’m a certified work-life coach who helps ambitious women in tech make more impact, work less, and design a life that they love.
I volunteer for European Women on Boards, an NGO with the mission to increase gender equality in decision-making; We and AI, a British NGO that aims to increase public awareness about the benefits and challenges of AI; and I’m a trustee of the Booth Centre, a community centre run with people affected by homelessness.
I’m a writer and a keynote speaker. I’ve published research on the effect of covid-19 on the unpaid work of professional women and I’m writing a book about how women succeed worldwide based on feedback from over 400 women in tech living in 60+ countries.
But I’d lie if I said the transition was seamless.
The path to launching my website
I first thought about launching a website dedicated to the intersection of DEI and tech in 2016. But I became a master at talking myself out of it.
I told myself that
I was not a DEI expert — I compared myself to people who had the title of Head of DEI or who had written books about unconscious bias. Without a diploma in Human Resources, who I was to be vocal about diversity and inclusion in public?
My “Good Girl” manual — I had been socialised to believe that it was not serious for a woman with engineering and Ph.D. diplomas to take a 90-degree turn and “waste time” focusing on DEI.
Perfectionism — As Brené Brown says in Men, Women and Worthiness, many women are raised with the expectation of perfection. I never had a blog on DEI or any other topic. Still, I had decided that if my blog ever had a typo, it would have catastrophic consequences for my reputation. It was either perfection or nothing.
What I discovered through a journey of deep introspection and coaching was that
I was protecting myself from criticism — Starting a public blog in DEI exposed me to others questioning both my views and the relevance of my background to speak about the topic.
I was hooked on praise —My worth was tied to others’ appreciation of my work. I was concerned about what my professional and personal network would think of me if I started a blog about DEI.
I thought I needed to find a role model —At the time, the only people working in tech that I knew were interested in DEI were those on the HR team. As I didn’t know anybody who worked in tech and had a blog on diversity and inclusion, I repeated to myself that “I couldn’t be what I couldn’t see.”
From the three, let’s focus the “need” to find a role model as a prerequisite to stretch ourselves out of our comfort zone.
The myth of the “role model”
There are three top reasons why focusing on finding a role model didn’t help me
I fell into productive procrastination — Whilst searching for my “elusive” role model, I would spend my time busy with further certifications, courses, and workshops creating the illusion that I was working towards building my website. It was a lie, I was procrastinating.
I used comparison against myself— Once I found my unicorn — aka “role model” —I proceeded to dissect how great they were and find shortcomings in myself. I am the same age as Sheryl Sandberg. When I read Lean In in 2017, the gap was obvious. She had been a student at Harvard University, VP at Google, and at that time she was already a millionaire and COO at Facebook. I felt like a failure.
I missed my uniqueness — By trying to find and imitate a role model, I discarded what made me distinctive: the combination of having a strong scientific and technical background, a career in services in tech, and experience living in 6 countries on 3 continents.
Luckily, there was another way. What if I already had the role models I needed? What if you already have them too?
The three tools we all possess
Our past self
We use our past to berate ourselves.
My blog and my promotion to director have brought me joy and recognition. It’s easy to look back at Patricia v.2017 and recriminate her for neither getting the director role after five years as a senior manager nor being bold enough to start her blog until 2018. She used to be my punching ball.
Instead, what if we flipped the script and took the time to thank our past selves for believing in our potential?
For example, I’ve learned that I can access the memories of Patricia v.2017 to give me confidence when things don’t go as planned or take longer than expected.
In those moments, I pause and thank her for believing that Patricia v.2024 was possible. For not giving up on me — her future self — when people around her told her to put her head down and continue to do what she was doing.
IN PRACTICE: What relation do you have with your past self? Do you use it to reprimand yourself or to energise you?
Our present self
Sometimes, I use “time” as a tactic to talk myself out of what I want to do but I’m not doing. For example, I tell myself
Writing an article takes a lot of time.
I don’t have enough time to network.
It’s impossible to manage my corporate career, my volunteering work, and my business.
In those moments, I also default to using verbs like “should”, “have to”, or “need” to catastrophise about my stretch goals.
I should be posting every day on social media to grow my business.
I must write a new article every week to show I’m serious.
I need to network to be a successful businesswoman.
Notice a pattern? In those moments, I talk to myself like a victim of my business, my writing, and my time management skills.
Alternatively, I can stop being a martyr of my stretch goals and become a strategist of my life. In those moments, that’s how I talk to myself
I decide to spend one hour per day on social media to build my brand as an inclusion strategist and technologist.
I choose to spend my Sunday writing articles because I want to share my point of view about tech, DEI, careers, and feminism with others.
I prioritise networking in my business because it helps me to find clients, connect with interesting people, and explore synergies.
In summary, I talk to myself as the person who has authority over my life.
IN PRACTICE: Which kind of language do you use to prompt yourself into action? Do you treat yourself as a victim or as a decision-maker?
Our future self
We talk endlessly about SMART goals — objectives that are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound.
SMART goals are great when we want to play it safe and have a plan in place to reach our objective.
But what if you are a trailblazer? What if you want to escape a cookie-cutter life?
If you’re not convinced yet, can you imagine Mahatma Gandhi, Emmeline Pankhurst, Nelson Mandela, and Florence Nightingale accomplishing their bold vision by using SMART goals?
Let me introduce you to impossible goals. Those are goals that are so bold that you don’t know how to achieve them. Yet.
There are four key benefits of setting impossible goals
They remove limiting beliefs you didn’t know you had about what’s possible for you.
They teach you to embrace uncertainty.
You discover that you can trust yourself to learn what you need to know to achieve your objective.
You transform yourself through the journey to attain an impossible goal.
Tempted? This is how it works.
In 2022, I coached 5 women and they got the promotion they wanted. In 2023, my impossible goal was to coach 50 women and people from underrepresented groups to get the promotion they deserved.
I’m happy to report that I coached 58.
Was it easy? No. Did I know how to do it when I set the impossible goal? No. But by trusting my future self — that version of Patricia that would have already succeeded — and using it to help me focus when I wanted to give up, I exceeded my impossible goal.
IN PRACTICE: What outrageous goal do you want to achieve? Now, imagine who you’ll be once you reach that goal. How does that feel?
How to use your three role models at a juncture
In June 2018, I finally launched my website. It was not perfect then and still isn’t today. But it has been an incredible laboratory to learn about myself and show me what I’m capable of when I rely on my own role models rather than wait for external inspiration.
How can we use those three tools when we are at a crossroads, like ending a mentoring scheme, completing a degree, or feeling that we’ve outgrown our current role?
In those moments, there are three typical traps where our past, present, and future selves can help us.
Ruminating about the past
When we complete a chapter in our personal or professional career, we may look backward and reprimand ourselves for the things we did and didn’t do.
For example, we may scold ourselves because we missed the opportunity to connect more often with our mentor, regret the classes we missed at the university, or lament that we didn’t invest more time in broadening our network.
Instead of having a pity party, go back in time and remember that version of yourself that signed up for the mentoring scheme, started the degree, or applied for the job you have. And then, thank your past self because they made a decision from which you’re benefiting today.
The upside? Reminding your brain that you’re a person who makes sound decisions.
Trapped in analysis-paralysis
We may be fretting about what road to take as we feel “on our own” after reaching a milestone – worrying about wasting our time, making the wrong decision, or missing out on the opportunity of a lifetime.
Don’t let your brain make you a victim of the present. Be your own ally.
Rather than stressing out about the “right choice” and “the lack of time”, I dare you to believe that
All alternatives are valid — Your job is to pick one and then tell your brain the reasons why you like your choice.
It’s possible to timebox tasks — You can decide in advance how much time you want to dedicate to an activity rather than working on the assumption that tasks “take the time that they take”.
Done is better than perfect.
Feeling uncertainty about the future
When we complete a phase in our career, it may be hard to get past the obstacles we foresee in our future: Our first job application, asking for a promotion, or starting our own company.
Here is where your future self can be priceless as your mentor and guide.
Imagine the version of you who already got the job you want, was promoted, or is a successful entrepreneur. Then, use it as your mentor and guide.
What advice can they give you about your next steps?
How can they inspire you to continue working on your goals?
How can you use them as accountability partners when you are tempted to give up on your objectives?
I want to thank me — for believing in me and doing what they said I could not do. And I want to say to myself in front of all you beautiful people, “Go on girl with your bad self. You did that.”
Instead, learn to appreciate your uniqueness and talk to yourself — past, present, and future versions — like your friend, mentor, and coach, rather than your most hated enemy.
Ready to become your own role model? Let me know what you think in the comments!
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
My career as a people manager in tech started about 17 years ago. At the time, I was sent to a two-day course that was supposed to tell me everything I needed to know to manage people. Unfortunately, all that course told me was that my direct reports wanted to take advantage of me and that I needed to demonstrate “I was the boss”.
Since the course, I found the opposite to be true.
All my years of experience managing employees located around the world, discussing challenges with other managers, and mentoring and coaching those starting their management careers have demonstrated to me that there is much more important information to learn as a manager.
It’s not that underperformance is not a challenge but when it happens, typically Human Resources can help. On the flip side, you may have little support as a manager to get the most out of a team of smart people.
What would I have loved to know in that management workshop 17 years ago?
Being a good person is not the same as being a good manager
I was promoted within my team. Without transition, I moved from being their colleague to managing them.
As contract research consultants, we were working in a high-pressure environment all the time so I felt my role was to assuage the team’s stress. I endeavoured to be the group’s cheerleader and make sure all decisions were made by consensus.
That didn’t make me a great manager.
Good people management involves adapting your style to the context. Indeed, sometimes you need to be the one uplifting the team’s mood and some decisions are better to be taken as a group. But other situations need you to be the one grounding the team or taking an unpopular — but necessary — decision.
Takeaway: People management is not a moral trait — being a “good person” — but a profession. Create your scorecard about what good management looks like, identify your gaps, get mentors, and invest in learning and perfecting your skills.
Don’t treat everybody the same
I remember a conversation with an experienced manager many years ago. We were talking about biases and he shared with me that his rule of thumb was to treat everybody the same. My answer? That I strived to treat everybody differently because each member of my team was unique.
My rationale is that each of your direct reports is different and they come with their unique strengths and challenges. Why would you treat an employee who is a single father in his first professional role the same as an experienced non-binary employee caring for a family member with Alzheimer’s?
Takeaway: You may be familiar with the Golden Rule: Treat others as you wish to be treated. All my years as a customer support leader and inclusion strategist is that what works is the Platinum rule: Treat others as they wish to be treated. Invest time in knowing your team members.
Don’t compete
I was a high-performing team contributor before my promotion to manager. In the first years after the transition, I felt I needed to do my “old” job as well as my new job as a manager and I needed to demonstrate to my team that I hadn’t lost my “edge”.
The result? Work constantly overspilling to long evenings and weekends that got me almost to burnout several times.
Takeaway: You need to let go of your former identity. As a manager, your value is to enable the team to deliver the objectives they are assigned to and remove obstacles in their way. Trying to get into a competition with them is simply a waste of everybody’s time and energy.
Keep for yourself your 2 cents
The hierarchical view of management that was instilled in me implied that my obligation was always to provide positive and negative feedback to my team. Simply saying that the work was of good quality felt like I was a slacker — as a “good manager” I should be providing detailed feedback.
As a consequence, I spent useless time and effort at the beginning on tasks such as going slide by slide through very good presentations from my direct reports and commenting on small stuff to show them that I was doing my work as a manager. I not only wasted my time but I’m sure I tested their patience too.
Takeaway: If the work is of good quality, simply acknowledge it. Don’t feel the need to provide suggestions when they don’t add value.
Let your cape at home
Working with smart people is a privilege but it doesn’t come without drawbacks. One of them is their capacity to outsmart you if you let them. Let me explain.
I remember clearly some of my very smart and experienced reports coming “helpless” to me about a difficult customer or task. Of course, I would fall for the trick and “offer” to step in and tackle the issue myself. Or come up with a solution to their problem.
The ruse worked for a while because, from my side, it was making me feel “valued”, and from theirs, it meant that they outsourced the problem to me. What could be wrong with that?
That resulted in more work for me and hindered their growth.
So I learned the hard way that I had to resist the urge to save the day every time an employee would come with a problem. That didn’t mean that I wouldn’t engage in collaborative discussions about how to approach complex issues — or remove barriers blocking them from doing their job — but that my role was not to do their job.
Takeaway: They are smart people and you pay them to solve problems. Don’t be the manager that needs to be the superhero-ine in each situation. Your job is to coach your direct reports towards solutions and offer them challenges at their level that enable them to grow.
Be prepared to eat humble pie
In the “command and control” version of management, the boss talks and the team members do as instructed without asking for context, highlighting contradictions, or questioning assumptions.
The reality is that I’ve never been that kind of employee myself. I’ve always thrived in work environments where constructive challenge is welcome and seen as a sign of engagement.
On the other hand, as a manager, I have to admit that sometimes it can be exhausting to have such passionate, clever, and demanding discussion partners. All the time.
The remedy? In the few instances I’ve longed for quieter 1:1 and group meetings, I’ve reminded myself that the alternative is boredom and conformism. That has been enough to bring me back to appreciate the team I have.
Takeaway: When you manage top performers, it’s a given that they will challenge the status quo and come up with better alternatives to the solutions you present. Remember that this is the reason you’re paying them.
Your reports are not your friends
When I took my first job as a people manager, I didn’t consciously think about the necessary change in the dynamics with my coworkers.
In retrospect, it was inevitable but maybe my brain was not ready to contemplate that change yet. Paradoxically, none of the books I’d read about management appeared to care enough to mention it.
It took awkward conversations, light jokes not laughed at, and some of my direct reports’ kind comments for me to understand that I couldn’t close my eyes anymore. Things had changed forever.
Later on, when through my DEI work I began to dig deep into biases, I realised the importance of separating personal affinity from the manager-employee relationship. For example, I’ve learned how easy it’s to overburden the employee that we find the easiest to work with.
Takeaway: By seeing your team as friends, you’re short-changing them. Regardless of whether you like them or not as a person, your job as a manager is to ensure they progress in their career and deliver on their objectives.
Take care of yourself
During the pandemic, somebody on my team passed away after a long illness. I felt the loss deeply — he was an amazing human being and professional.
If that was not enough, due to the restrictions on movement and direct contact with people, it fell on me alone to inform all the relevant stakeholders in the company and file the necessary paperwork. I felt both drained and devastated.
In a moment of clarity, I realised that I needed to put my oxygen mask first and reluctantly took some time off to process the events. It was the best decision for me, my team, and the company.
Takeaway: Take care of your mental and physical health. It’s no fun to be part of a team where the boss is always stressed and deprioritizes their own health. Don’t underestimate the toll on you of both onboarding and losing employees, reorganisations, and other major events.
Managing clever people can be very rewarding provided that you understand that the way you deliver business value has shifted and you act accordingly.
Your role is not anymore to be the smartest person in the room but to coach, mentor, and sponsor a high-performing group of people so you can become a winning team.
BACK TO YOU: What do you think people managers need to learn — or unlearn — when managing smart tech workers?
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
Two weeks ago, deepfake pornographic images of Taylor Swift spread like fire through X. It took the platform 19 hours to suspend the account that posted the content after they amassed over 27 million views and more than 260,000 likes.
That gave me pause. 260,000 people watched the content, knew it was fake, and felt no shame in sharing their delight publicly. Wow…
I’ve written before about our misconceptions regarding deepfake technology. For example, we’re told that most deepfakes target politicians but the reality is that 96% of deepfakes are of non-consensual sexual nature and 99% of them are from women. I’ve also talked about the legal vacuum regulating the use of this technology.
However, until now I hadn’t delved into the ecosystem underpinning the porn deepfakes: the industry and the viewers themselves.
Let’s rectify this gap and get to know the key players.
Why is so easy to access porn deepfakes?
We may be led to believe that porn deepfakes are hard to create or find.
False and false.
It takes less than 25 minutes and costs $0 to create a 60-second deepfake pornographic video. You only need one clear face image.
I can confirm that when searching on Google “deepfakes porn,” the first hit was MrDeepFake’s website — one of the most famous websites in the world of deepfake porn.
Moreover, the risk of hosting the content is minimal.
Section 230, which passed in 1996, is a part of the US Communications Decency Act. It was meant to serve as protection for private blocking and screening of offensive material.
However, it has become an ally of porn deepfakes as it provides immunity to online platforms from civil liability on third-party content — they are not responsible for the content they host and they can remove it in certain circumstances, e.g. material that the provider or user considers being obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable.
So whilst Section 230 does not protect platforms that create illegal or harmful content, it exempts them from any responsibility for third-party content.
Who’s making money from porn deepfakes?
Many are profiting from this nascent industry: Creators, deepfake porn websites, software manufacturers, infrastructure providers, marketplaces, and payment processors.
It bills itself on Instagram as “the highest paying adult content creator platform.”
Paywalled.
Clients may be redirected from sites such as MrDeepFakes afters clicking on the deepfake creators’ profiles. Once in Fan-Topia, they can pay for access to libraries of deepfake videos with their credit cards.
Pornhub
In 2018, the internet pornography giant Pornhub banned deepfake porn from their site. However, that’s not the whole truth
When Pornhub removes deepfake porn videos from their site, they leave the inactive links as breadcrumbs that act as clickbait to drive traffic to the site.
Users can advertise the creation and monetisation of porn deepfakes on the site.
They advertise deepfakes through TrafficJunky, the advertising portal through which Pornhub makes all their ad revenue.
Pornhub provides a database of abusive content that facilitates the creation of porn deepfakes.
Software manufacturers
A couple of examples
Stability AI has made their model Stable Diffusion — a deep learning, text-to-image model— open-source, so any developer can modify it for purposes such as creating porn deepfakes. And there are plenty of tips about how to use the models in forums where deepfake porn creators swarm.
Taylor Swift’s porn deepfake was created using Microsoft Designer, Microsoft’s graphic design app that leverages DALLE-3 — another text-to-image model— to generate realistic images. Users found loopholes in the guardrails that prevented inappropriate prompts that explicitly mentioned nudity or public figures.
Infraestructure providers
Repositories
GitHub is a Microsoft-owned developer platform that allows developers to create, store, manage, and share their code. It’s also
A host of guides and hyperlinks to (a) sexual deepfake community forums dedicated to the creation, collaboration, and commodification of synthetic media technologies, and (b) AI-leveraged ‘nudifiying’ websites and applications that take women’s images and “strip them” of clothing.
A repository of the source code of the software used to create 95% of deepfakes, DeepFaceLab, as well as other similar codes such as DeepNude and Unstable Diffusion.
According to a Bloomberg review, 13 of the top 20 deepfake websites are currently using web hosting servicesfrom Cloudflare Inc. Amazon.com Inc. provides web hosting services for three popular deepfaking tools listed on several websites, including Deepswap.ai.
Marketplaces
Etsy
As of December 2023, AI-generated pornographic images of at least 55 well-known celebrities were available for purchase on Etsy, an American e-commerce company focused on handmade or vintage items and craft supplies.
Moreover, a search for “deepfake porn” on the website returned about 1,500 results. Some of these results were porn and others offers non-explicit services to “make your own deepfake video.”
On the Fan-Topia payment page, the logos for Visa and Mastercard appear alongside the fields where users can enter credit card information. The purchases are made through an internet payment service provider called Verotel, which is based in the Netherlands and advertises to what it calls “high-risk” webmasters running adult services.
The MakeNude.ai web app — which lets users “view any girl without clothing” in “just a single click” — has partnered with Ukraine-based Monobank and Dublin’s Beta Transfer Kassa which operates in “high-risk markets”.
Deepfake creators also use PayPal and crypto wallets to accept payments. Until Bloomberg reached out to Patreon last August, they supported payment for one of the largest nudifying tools, which accepted over $12,500 per month.
Other enablers
Search engines
Between 50 to 80 percent of people searching for porn deepfakes find their way to the websites and tools to create the videos or images via search. For example, in July 2023, around 44% of visits to Mrdeepfakes.com were via Google.
NBC News searched the combination of a name and the word “deepfakes” with 36 popular female celebrities on Google and Bing. A review of the results found nonconsensual deepfake images and links to deepfake videos in the top Google results for 34 of those searches and the top Bing results for 35 of them.
As for the victims, both Google and Microsoft services require in their content removal requests that people manually submit the URLs.
Social media
More than 230 sexual deepfake ads using Emma Watson and Scarlett Johansson’s faces ran on Facebook and Instagram in March 2023. It took 2 days for Meta to remove the ads, once they were contacted by NBC.
Users of X, formerly known as Twitter, regularly circulate deepfaked content. Whilst the platform has policies that prohibit manipulated media, between the first and second quarter of 2023, the number of tweets from eight hashtags associated with this content increased by 25% to 31,400 tweets.
There were a total of 95,820 deepfake videos online in 2023.
The ten-leading dedicated deepfake porn sites had monthly traffic of 35 million in 2023.
What about the deepfake porn consumers?
They surveyed 1522 American males who had viewed pornography at least once in the past six months. Some highlights:
48% of respondents reported having viewed deepfake pornography at least once.
74% of deepfake pornography users didn’t feel guilty about it. Top reasons they didn’t feel remorse? 36% didn’t know the person, 30% didn’t think it hurt anybody, 29% thought of it as a realistic version of imagination, and 28% thought that it’s not much different than regular porn.
That may lead us to believe that indeed those “watchers” felt porn deepfakes were innocuous. That’s until we learn that
73% of survey participants would want to report to the authorities if someone close to them became a victim of deepfake porn.
68% indicated that they would feel shocked and outraged by the violation of someone’s privacy and consent in the creation of deepfake pornographic content.
In summary, non-consensual deepfakes are harmless until your mother and daughter are starring on them.
if they don’t portray your loved ones.
What’s next?
As with other forms of misogynistic behaviour — rape, gender violence, sexual discrimination — when we talk about deepfake pornography, we focus on the aftermath: the victims and the punishment.
What if we instead focused on the bottom of the pyramid — the consumers?
Can we imagine a society where the deepfake porn videos from Taylor Swift would have had 0 views and no likes?
What will take to raise boys that feel outrage — rather than unhealthy curiosity, lust, and desire for revenge — at the opportunity to watch and purchase deepfake porn?
How about believing that porn deepfakes are harmful even if they don’t portray your sister, mum, or wife?
As with physical goods, consumers have the power to transform the offer. Can we collectively lead the way towards a responsible digital future?
PS. You and AI
Are you worried about the impact of AI impact on your job, your organisation, and the future of the planet but you feel it’d take you years to ramp up your AI literacy?
Do you want to explore how to responsibly leverage AI in your organisation to boost innovation, productivity, and revenue but feel overwhelmed by the quantity and breadth of information available?
Are you concerned because your clients are prioritising AI but you keep procrastinating on learning about it because you think you’re not “smart enough”?
In the discussions around gender bias in artificial intelligence (AI), intentionality is left out of the conversation.
We talk about discriminatory datasets and algorithms but avoid mentioning that humans — software developers — select those databases or code the algorithms. Any attempts to demand accountability are crushed under exculpating narratives such as programmers’ “unconscious bias” or the “unavoidable” opacity of AI tools, often referred to as “black boxes”.
Patriarchy is much older than capitalism; hence, it has shaped our beliefs about those who have purchasing power and how they use it. So patriarchy wants us to believe that women don’t have money or power, and that if they do, they’ll spend it on make-up and babies and put up with services and products designed for men. Moreover, that women are expendable in the name of profits. All this while in 2009 women controlled $20tr in annual consumer spending and in 2023 they owned 42% of all US businesses.
Tech, where testosterone runs rampant, has completely bought into this mantra and is using artificial intelligence to implement it at scale and help others to do the same. That’s the reason it disregards women’s needs and experiences when developing AI solutions, deflects its accountability on automating and increasing online harassment, purposely reinforces gender stereotypes, operationalises menstrual surveillance, and sabotages women’s businesses and activism.
Techno-optimism
Tech solutionism is predicated on the conviction that there is no problem tough enough that digital technology cannot solve and, when you plan to save the world, AI is the ultimate godsend.
It’s only through understanding the pervasiveness of patriarchy, meritocracy, and exceptionalism in tech that we can explain that the sector dares to brag about its limitless ability to tackle complex issues at a planetary scale with an extremely homogenous workforce, mainly comprising white able wealthy heterosexual cisgender men.
For instance, recruiting AI tools have been regularly portrayed as the end of biased human hiring. The results say otherwise. Notably, Amazon had to scrap their AI recruiting tool because it consistently ranked male candidates over women. The application had been trained on the company’s 10-year hiring history, which was a reflection of the male prevalence across the tech sector.
Another example is the assumption of manufacturers of smart, internet-connected devices that the danger typically comes from the outside; hence, the need to use cameras, VPNs, and passwords to preserve the integrity of the households. But if you’re a woman, the enemy may be indoors.
Tech is also a master at deflecting their responsibility on how AI enables bullying and aggression towards women. For example, we’re told that we must worry about deepfakes threatening democracies around the world based on their ability to reproduce voices and images from politicians and world leaders. The reality is that women bear the brunt of this form of AI.
How do machines know what a woman looks like? The Gender Shades study showed that face recognition algorithms used to predict race and gender were biased against darker females, which showed up to a 35% error compared to 1% for lighter-skinned males. Whilst Microsoft and IBM acknowledged the problem and improved the algorithms subsequently, Amazon blamed the auditor’s methodology.
Tech has a long tradition of capitalising on women and gender stereotypes to anthropomorphise its chatbots. The first one was created in 1966 and played the role of a psychotherapist. Its name was not that of a famous psychotherapist such as Sigmund Freud or Carl Jung, but Eliza, after Eliza Doolittle in the play Pygmalion. The rationale was that through changing how she spoke, the fictional character created the illusion that she was a duchess.
Tech actively sabotages women in areas such as self-expression, healthcare, business, finances, and activism.
AI tools developed by Google, Amazon, and Microsoft rate images of women’s bodies as more sexually suggestive than those of men. Medical pictures of women, photos of pregnant bellies, and images depicting breastfeeding are all at high risk of being classified as representing “explicit nudity” and removed from social media platforms.
It can escalate too. It’s not uncommon that women’s businesses relying on portraying women’s bodies report being shadow-banned — their content is either hidden or made less prominent by social media platforms without their knowledge. This practice decimates female businesses and promotes self-censoring to avoid demotion on the platforms.
While AI is naturally associated with the virtual world, it is rooted in material objects. Moreover, most tech software and platform giants — Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta (aka Facebook) — are hardware providers as well. Datacentres, smartphones, laptops, and batteries rely heavily on metals such as cobalt and women often play a key role in their extraction and recycling.
For example, the Democratic Republic of Congo supplies 60% of the world’s cobalt. The mineral is extracted via artisanal and industrial mines. Some sectors welcome the integration of women into the artisanal mines as a means to empower them financially and as a substitute for children’s labour.
What tech has done about this? Software-only companies continue to look the other way while those manufacturing hardware avoided their responsibility as much as they could.
There is also a gendered division of labour in electronic waste, a €55 billion business. Women frequently have the lowest-tier jobs in the e-waste sector. They are exposed to harmful materials, chemicals, and acids as they pick and separate the electronic equipment into their components, which in turn negatively affect their morbidity, mortality, and fertility.
Again, the focus of the efforts goes to reducing child labour and women’s work conditions are lumped with those of “adult” workers. An additional challenge compared to mining work, it’s that hardware manufacturers control the narrative, highlighting their commitment to recycling materials across their products for PR purposes.
AI-powered misogyny beyond tech
Last but not least, not only tech companies use AI as a misogyny tool. Organisations and individuals around the world are ramping up quickly.
The baby-on-board market is a goldmine and technology is instrumental in helping vendors to exploit it. It has become habitual that retailers use AI algorithms to uncover and target pregnant girls and women.
Then, there is sexual exploitation. According to the United Nations, for every 10 victims of human trafficking detected globally, five are adult women and two are girls. Overall, 50 per cent of victims are trafficked for sexual exploitation (72% in the case of girls). Traffickers use online advertisements, social media platforms, and dating apps — all powered by AI — to facilitate the recruitment, exploitation, and exertion of control and pressure over the victims.
And thanks to generative AI, it has never been easier for individuals to create misogynistic content, even accidentally. Examples include:
ChatGPT replicating gender stereotypes when writing professional profiles, stressing communal skills for women while highlighting financial achievements for men.
Tech has embraced the patriarchal playbook in its adoption and deployment of artificial intelligence tools. Hoping to reap massive financial returns, the sector is unapologetically fostering gender inequity and stereotypes.
As Black feminist Audre Lorde wrote, “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” Whilst tech continues to be run by wealthy white men who see themselves as the next Messiah, misogyny and patriarchy will be a feature and not a bug of artificial intelligence applications.
We need a diverse leadership in tech that sees women as an underserved market with growing purchasing and executive power. Tech also needs investors to understand that outdated patriarchal beliefs about women being a “niche” don’t serve them well.
Finally, Tech needs to assume responsibility for the tools it creates and that goes beyond monitoring apps performance. It starts at the ideation stage by asking uncomfortable ethical questions such as “Should we build that?”
Because not all speed is progress.
NOTE: This article is based on a piece that I wrote previously for The Mint.
PS. You and AI
Are you worried about the impact of AI impact on your job, your organisation, and the future of the planet but you feel it’d take you years to ramp up your AI literacy?
Do you want to explore how to responsibly leverage AI in your organisation to boost innovation, productivity, and revenue but feel overwhelmed by the quantity and breadth of information available?
Are you concerned because your clients are prioritising AI but you keep procrastinating on learning about it because you think you’re not “smart enough”?
More than 20 years ago, I negotiated my first salary. I could have done much better.
At the time, my future employer asked for my previous salary and offered exactly the same amount. Their bargaining chip was that they knew I was without a job and that I was obviously quite inexperienced in negotiating my compensation package.
My gut feeling was they were taking advantage of me, but I didn’t have proof. I asked my friends for advice, but none of them had much more experience than I did. Still, I negotiated a £3,000 increase, which I got.
To make a long story short, I learned I was severely underpaid a year later. That had three consequences
Feeling betrayed by the organization, I decided to search for another job, which I landed about a year later.
As bonuses, promotions, and pension schemes depended on my salary, that initial negotiation mishap penalized my earnings — and retirement “pot” — for many years.
Given the pervasive practice of asking candidates for their previous salaries several times, it compromised any leverage I may have when negotiating a new role.
Unfortunately, I’m not alone.
In this article, I share why we must keep talking about the effect of gender on compensation. I also dispel some of the most damaging myths surrounding
The impact of gender on workers’ salaries — including those about differences between how men and women approach salary discussions.
How policies may help to bridge the gender pay gap.
What leverage is available during salary negotiations.
Why addressing the impact of gender on salaries is both urgent and important
I’ve been talking about women and money extensively since I started blogging. For example, I’ve discussed
The UN findings showing that women invest 90 percent of their income back into their families, compared with 35 percent of men.
How society profits from women’s unpaid work and how we should rethink it for a better tomorrow.
The way salary increases are one of the ways my clients reap the benefits of my coaching and mentoring program.
Three reasons made me decide to revisit the topic
Not long ago, a client — a woman in tech — shared that she was expecting a job offer from her dream employer — her first job outside academia. After telling her I was “removing my coaching hat and putting my mentoring hat on,” I exhorted her to negotiate her salary. I offered my availability to provide feedback on the compensation package. Her reply clearly showed me that she wasn’t aware salaries were negotiable.
I read the article from Ronke Babajide, “The Sad Truth Is That the Bigger Your Pay Check, the Bigger the Pay Gap.” In the piece, she shares a personal story about how she was paid substantially less than her male counterparts. I was surprised by how many comments she got from women sharing similar heartbreaking stories. It also made me realize that when we talk about how gender influences salaries, often many things get conflated — for example, equal salary and the gender pay gap.
Claudia Goldin was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for her work towards the first comprehensive account of women’s earnings and labour market participation through the centuries. Her research reveals the causes of change and the main sources of the remaining gender gap.
And now, let’s debunk the myths.
Myth #1: Equal pay is the same as the gender pay gap
Equal pay
Equal pay is being paid the same salary for the same work. The right to equal pay has been recognized by EU law since 1957. More precisely, Article 157 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the EU (TFEU) states
Each Member State shall ensure that the principle of equal pay for male and female workers for equal work or work of equal value is applied.
2.For the purpose of this Article, ‘pay’ means the ordinary basic or minimum wage or salary and any other consideration, whether in cash or in kind, which the worker receives directly or indirectly, in respect of his employment, from his employer.
Equal pay without discrimination based on sex means:
(a)that pay for the same work at piece rates shall be calculated on the basis of the same unit of measurement;
(b)that pay for work at time rates shall be the same for the same job.
Although the UK is not a member of the EU anymore, the Equal Pay Act 1970 established that
(a)for men and women employed on like work the terms and conditions of one sex are not in any respect less favourable than those of the other; and
(b)for men and women employed on work rated as equivalent the terms and conditions of one sex are not less favourable than those of the other in any respect in which the terms and conditions of both are determined by the rating of their work.
(1)If an occupational pension scheme does not include a sex equality rule, it is to be treated as including one.
(2)A sex equality rule is a provision that has the following effect —
(a)if a relevant term is less favourable to A than it is to B, the term is modified so as not to be less favourable;
(b)if a term confers a relevant discretion capable of being exercised in a way that would be less favourable to A than to B, the term is modified so as to prevent the exercise of the discretion in that way.
Of course, that doesn’t mean that there are employers that break the law upfront — pay women less than men for the same work — or use subterfuges to pay them less. Two examples:
In 2020, the Guardian reported that since the 2007–08 financial year, employment tribunals in England and Wales had received an average of almost 29,000 complaints a year.
Across the whole period, equal pay claims made up 12% of all cases, which include other complaints such as unfair dismissal, discrimination, and unlawful deductions from pay. Equal pay claims made up 21% of all cases in 2017–18, 14% in 2018–19 and 14% in the first three quarters of 2019–20.
Shop floor Tesco staff, who are predominantly female, launched a claim in 2018 on the basis that “Tesco breached its duty under section 66 of the Equality Act 2010 to pay them equally to men in comparable roles, namely warehouse staff who are predominantly male. The claimants argue that they have been paid up to £3 an hour less than a warehouse and distribution centre staff.” Through the years, several similar claims at other UK supermarkets including Asda, Sainsbury’s Morrisons, and the Co-op have been working their way through the courts.
In the US, the Equal Pay Act of 1963 protects against wage discrimination based on sex. However, as in Europe, that doesn’t mean that discrimination is eradicated. For example
By 1969, the median salary for female computer specialists was $7,763. In contrast, men earned a median of $11,193 as computer specialists and $13,149 as engineers.
Gender pay gap
The gender pay gap measures the difference in the average hourly wage of all men and women in work. Unlike unequal gender pay, the gender gap pay is not unlawful although countries such as the UK have regulations and laws making its reporting recommended or even mandatory.
In 2016, the Women and Equalities Committee published a report outlining some of the main causes of the gender pay gap:
The part-time pay penalty — Women are more likely to work part-time, and part-time workers are paid less.
Occupation segregation — Women tend to work in lower-paid occupations and sectors.
I’ll add two more:
Women are assessed on performance and men on potential. As a result, they are seen as less “promotable material”.
Managers holding “benevolent sexism” beliefs may block women’s professional progression under the premise that they are “protecting” them. For example, not offering a more senior role that involves traveling to a woman with small children under the assumption that she won’t be interested.
Finally, it’s very important to highlight that the gender pay gap is an intersectional issue.
As this report from the Fawcett Society showed, the ethnic gender pay gap is extremely complex. For example, it can range from a reversed gender pay gap of -5.6% for Chinese women in Great Britain to 19.6% for Black African women.
The UK Trades Union Congress published a new analysis in November showing that non-disabled men are paid on average 30% more than disabled women.
Myth #2: Transparency in salaries will eliminate the gender pay gap
I’ve been an advocate of salary transparency since in 2018 I attended a talk by Åsa Nyström, at the time Director of Customer Advocacy at Buffer. She discussed Buffer’s value of “Default to Transparency” which consisted of sharing via their website all their employees’ salaries as well as the formula used to calculate them.
The benefits of salary transparency are multiple
For companies— It increases performance as it promotes trust between employees and employers. A study showed that people at high-trust companies report 74% less stress, 106% more energy at work, 50% higher productivity, 13% fewer sick days, 76% more engagement, 29% more satisfaction with their lives, and 40% less burnout.
For women — Research has shown that women are more prone to negotiate the compensation package when the job description includes the salary ranges.
For governments – Salary transparency makes it less likely for unequal pay to occur, increase wages among women and other low-power groups which in turn will reduce their demands for state benefits.
However, it’s not the magic bullet for the gender pay gap. We need to remember that the gender pay gap is about career progression and gendered careers, so transparency won’t eliminate entrenched conscious and unconscious biases.
Still, transparency is a step in the right direction and there is some good news to celebrate.
help workers or jobseekers better understand their position in the wider pay structure of a company or industry. It also includes collective measures to ensure employers share aggregated pay data broken down by gender, both internally and publicly.
Some of its key points are:
The right for workers to obtain pay information about other workers doing equal work from an employer.
During recruitment, job candidates also have a right to be informed about the pay levels they can expect at the position they are applying for.
Candidates have the right not to be asked about their pay history.
Organisations with more than 100 employees will have to publish their gender gaps regarding total pay and variable pay (such as bonuses), including their internal gender pay gap by job category.
EU Member States are required to implement legislation giving effect to it by 7 June 2026, the date on which the general obligations in relation to pay transparency and information provision come into force. The gender pay gap reporting obligations will come into effect on a phased basis starting on 7 June 2027.
Myth #3: Women earn less because they don’t negotiate
Year after year, I keep hearing that the gender pay gap is due to women not asking for raises or underselling their skills.
Whilst some women may indeed be reluctant to negotiate, either because they don’t know that salaries are negotiable or they don’t know how to negotiate them, there are also other four important reasons:
Many women are actively discouraged by their entourage to have salary negotiations. Over and over, women tell me that they’ve been advised by their mentors and network to “not rock the boat”.
Some studies show that when women negotiate their salaries, they receive backlash: They are seen as greedy whilst men who do the same are deemed assertive. Women know that they need to be perceived as “likable” so they don’t negotiate.
Society tells women how important is their work as family “pillars”. But does society monetarily recognize the kind of work women typically perform in that role — household chores, breastfeeding, child rearing, family caregiving? No. Hence, we’re used to our work being simultaneously praised and not recognized monetarily.
Women have been trained by society that our judgment is not trustworthy and that we need external validation before making decisions. Hence, we’re expected to talk ourselves out of our gut feeling that we’re underpaid and trust the organisations we work for about the monetary value of our work.
Finally, some studies show that women are more likely to negotiate salaries than men. However, while women are more likely to ask for higher salaries, men still receive greater compensation.
Myth #4: I will negotiate my salary once I prove my value to the organisation
You’ll never be in a better position to negotiate your salary than when you join an organisation. Please don’t count on being able to renegotiate your salary later on or at the next promotion — it’s extremely unlikely you have that leverage.
Moreover, by not negotiating your salary, you risk
Feeling regret when thinking about how much you could have asked for.
Fostering resentment against the organisation — if you learn others with similar background and skills are been paid more.
Myth #5: I may lose the job offer if I negotiate the salary
Scoop: You’re expected to negotiate your compensation package. So do it!
Research demonstrates that it’s extremely unlikely that a company withdraws a job offer only because you want to negotiate the salary. Worst case scenario? You get what you got offered in the first place, but at least you know you reached the maximum on the table.
And if you don’t know how much you should negotiate for, ask mentors, sponsors, professional communities, and friends.
Myth #6: I need to be mindful of the ongoing economic situation and settle for less
If you still feel reluctant to negotiate your salary, think about your future self.
For example, an increase of £2,000 in 2024 will translate into £40,000 in 20 years. Moreover, promotions, bonuses, and contributions to your pension scheme are typically calculated as a percentage of your salary, so they’ll increase as your base salary increases.
In summary, those £2,000 will be the gift that keeps on giving!
Call to action
I have two asks for you
1.- Share this article with a woman who will benefit from negotiating her salary in 2025.
2.- Set a salary increase goal for 2025.
WORK WITH ME
I’m a technologist with 20+ years of experience in digital transformation. I’m also an award-winning inclusion strategist and certified life and career coach.
I help ambitious women in tech who are overwhelmed to break the glass ceiling and achieve success without burnout through bespoke coaching and mentoring.
I’m a sought-after international keynote speaker on strategies to empower women and underrepresented groups in tech, sustainable and ethical artificial intelligence, and inclusive workplaces and products.
I empower non-tech leaders to harness the potential of AI for sustainable growth and responsible innovation through consulting and facilitation programs.
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.
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 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.
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
Generative AI — and more precisely ChatGPT and text-to-image tools like Midjourney — have prompted a flurry of strikes and pushback from visual and writing professionals. And rightly so.
The reason? Book authors, painters, and screenwriters feel that’s unfair that tech companies earn money by creating tools based on scrapping their work result of many years spent learning their craft. All that without acknowledging intellectual property or providing financial compensation.
They say that this is “the first time in history” this has happened.
I dissent. This has been happening for centuries — to women. Let me explain.
There are three reasons that typically come up to explain why there haven’t been more women artists and scientists through the centuries:
Women have been too busy with children and house chores to dedicate time — and have the space — to scientific and artistic pursuits.
In many cultures, men have been priorised to go to school and university over women.
To avoid bias against their work, some women decided to publish their work under a male pen name or to disguise themselves as men
But there is a fourth cause. When women’s outstanding work has been credited to a man. So although the work itself may have won a Nobel prize or be showcased in museums, libraries, and galleries, it has been attributed to a man instead of the rightful female author.
Hepeating: When a man takes credit for what a woman already said
Let’s review some unsung sheroes of science and art.
Science and art — a land with no women?
Let’s start with science
One of the most famous cases is that of Rosalind Frankin. Her “work was central to the understanding of the molecular structures of DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid)” but her contribution was erased by the academic community that awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1962 to Francis Crick, James Watson, and Maurice Wilkins — who used part of her research — for the discovery of the DNA double helix.
Candace Pert discovered the brain’s opiate receptor during her time as a graduate student at Johns Hopkins University. The discovery led to an award for her professor, Dr. Solomon Snyder. When she protested the fact that her contribution had been neglected, he replied, “That’s how the game is played.”
In 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?
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.
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
In the last two weeks, I’ve had the privilege to attend four different conferences focused on women and I’ve presented at two of them.
The topics discussed were as complex and rich as women’s lives: neurodiversity in the workplace, women in politics, childcare, artificial intelligence and the future of the female workforce, child labour, impossible goals and ambition, postpartum depression at work, career myths, women in tech, accessibility, quotas… and so many more.
The idea for this article came from my numerous “aha” moments during talks, panels, and conversations at those events. I wanted to share them broadly so others could benefit as well.
I hope you find those insights as inspiring, stimulating, and actionable as I did.
The keynote speakers and panels were excellent. The discussions were thought-provoking and space was held for people to voice their dissent. I especially appreciated listening to women politicians discuss feminist issues.
Below are some of my highlights
The need to find a space for feminist men.
It’s time for us to go outside our comfort zone.
“If men had the menopause, Trafalgar Square Fountain would be pouring oestrogen gel.”
If we want to talk about averages, the average voter is a woman. There are slightly more women than men (51% women) and they live longer.
Men-only decision-making is not legitimate, i.e. not democratic. Women make up the majority of individuals in the UK but the minority in decision-making. Overall, diversity is an issue of legitimacy.
The prison system for women forgets their children.
Challenging that anti-blackness/racism is not seen as a topic at the top of the agenda for the next election.
We believe “tradition matters” so things have gone backwards from the pandemic for women.
In Australia, the Labour Party enforced gender quotas within the party. That led to increasing women’s representation to 50%. The Conservative Party went for mentoring women — no quotas — and that only increased women’s participation to 30%.
There is a growing toxicity in X/Twitter against women. Toxic men’s content gets promoted. We need better regulation of social media.
More women vote but decide later in the game.
We cannot afford not to be bold with childcare. The ROI is one of the highest.
We need to treat childcare as infrastructure.
There are more portraits of horses in parliament than of women.
Empowered to Lead Conference 2023
On Saturday 28th October, I attended the “Empowered to Lead” Conference 2023 organised by She leads for legacy — a community of individuals and organisations working together to reduce the barriers faced by Black female professionals aspiring for senior leadership and board level positions.
It was an amazing day! I didn’t stop all day: listening to inspiring role models, taking notes, and meeting great women.
We ask people what they want to do only when they are children — that’s wrong. We need to learn and unlearn to take up the space we deserve.
Three nuggets of wisdom: Audacity/confidence, ambition, and creativity/curiosity.
Audacity— Every day we give permission to others to define us. Audacity is about being bold. Overconsultation kills your dream. It’s about going for it even if you feel fear.
Creativity & curiosity — takes discipline not to focus on the things that are already there. Embrace diverse thinking.
Question 1: What if you were the most audacious, the most ambitious, and the most creative?
Question 2: May you die empty? Would you have used all your internal resources?
Baroness Floella Benjamin DBE
Childhood lasts a lifetime. We need to tell children that they are worth it.
Over 250 children die from suicide a year.
When she arrived in the UK, there were signs with the text “No Irish, no dogs, no coloureds”.
After Brexit, a man pushed his trolley onto her and told her, “What are you still doing here?” She replied, “I’m here changing the world, what are you doing here?”
She was the first anchor-woman to appear pregnant on TV in the world.
“I pushed the ladder down for others.”
“The wise man forgives but doesn’t forget. If you don’t forgive you become a victim.”
‘Every disappointment is an appointment with something better’.
Jenny Garrett OBE
Rather than talking about “underrepresentation”, let’s talk about “underestimation”.
Nadine Benjamin MBE
What do you think you sound? Does how you sound support who you want to be?
You’re a queen. Show up for yourself.
Additionally, Sue Lightup shared details about the partnership between Queen Bee Coaching (QBC) — an organisation for which I volunteer as a coach — and She Leads for Legacy (SLL).
Last year, QBC successfully worked with SLL as an ally, providing a cohort of 8 black women from the SLL network with individual coaching from QBC plus motivational leadership from SLL.
At the conference, the application process for the second cohort was launched!
Women in Tech Festival
I delivered a keynote at this event on Tuesday 31st October. The topic was the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on the future of the female workforce.
When I asked the 200+ attendees if they felt that the usage of AI would create or destroy jobs for them, I was surprised to see that the audience was overwhelmingly positive about the adoption of this technology.
Through my talk, I shared the myths we have about technology (our all-or-nothing mindset), what we know about the impact of AI on the workforce from workers whose experience is orchestrated by algorithms, and four different ways in which we can use AI to progress in our careers.
The talk was very well received and people approached me afterwards sharing how much the keynote had made them reflect on the impact of AI on the labour market. I also volunteered for mentoring sessions during the festival and all my on-the-fly mentees told me that the talk had provided them with a blueprint for how to make AI work for them.
I also collected gems of wisdom from other women’s interventions
Our workplaces worship the mythical “uber-productive” employee.
We must be willing to set boundaries around what we’re willing to do and what not.
It may be difficult to attract women to tech startups. One reason is that it’s riskier, so women may prefer to go to more established companies.
Workforce diversity is paramount to mitigate biases in generative AI tools.
I found the panel about quotas for women in leadership especially insightful
Targets vs quotas: “A target is an aspiration whilst a quota must be met”.
“Quotas shock the system but they work”.
Panelists shared evidence of how a more diverse leadership led to a more diverse offering and benefits for customers.
For quotas to work is crucial to look at the data. Depending on the category, it may be difficult to get those data. You need to build trust — show that’s for a good purpose.
In law firms, you can have 60% of solicitors that are women but when you look at the partners is a different story — they are mostly men.
A culture of presenteeism hurts women in the workplace.
Organisations lose a lot of women through perimenopause and menopause because they don’t feel supported.
There was a very interesting panel on neurodiversity in the workplace
Neurodivergent criteria have been developed using neurodivergent men as the standard so often they miss women.
The stereotype is that if you have ADHD, you should do badly in your studies. For example, a woman struggled to get an ADHD diagnosis because she had completed a PhD.
Women mask neurodivergent behaviours better than men. Masking requires a lot of effort and it’s very taxing.
We need more openness about neurodiversity in the workplace.
The title of my talk was “Seven Counterintuitive Secrets to a Thriving Career in Tech” and the purpose was to share with the audience key learnings from my career in tech across 3 continents, spearheading several DEI initiatives in tech, coaching and mentoring women and people from underrepresented communities in tech, as well as writing a book about how women succeed in tech worldwide.
First, I debunked common beliefs such as that there is a simple solution to the lack of women in leadership positions in tech or that you need to be fixed to get to the top. Then, I presented 7 proven strategies to help the audience build a successful, resilient, and sustainable career in tech.
I got very positive feedback about the talk during the day and many women have reached out on social media since to share how they’ve already started applying some of the strategies.
Some takeaways from other talks:
I loved Becki Howarth’s interactive talk about allyship at work where she shared how you can be an ally in four different aspects:
Communication and decision-making — think about power dynamics, amplify others, don’t interrupt, and create a system that enables equal participation.
Calling out (everyday) sexism — use gender-neutral language, you don’t need to challenge directly, support the recipient (corridor conversations).
Stuff around the edges of work — create space for people to connect organically, don’t pressure people to share, and rotate social responsibilities so everyone pulls their weight.
Taking on new opportunities — some people need more encouragement than others, and ask — don’t assume.
The talk of Lydia Hawthorn about postpartum depression in the workplace was both heartbreaking and inspiring. She provided true gems of wisdom:
Up to 15% of women will experience postpartum depression.
Talk about the possibility of postpartum depression before it happens.
Talk to your employer about flexible options.
Consider a parent-buddy scheme at work.
Coaching and therapy can be lifesaving.
Amelia Caffrey gave a very dynamic talk about how to use ChatGPT for coding. One of the most interesting aspects she brought up for me is that there is no more excuse to write inaccessible code. For example, you can add in the prompt the requisite that the code must be accessible for people using screen readers.
Finally, one of the most touching talks was from Eleanor Harry, Founder and CEO of HACE: Data Changing Child Labour. Their mission is to eradicate child labour in company supply chains.
There are 160 million children in child labour as of 2020. HACE is launching the Child Labour Index; the only quantitative metric in the world for child labour performance at a company level. Their scoring methodology is based on cutting-edge AI technologies, combined with HACE’s subject matter expertise. The expectation is the index provides the investor community with quantitative leverage to push for stronger company performance on child labour.
Eleanor’s talk was an inspiring example of what tech and AI for good look like.
Back to you
With so many men competing in the news, social media, and bookstores for your attention, how are you making sure you give other women’s wisdom the consideration it deserves?
Work with me — My special offer
“If somebody is unhappy with your life, it shouldn’t be you.”
You have 55 days to the end of 2023. I dare you to
Leave behind the tiring to-do list imposed by society’s expectations.
Learn how to love who you truly are.
Become your own version of success.
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, explore strategies to overcome them, and implement a plan.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
I also find it difficult to reflect on and savour my accomplishments. Although DEI and women in tech are topics where many people doing an amazing job, the progress is slow or sometimes akin to a Whac-A-Mole game, the moment you think an area is improving, then something else pops up.
For example, I was very glad to see that the Black Lives Matter movement had put DEI are the forefront and that many organisations were prioritising it. But the relief has lasted only for a while. With the redundancies in the tech sector and the inflation, the roles related to DEI are the first bearing the brunt of the layoffs.
Unlike in my corporate job, my “identity” as an inclusion strategist has much more fluid KPIs. Part is paid work and part is probono. It’s also a match-up of several areas: coaching, public speaking, and writing, to mention a few.
So, what’s enough? Is savouring successes a path to conformity?
Comparison
We are told that comparison and feedback make us better. That without criticism, we’ll all be slackers and underperformers.
And that’s reinforced every year when we commit to annual goals, KPIs, and scorecards.
We’re told that we need to do more and better and that the path is to continuously measure ourselves against others — and surpass them. Only then, we can be sure we’re doing our best.
The problem that is not often discussed is how this drives dissatisfaction, frustration, and disappointment with ourselves.
“Comparison” comes often in my coaching sessions. Amazing individuals that create and deliver impactful work feel that they’re not enough when they measure themselves up against others — colleagues, family, friends, influences, and even random people on social media.
I tell them that I see comparison at three levels:
Upward social comparison — When we compare ourselves to those who we believe are better than us.
Downward social comparison — When we compare ourselves to people who we believe are worse off than us.
Comparison to ourselves — When we compare ourselves against a version of our persona.
Upward and downward comparisons typically provide either transitory self-esteem boost— e.g. I’m better than individual X — or in the long run, generate emotions like jealousy and envy — my career hasn’t progressed as fast as that of colleague Y.
But comparing to ourselves is not the panacea always. And that became clear to me last week.
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…
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.
Artice: Am I an entrepreneur? — “Ziva Voices — HerStory in the Making” bookazine (April 2023)
Wrote a weekly Blog Post since Feb 13th, 2023 and I revamped my website patriciagestoso.com
Broadened the reach of my blog post by making them accessible via a Weekly Newsletterthat I advertise as fresh thinking about inclusion, tech, professional success & systemic change through a feminist lens.
10 of my Medium articles were featured in Code Like a Girl magazine.
Posting on LinkedIn daily since April 2023.
Podcasts
I did my first podcast of the year! I was a guest on the podcast “Ophelia On Fire!”. In the episode, I talked about
Self-worth vs Confidence
Confidence vs Competence
Strategies to avoid our feeling of confidence holding us back in our careers
Talks
Panel ”Healthcare 2.0: Do all roads lead to Medical School?” at the UK Imaging and Oncology Congress UKIO 2023 (June 2023).
Keynote “Delivering inclusive coaching experiences” for the Queen Bee Coaching April 2023 CPD session (April 2023).
Coaching
After a 6-month training and passing two exams, I’ve got certified as a life coach by The Life Coach School.
Following my impossible goal for 2023 of coaching 50 women and underrepresented people to get the promotion they deserve, I’m happy to report that I’ve already coached 42 of them towards getting the professional recognition they merit.
Book
I’m writing a book about “how women succeed in tech worldwide” for which we run a survey worldwide. Last June, we reached the milestone of 400 responses from women in tech living in 50+ countries.
If you’re a woman in tech, you can still share your experience by answering the 7-min survey here.
Testimonials Patriarchy instructs women to downplay our achievements, experiences, and skills. That’s why I find testimonials from clients a way to fight against that indoctrination.
I 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.
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.
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.
When the COVID-19 pandemic started in 2020, many people told me that finally, we’d be able to cross out all the entrenched gender inequities in the workplace. Women leaving the workforce because of incompatibility with their caregiving duties, the gender pay gap, the lack of women in leadership positions…
The name of the magic bullet? Flexible and remote working.
As I anticipated three years ago, hybrid working hasn’t delivered on its promise to bridge the chasm between caregiving and a thriving career.
Let’s run three thought experiments to put our current systems to the test. Are they serving us well?
[Economics thought experiment #1] Childcare vs Caring for the neighbour’s children
Amy and John are neighbours. They know each other’s family and each has one baby and one toddler.
Experiment A
Given the high costs of caregiving, Amy and John decided to put their careers on hold for 3 years and instead care for their own children full-time.
During those three years, everybody around Amy and John considers they are unemployed. That includes
Their family and friends.
The International Labor Organisation (ILO), which considers persons employed as those “who worked for at least one hour for pay or profit in the short reference period.”
Experiment B
During three years, from Monday to Friday
Amy goes to John’s house and cares for John’s children for £1.
Conversely, John goes to Amy’s house and cares for Amy’s children for £1.
During those three years, everybody around Amy and John considers that they ARE employed. That includes
Their family and friends.
The International Labor Organisation (ILO).
Same results if we swap childcare with eldercare.
If a person provides unpaid care to her family, we refer to it as a “staying-at-home parent”. However, if they perform the same tasks for a salary, then they become “domestic workers”.
[Economics thought experiment #2] Maternity leave vs Gap year
Two people decide to take a year off.
Person #1 takes a year of maternity leave.
Person #2 takes a gap year to travel the world.
How are they perceived before they leave?
Person #1 is not committed to their career.
Person #2 wants to expand their horizons.
And when they are back to work?
Person #1 is considered in the #MommyTrack after a year of “inactivity”.
Person #2 has acquired valuable transferable leadership skills throughout a year of “life-changing experiences”.
In practice, if your children are born before 6 April 2017, you get paid £545 (basic amount), and then up to £3,235 for each child.
If one or more of your children were born on or after 6 April 2017, you could get £3,235 for up to 2 children.
You’ll only get the £545 (basic amount) if at least one of your children was born before 6 April 2017.
What’s the rationale behind capping this outrageous sum of money for 2 children? Apparently, this should encourage parents of larger families to find a job or work more hours.
Counterevidence #1 — “It has affected an estimated 1.5 million children, and research has shown that the policy has impoverished families rather than increasing employment. As many as one in four children in some of England and Wales’s poorest constituencies are in families left at least £3,000 poorer by the policy. It also found that in the most ethnically diverse communities, 14% of children were hit by the cap”.
Counterevidence #2 — China was often vilified for its one-child policy, which taxed families that dared to have more than one child.
The policy was enforced at the provincial level through contraception, abortion, and fines that were imposed based on the income of the family and other factors. Population and Family Planning Commissions existed at every level of government to raise awareness and carry out registration and inspection work.
The fine was a so-called “social maintenance fee”, the punishment for families with more than one child. According to the policy, families who violated the law created a burden on society. Therefore, social maintenance fees were to be used for the operation of the government.
I’ve been part of committees as well as advisory boards for several years on very varied topics: emerging tech, DEI, customer support, operations…
After some reflection, I recently decided that I wanted to broaden my impact and I started to apply for non-executive board positions.
It’s not been easy or quick because I’ve been very picky about the organisations I’m submitting my applications to. First and foremost, I want to be part of the board of an organisation connected with my values and the legacy I want to leave behind: Working towards building inclusive products, workplaces, and societies.
The feedback I’ve got so far on my applications it’s that my background is difficult to “put in a box”.
I’ve been working on software companies for 18+ years BUT not in the IT or software development departments.
I’ve been part of the acquisition integration team operationalising the transfer of thousands of support tickets, accounts, and contacts, as well as creating standard operation procedures for support, onboarding thousands of customers and internal employees, and running support operations BUT technically I’m not in the operations department.
I have countless proof of DEI advocacy — including spearheading diversity initiatives, writing, speaking, inclusive leadership programs, mentoring, and coaching — BUT I’m not in HR.
In summary, I’m not enough or — even trickier — I’m too original, as I was told in France when I applied for a job for which I fulfilled all the requirements but — guess what? — the fact that I had done my engineering and M.Sc. degree in Venezuela, my Computational Chemistry Ph.D. in Canada, and my post-doc in Greece meant for them that they couldn’t relate to me or my experience. Frightened by the difference I was bringing with me, they decided to go with a candidate from the same university that everybody else in the department.
But this week something different happened.
I met with the CEO of an organisation with several open board positions to learn more about them and check if my profile was of interest before submitting my application. The position description specifically asked for DEI expertise.
At the meeting, the CEO described the organisation and I was in awe at their purpose and impact. Then, it was my turn to talk about my background. I told him about my different roles as Director of Support and Customer Operations, award-winning inclusion strategist, as well as a DEI board advisor for an NGO focusing on making AI work for everybody.
We talked about the need to diversify their board members and that they wanted to operationalise DEI in their organisation. My brain began to talk me out of the position. I mentioned something along the lines of “I fully support the need to diversity your board and obviously I’m white” and “I’m an inclusion strategist but I don’t have an HR background”…
And then, the magic happened.
The CEO told me that they were recruiting for 3 positions — not one, as I thought — and that my experiences as an immigrant in different countries, my work in tech, and my DEI journey would bring a very unique perspective to the board.
Suddenly, I experienced a shift.
From feeling that I needed to fit into boxes created by others — to be tolerated- I moved to feel welcome.
Welcoming users
This is not only about hiring people. It’s about customers too.
Some months ago, I was talking with an organisation that works towards ensuring that data and AI work for all people and society. They wanted my feedback about their website in the context of my hat of inclusion strategist.
For example, I told them about how there were no images showcasing people with disabilities, old people, or children on their website. I also mentioned the lack of pronouns and the signals that sends to users from the LBTQAI+ community.
Once I finished with my high-level evaluation of their website, I waited for my interlocutor’s feedback:
“You mentioned visitors of the website feeling welcome. I never thought about a website in this way”.
And his face lighted up. I hadn’t realised until that moment that I used the word “welcome”. I’m glad I did.
To welcome people, start with your own feelings
When we talk about DEI, we often talk about “managing” the feelings of the people that society puts in a low-status category: Women, LBTQAI+, disabled, old…
We should make them feel included
We should make them feel that they belong
We should make them feel…
But the reality is that we can only control our feelings. The idea of “making somebody else feel like they belong” is a nice construct but doesn’t reflect how our brain works.
We’re a “circumstance” in others’ lives. We’re their “environment”. Their thoughts about that environment are what make them feel included or excluded — that they belong or they are only tolerated.
What if instead of thinking about others’ feelings, we started by thinking about our thoughts and feelings?
In other words, when you have a new colleague, manager, direct report, neighbour, or family member, my challenge to you is to interrogate your thoughts about that person.
For example, are you thinking?
“I need to make X, Y, and Y so the person doesn’t think I’m racist”
“I must watch what I say to avoid hurting the person’s feelings”
“I should say X, Y, and Z so the person knows I’m their ally”
and as a consequence, are you feeling?
Stressed
Judged
Inadequate
Instead, I offer you to “try” thoughts like
“I’m interested in what I can learn from this person”
“This person will be an asset to the organisation”
“As a manager, I can help this person to fulfill their potential”
And what feelings do those thoughts elicit? I can share how I feel when I “try” those thoughts with a person.
Curious
Interested
Energised
In summary, we should care about our own thoughts and feelings because they drive our actions.
If you feel “judged” because you think “I must watch what I say to avoid hurting the person’s feelings”, probably you will “send vibes” to the person about being hypervigilant, sound scripted, and you’ll minimise your contact with them.
On the other hand, if you feel energised because you think that you can help this person to fulfill their potential, chances are you’ll share your knowledge with them, introduce them to your networks, and assign them stretching projects that will lead them to promotions.
The bottom line
We put a lot of effort into discussing actions to affect others’ feelings of inclusion and belonging.
Instead, if we truly want to produce meaningful DEI progress, we should start with our own thoughts and feelings. Only then, we will move from tolerating to welcoming.
QUIZ: Patriarchy and You
How much is patriarchy ruling your life and career?
We believe that we make choices based on logic and objective criteria.
The reality is that the patriarchal rules embedded in our socialisation often decide for us.
This 3-minute quiz will tell you how much patriarchy impacts your life and career choices.
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
There are multiple reasons for that. Some of them are:
Others may not be aware of your work.
They may be aware but don’t understand what it takes to deliver those results.
They may know about your work but don’t remember it at the promotion time.
Maybe only your manager knows about your achievements.
You deliver great value on key initiatives that are perceived as “one-offs”. That is, the value doesn’t fit the “typical” checkboxes for promotion.
Your work has reset the baseline of what people expect from you: You consistently deliver fantastic work so, by doing so in each project, you’re perceived as not doing anything “extraordinary” worth of a promotion.
You are perceived as a “commodity” worker: The business believes you won’t leave.
And there are many more.
What to do instead? Two actions you can start implementing right now to visibilise your great work:
1.- Record your wins — For example, create a “win folder” in your inbox to record your achievements, including those that appear “small”. That especially includes positive feedback from customers and colleagues. This information will be invaluable at the annual assessment time.
2.- Socialize your wins — Make your manager aware of your achievements… and everybody else that can support your promotion or may raise an objection about it. That includes your peers and especially other senior leaders in the organisation.
[Bad career advice #3] If you minimize your work, you’ll be more likeable and get promoted
Since I was little, I was taught by society to minimize and diminish myself and my contributions at each opportunity.
If they’d say “You’re intelligent”, the answer was “I work hard”.
To a professor telling me “Great work, Patricia”, I’d reply, “It was easy”.
Even to somebody praising how well a dress looked on me, I’d learned to reply “Really? It was not that expensive”.
And this pattern of diminishing my contributions and work continued through my early career. I felt the “right” answer to somebody acknowledging I had done great work was something like “It’s nothing”, “Anyone could have done it…”, or “Thanks but…”.
I also learn to caveat my comments with “I’m not an expert”, even if I was, because I internalised that otherwise I won’t be liked.
What’s the problem with that? I’ll answer with another question: How are you going to build a case for your promotion if you keep minimizing your contribution during the year? You cannot spend 365 days deflecting every praise on your work and then pitch during the annual and mid-year reviews that you’ve done outstanding work.
What to do instead? When somebody compliments your work, simply reply “Thank you” or, even better, stress what was the most difficult part. E.g. “Thanks. It entailed non-negligible strategic thinking/collaboration among teams/risk-taking. I’m glad to hear the project/initiative/presentation met your high standards “.
[Bad career advice #4] Everybody knows you want to be promoted
Nope. The world doesn’t turn around you!
During my academic years, the path was very clear. I was studying Chemical Engineering to get a diploma in Engineering. The same with my Master, and Ph.D. in Computational Chemistry. I didn’t need to spell out my goals. They were clear to everybody and that made it easy for people to support me, mentor me, and coach me.
Then, during my post-doc, the goal was much more fluid. It was like being in limbo. People assumed I wanted to be a professor at university — that’s what everybody wanted in the lab but I was not sure anymore… And then I knew that I wanted to work for a commercial company. Still, because I didn’t tell anybody, none knew, and obviously they didn’t think to recommend me if a commercial opportunity came along.
I did get a position to work for a company in France after my post-doc but it was all on my own. I had to look for open positions and apply to them. No warm introductions or help to prepare the interviews. Still, my post-doc advisor was very supportive once I asked for a recommendation to finalise my hiring at that company… I wish I’d communicated to him my intentions earlier.
I learned my lesson. Since then, I’ve been transparent with my managers about my career goals and where I see the next step for me. This kind of conversation helped me to understand the gaps between my perception and theirs about my career ambitions.
What to do instead? Spell out exactly what you want. Do you want to be promoted? Do you believe you deserve it? Say it. Explicitly. Don’t simply say “I want to be promoted” but “I have now the skills, achievements, and experience to be promoted to Sr. Support Engineer”, “Operations Sr Manager” or “Principal Software Engineer”.
And if you haven’t started to discuss it with your manager, don’t leave it to the annual review. Bring it to your next 1:1 meeting!
[Bad career advice #5] If you go after a promotion, you may let other people down
At one point when I was looking for a job early in my career, I reached out to quite a lot of organisations with my CV. One of them replied that they wanted to hire me. The position was not starting until several months later but I was over the moon.
About a month later I got the previous message, I was contacted by another of the organisations to which I’d applied. They were also interested in my CV. What’s more, they were even a better opportunity than the one I had accepted.
I was torn. I didn’t want to let the first organisation down but it was such a good opportunity…
I reached out to my only mentor at the time and she told me I should be cautious. I didn’t want to be known as somebody that was untrustworthy… Long story short, I declined the second offer.
In the very long run, all went well with my first option but I regret that my decision was based on “not letting others down” and not on “this is the best choice for me”.
What to do instead? Every time your brain goes into the “I may be letting others down” rabbit hole, question if you’re letting yourself down instead. Also, I invite you to examine the long-term effect of your decision. In my story, the decision was life-changing for me — it affected my career path — whereas for my employers it would have been an inconvenience but definitely, it wouldn’t have changed the organisation.
Feminist Tech Career Accelerator
Three things are keeping you from getting the tech career you deserve
Your Brain * Your Education * Patriarchy
Thrive In Your Tech Career With Feminist Guidance
Achieve your career goals * Work smart * Earn more
Work is currently designed for an idealised version of a White young single man with no care responsibilities.
And it goes beyond the scheduling constraints of a “full-time job” – 40 hours/week, 9 to 5 straight hours, and the Monday to Friday working week. From what we consider “looking professional” all the way to the expectations of having to be always on just in case the business needs us or even setting the office temperature, which was developed back in the 1960s through an analysis of the resting weight of a 154lb (69kg) 40-year-old man.
It’s not a surprise that women and people from underrepresented groups feel they don’t “fit in”.
And it goes beyond dress codes and schedules. We’re expected to put up with microaggressions, weaponised incompetence, office work, and harassment, to mention a few.
However, rather than questioning the current state of affairs, patriarchy has trained us to think that we’re the problem and it’s upon us to either fix it – for example, through championing DEI initiatives – or simply toughen up.
In addition to the mental load to either fit in or fix the system, the problem with that kind of indoctrination is that assumes that quitting a job is not a valid option. It’s seen as a failure rather than a choice. And that hurts our career and diminishes our leverage.
How do I know? Because I’ve done so.
My quitting story
After finishing my master in chemical engineering in Venezuela, I decided to pursue a Ph.D. abroad. At the time, I wanted to become a professor at the university and I felt that was the best next step.
The problem? I didn’t have the money to pay for 5 years of living abroad and expensive tuition fees. One of my master’s advisors came up with a solution: There was a professor in Canada that was looking for a Ph.D. student and he could pay me a minimum wage – enough to live.
Our email interactions hinted some worrying signals about him not being an easy person to work for but I was so keen on the opportunity – I kept telling myself that was “the only” chance available to me – that I decided to take it and go to Canada.
I should have listened to my gut feeling. He was a bully. I was the only woman in the lab but we all suffered harassment and discrimination at different levels. One of the people even died from suicide.
How was he able to pull it off? We were all on a student visa. Pushing back, denouncing him, or leaving the lab meant to have to go home empty-handed. In one word, fail.
I kept telling myself that if I was able to cope, it’d be worth it. I got really good at diminishing in my mind all the things that were wrong with my boss’s behaviour and minimising myself such as not bringing out the worst of his character.
Moreover, most people around me that knew about his behaviour empathised with me but also reminded me that quitting would mean “losing” the time I’d already spent on my Ph.D.
To cut a long story short, after 1 year and 4 months, I quit. When I announced it to him, he told me that he’d publish my work without my name, which he did it. He tried to make me change my mind with threats and nice words.
It didn’t work. I left and I moved to another lab where I thrived. The difference was that now I had a great advisor that supported me rather than put me down. I wrote 5 papers and completed my Ph.D. in 4.5 years.
What about the others in my first lab? They stayed. And they all told me that they regretted it.
From my side, I didn’t regret going to another lab and start again my Ph.D. That previous experience was not a waste of time. It helped me to know that I have non-negotiables at work like respect, mental wellbeing, and appreciation.
I learned from that experience that it was paramount that I integrated quitting into my career strategy.
But how to do it?
Coaching tool: decisions ahead of time
One of the reasons that makes it so hard to quit is that we only consider it when we have the feeling that we’ve run out of “other” options. That means we’re not in a very generative state. We feel exhausted, defeated, or angry, to mention a few typical emotions.
What’s more, we feel disappointed with ourselves for allowing the situation to reach such a low point. Typically the reason it’s that we’ve experienced the boiling frog syndrome.
The premise is that if a frog is put suddenly into boiling water, it will jump out, but if the frog is put in tepid water which is then brought to a boil slowly, it will not perceive the danger and will be cooked to death. The story is often used as a metaphor for the inability or unwillingness of people to react to or be aware of sinister threats that arise gradually rather than suddenly.
How to avoid finishing like the frog? Or wait until you’re burnt out to jump out of the boiling water?
I recommend a coaching technique called “decision ahead of time”. In brief, plan how you’ll think, feel, and act in advance of certain triggers appearing.
How does that work in practice?
List your non-negotiables at work. That can be about the culture, the perks, your promotion aspirations, your schedule, your participation in projects, your salary expectations, and so on.
Then, decide in advance what changes in those areas will give you hints that you may want to leave, how leaving would look like, and how that would integrate into your career strategy.
In those terms, quitting doesn’t look like a failure but as part of a plan. It’s framed as a healthy way to avoid burnout and practice setting boundaries.
If not quitting, what are you doing about your career?
The boiling frog syndrome is so seductive that can make us forget our career by focusing on our current job.
How do we know if we’re trapped in our own version of the boiling frog syndrome?
Ask yourself the following questions:
Do you know where you’re and what you want out of your career?
Have you delegated to your manager, CEO, or organisation your professional ambitions?
Are you hoping to finally get promoted but you don’t have a clear commitment from your manager about what you need to get it or when it’ll happen?
Do you keep talking yourself out of your promotion aspirations, telling yourself that it could be worse?
Feminist Tech Career Accelerator
Three things are keeping you from getting the tech career you deserve
Your Brain * Your Education * Patriarchy
Thrive In Your Tech Career With Feminist Guidance
Achieve your career goals * Work smart * Earn more
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.
“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.
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”.
Take the opportunity to start a discussion about how valuable is the task, who should be doing it, and how it should be rewarded.
Are you a “perpetrator” of weaponised incompetence?
It’s also important that women – and people belonging to other protected categories – check if we are using weaponised incompetence against other people. For example, as I mentioned above, non-White women are expected to do more office housework than White women.
We, White women, need to step up and help break the cycle rather than reinforce it.
The first step is awareness.
Look at the low-value tasks you convince yourself “you’re not to be good at” or that you don’t want to learn.
Reflect on the reasons why you don’t want to learn to do them or why you think you’re not good at them.
Next, think about to whom you deflect that task.
Is it always the same person?
Is there a reason why the task shouldn’t be rotated among other people?
If it’s always the same person and the task is not core to the person’s role, step up and break the cycle of weaponised incompetence.
Final reflections
During an insightful discussion, Rose Cartolari challenged the use of weaponised incompetence as an expression that may further the divide between the giver and the receiver of the action. Instead, she offered the less violent and loaded term learned helplessness for reflection.
The American Psychological Association defines learned helplessness as “a phenomenon in which repeated exposure to uncontrollable stressors results in individuals failing to use any control options that may later become available. Essentially, individuals are said to learn that they lack behavioral control over environmental events, which, in turn, undermines the motivation to make changes or attempt to alter situations”.
I wonder if a term like strategic helplessness could be used instead of weaponised incompetence. I love to get your feedback on the comments on this expression.
BACK TO YOU: What do you do when co-workers use weaponised incompetence to get you to do low-value/unpromotable tasks?
Feminist Tech Career Accelerator
Three things are keeping you from getting the tech career you deserve
Your Brain * Your Education * Patriarchy
Thrive In Your Tech Career With Feminist Guidance
Achieve your career goals * Work smart * Earn more
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.”
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
