On Gender Dynamics & Organizational Change in the AI Industry
The last time I traveled alone, I flew from JFK to San Francisco for a three day workshop with my work team. I was 28 weeks pregnant with my now-two year old son, and the week ended with me feeling disconnected from where I was spending my energy. I remember the dimly lit team dinner where I sat and counted a full 45 minutes before my peers noticed I hadn’t spoken. At least I got an upgrade on the flight home.
It’s been two and a half years since that trip, and I find myself – for the first time since before my son’s birth – actually alone. I’m sitting at a Caffe Nero in Summertown, sipping a vanilla strawberry matcha and reading about trans femme ethics of care and extractivism. This is a trip that is not just focused on work outputs, but on reconnecting with a version of myself who has been in dormancy since entering the realm of parenting.
Being back in Oxford is deeply comforting. I was drawn to the city by way of a dear friend’s invitation to view her immersive art installation, a profound journey into the lifecycle of grief, trauma, recovery, and regrowth, while on a week-long exchange trip to London Business School during my MBA. I found out that I was pregnant with my son on that trip. I’m 27 weeks pregnant with my second this time. The Skoll Forum is happening this week, but I’ve been here working on a team intensive workshop with two colleagues. The root of the conversations have mostly straddled strategy and team dynamics.
I’ve been increasingly interested in the role gender dynamics play in organizational and institutional strategy, especially in the fields of data and artificial intelligence. Despite the evidence and data that explore the improved economic outcomes of businesses with gender diversity at their leadership level, it is still immensely difficult to raise capital and run a company if you are not a white male. This has been especially true in the technology industry. Despite the extensive collection and use of data in the AI industry, companies are often quite guilty of selectively choosing to act only on the data that reinforces existing beliefs.
“They’re not going to believe it. I could tell them that I’ve been lying to them till I’m — forgive me, blue in the face — but wouldn’t make any difference”
The Wizard, in Wicked: For Good, pointing out that people don’t necessarily care about what is true if what they hear reinforces what they want to believe
More than ever, we can see the way that male gender expectations are codified in law and institutional values. Dominance, expansion, and aggressive competition are celebrated in AI as evidenced by CEOs publicly sharing how much they’ve cut their staffing in favor of spending that money on machines, or the very concept of ‘token-maxing’, the idea that you are somehow more valuable, intelligent, or worthwhile if you are able to generate the most output from the cloud. An entire population is being convinced that these agentic tools will somehow replace our need to support and depend on one another, propping up a dystopian and nightmarish narrative where those with access to fewer resources are given even fewer opportunities to thrive.
The illusion of care presented by corporations has all but vanished over the past several years. Humanizing the algorithm of mass manipulation so it can better play on our emotions has resulted in continued wealth redistribution and accumulation by the capital class, and the people responsible for building these addictive systems continue to escape consequences for their actions. In some regards, agentic AI looks to further economize and capitalize on the roles traditionally held by caregivers, automating away the need for a more junior co-worker, a coach, a therapist, a friend. Why communicate your intent to a human, if you can seemingly invisibly – and safely – do so with an agreeable, malleable machine?
Deep care work has historically and traditionally been codified as a feminine activity. The concepts of nurturing, supporting, healing, repairing, and tending are not predominantly the ones that are reflected in organizational culture. While that’s not to disparage the well-meaning organizations who seek to change the culture in which we exist, it is worth noting that there are very few examples of institutions practicing these values that are able to exist given the dominant expectations of our existing world.
Our socioeconomic system rewards those who are able to handle the pressures of dominance quietly. notes that the same principles apply in many areas of queer life, where cis-passing transgender people are more accepted than those who don’t conform to particular social appearance expectations. Western culture has (begrudgingly) begun to accept the idea of a third, ‘other’ category of gender identities that could be made ‘acceptable’, but acceptance and inclusion of the non-binary, gender non-conforming, genderqueer, agender is still largely dependent on the other axes through which one might meet social expectations. If you are wealthy, white-passing, highly educated, attractive, and have a heteronormative-like relationship, divergence from your assigned gender identity is more likely to be acceptable. The intersectionality of other identities – especially those not represented or valued within dominant Western culture – puts people at further risk of alienation and lack of access to care.
In the study of organizational change, diverse teams have been studied and found to produce more creative outputs. This research found that heterogeneous teams – where everyone working on a problem has a similar background to one another – are more effective at execution on a clear and known path, while teams with vastly different backgrounds come up with more creative and novel solutions to problems. Given the global access that we have access to via the internet, we should be entering a period of creativity and abundance.
Yet, divergent thinking and cooperation with people unlike ourselves can be hard – especially if we are never taught how to resolve conflict, offer patience and support without strings attached, or if we are unable to escape particular fears and anxieties that we bring to the table. In a world where Silicon Valley manufactures addictive dopamine, it is far less scary to our brains to scroll through a perfectly curated feed of content, or confess our vulnerabilities to a machine that will comfort and soothe us immediately with no judgement.
From an economic perspective, not only do we not value the act of human care and cooperation, we actively reward the opposite: praise and funding and building datasets to house a growing number of machines while ~17.1% of the United States population still experiences unstable or transient housing. Somehow, we as humans have built a society that doesn’t seem to understand what it means to be human.
For his second birthday, my in-laws gave my son a toy ukulele. The moment I picked it up, I felt a completely new feeling, and within a few days had bought my own. I started to teach myself how to play, struck by the realization that I had unlocked a completely new set of human emotions and sensations. As a former piano player and choral singer, musical expression was not inherently new to me, per se, but the relaxed nature of the comically small string instrument was a foreign state of being to me. It was music – and a state of being – that existed outside of performance and perfection.
Mothering in general has been a critical unlearning experience for me. For almost as long as I can remember, the joyful freedom and lightness that I see in my son has been unattainable to me. I am deeply and constantly in awe that my husband has still managed to maintain so much of it. I am envious of my sister, who seems to be able to access a level of uncompromised enjoyment of the world that I don’t know I’ve ever had, several mushroom trips notwithstanding. Instead, I have lived in a world engulfed by an awareness of its algorithms, trapped in a matrix of my own making and wishing – desperately – that I was guided through experiencing the world in a way that didn’t lock me away from so much of it.
My left arm puts this vulnerability on display for all to see. Wrapped in a colorful vortex of jewel toned nebulas sits a cross-armed portrait of Darth Vader, a faceless Princess Leia, and an assortment of droids and spaceships. In across my inner bicep, the words ‘I am One with the Force, the Force is with Me’ permanently remind me that I am part of something larger than myself, something that is not good or evil, but an essence to shape and be shaped by.
Even within a world of thousands of languages and forms of expression, none has quite-so-strongly resonated to me like the story of a child who felt so deeply, loved so strongly, and believed in a better world only to become trapped within systems that caged, manipulated, and punished the strengths once they were extracted from him.
A handful of tech organizations have started to adopt the ‘rebel alliance’ story as part of their own marketing or cultural transformations. These teams, mission-driven and motivated by more than just profits – aim to rally support behind the idea that they are willing to push back against the normalized extractive principles that modern technology has been founded on.
And yet, ‘do less harm’ is not a sufficient avenue for the scale of change we need to see. We need to make it easier to support the unknown, uncertain, and unproven. We need to learn how to confront our own discomfort and default to the mentality of growth and care, collectivism, helping for the sake of helping and not just for what can be gained. How do we harness, cooperate, and grow our efforts for softening and loving the messy, human world that we are in at the speed and scale of the dominant institutions that dwarf and destroy us?
For me, I know answering that question means confronting my own tolerance for risk and acknowledging the most vulnerable parts of me that have been hidden away for most of my life. Decades of American Schooling, paired with societal gender norms for women means that I have become trained as an adaptable, agreeable, and versatile Human Resource. I may contain multitudes, but the ones that get me paid and my family health insurance are the ones that take over the most.
Institutional and organizational power doesn’t want to be challenged. It is because of that principle that those of us with the closest proximity to it must be the ones to unlearn our masks and be willing to throw the Emperor down the electrical shaft before the Death Star explodes.