AI Needs Women: Why Your Voice Matters to Shape the Present and the Future

I vividly remember the day after Christmas 2022. Not because I was relaxing, but because I was at my laptop, updating my university courses and diving headfirst into AI tools for my business and podcast. ChatGPT had just launched, and I knew instantly: this was different. This wasn’t just another tech trend; this was a transformation.

In this episode, I share the talk I recently delivered at the ElleX Summit, where I wove together history, technology, and the urgent need for women’s voices in AI.

From Ada Lovelace and the women of NASA to Eleanor Roosevelt and the Brontë sisters, women have always shown up when new technologies emerged that gave them a voice and a platform.

And now, it’s our moment again.

You’ll hear:

• Why AI isn’t just a tool - it’s a force shaping how we work, teach, govern, and live

• Shocking examples of gender bias baked into AI systems

• Why your perspective, leadership, and storytelling are essential in this new era

• How I’m using AI to save time on the computer, so I can do more of the work that makes me feel human
  
  

AI can either reinforce the past or help us create a more inclusive future. It’s up to us to choose. Let’s make sure future generations find plenty of women in the history books of this AI era.

 

Links:

Show notes at https://www.speakingyourbrand.com/434/ 

Check out my new companion podcast “Confident Speaker”: https://confidentspeaker.transistor.fm/ 

Join our Automate & Amplify with AI program: https://www.speakingyourbrand.com/ai/ 

Learn how we can work together on your thought leadership and signature talk: https://www.speakingyourbrand.com/work-with-us/coaching/ 

Connect with me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/carolcox

 

Related Podcast Episodes:

• Episode 430: What Giving a TED-Style Talk Revealed About Us as Speakers

• Episode 432: AI Will Impact You: Here are 4 Ways to Think About It

• Episode 433: Behind the Scenes of My AI-Powered Business: Real-World Use Cases

Episode Transcript

Carol Cox: Whether you love AI, are curious about it, (00:00):
undefined
or are not quite sure your voice matters to
shape the present and the future.
I'm sharing my recent Ted style talk on why
AI needs women.
On this episode of the Speaking Your Brand
podcast. More and more women are making an

(00:21):
impact by starting businesses,
running for office, and speaking up for what
matters. With my background as a TV political
analyst, entrepreneur,
and speaker. I interview a coach for purpose
driven women to shape their brands,
grow their companies, and become recognized
as influencers in their field.
This is speaking your brand,

(00:43):
your place to learn how to persuasively
communicate your message to your audience.
Hi and welcome to the Speaking Your Brand
podcast. This is your host,
Carol Cox. We're continuing the series that
I've been doing all around.
I hopefully you've enjoyed the past few
episodes to get you thinking about ways that
you can integrate AI into your business,

(01:04):
into your content production,
and into the work you do in in ways that
maybe you haven't thought of before,
and not just doing it manually by,
say, going to ask ChatGPT to do something and
then coming back out, but really thinking
about how to automate what you're doing so
that you can do more of the things that you
love to do, like public speaking,
thought leadership, working one on one or in

(01:26):
small groups with clients,
and so on. In this episode,
I'm going to share with you the recent TEDx
style talk that I delivered at an event
called Elex.
My topic was AI Needs Women why Your voice
matters to shape the present and the future.
If you would like to learn how to create AI
automation workflows that you can use in your

(01:48):
business and your content production without
needing to know how to code,
check out my new live online four week
program called Automate and Amplify with AI.
I'm going to teach you and show you and
provide you with the AI workflows that I'm
using so that you can integrate these into
the work that you're doing as well.

(02:09):
You can get all the details and apply at
speaking your brand AI again that speaking
your brand AI.
Now let's get on to my talk.
It was the day after Christmas 2022,
and instead of enjoying that nice slow week
between Christmas and New Year's,
I was at my laptop updating all of the

(02:32):
business and marketing classes that I teach
at Full Sail University and starting to build
AI applications for my company and podcast,
Speaking Your Brand.
The reason? Well, OpenAI had just released
ChatGPT the month before and had taken the
world by storm, surprising even the company
itself. And as an educator,

(02:53):
a marketer and a technologist,
I'm a former software developer.
I instantly saw that this was going to impact
all of those fields and so much more.
Now. I've been around long enough to see
these hype cycles come and go.
The next big social media platform,
or software application or marketing strategy
that was going to, quote,
change everything.

(03:14):
And of course, they never did.
But AI is different.
It is what is known as a general purpose
technology, which means it really can change
everything. And it most likely will.
But I'm also a student of history,
and I gravitated towards history because I
was always looking for the women in the

(03:35):
stories. I wanted to see women like who I
wanted to grow up, to be sure.
I studied the presidents and the military
commanders, but I wanted to know what were
the women thinking?
What were they doing?
What did they want to contribute?
How did they want to shape society?
Because it's the past that shapes who we are
today, and it's what we do today that will

(03:58):
shape the future.
And as I look out at the tech landscape and
all the podcast and the YouTube videos and
the influencers on LinkedIn.
And I look at the CEOs of AI companies and
their boards. I see a lot of men and not as
many women as I was like.
And it's important for all of us,

(04:20):
no matter who we are, but especially women,
half the population to have a say,
to be part of the conversations,
the decision making and the leadership around
AI because it's going to impact how we work,
how we teach, how we learn,
how we govern, and how we interact with each
other. I mentioned that I'm a former software

(04:41):
developer. I founded two tech companies in
the first part of my career,
but I don't look like the typical techie.
You probably think of the guy in the hoodie
hunched over his laptop,
writing all the lines of code with millions
of dollars of venture capital money funding
his startup, and it is most likely a he

(05:03):
because women only get between 3 and 5% of
venture capital money for their startups,
and that number has not changed in the past
20 years and is actually getting worse
recently, not better.
But tech hasn't always been coded as male.
Way back in the 19th century,
Ada Lovelace pioneered how we even thought of

(05:25):
what a computer could be.
In the 1960s, NASA employed what they called
human computers, who were women,
primarily black women,
as portrayed in the film Hidden Figures who
calculated by hand.
On paper, the trajectories of rockets talk
about mind blowing.
In the early part of the 1800s with the rise

(05:47):
of the novel. Women like George Eliot and the
Bronte sisters wanted to have a public voice.
So what did they do?
They published under male pseudonyms,
so that, number one, they could get
published. And number two,
so that their work could be taken seriously.
In the early part of the 20th century.
I told you I was a history person.
First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and Dorothy

(06:09):
Thompson used the new technology of radio to
broadcast their voices,
which was so unusual at the time for women to
have a public voice.
But they did so to millions of homes across
the country. And of course,
more recently, millions of women around the
world have used the internet,
social media and mobile to build their

(06:30):
businesses, their brands and their careers.
But again, as I look out at the tech
landscape, I want to know where the women
are, where they're making an impact and how
we can amplify each other's voices.
Let me give you two examples of why what
we're doing with AI and understanding what AI
is doing to us is so important.

(06:51):
About a year ago, I asked ChatGPT to give me
a list of five well-known women
entrepreneurs. Sure, I could have searched
Google, but I figured ChatGPT would give me a
nice little summary.
A very simple, straightforward Request that
she starts writing.
You know, you can see the the words coming on
the screen and it says number one,

(07:11):
Oprah Winfrey. Number two,
Sara Blakely of Spanx and so on.
I'm like, okay, good. And then I can see it,
right? Number five period.
Elon Musk and ChatGPT continues.
Although Elon Musk is not a woman,
he has founded these businesses,
etc.. And I was like, okay,
hold on a second. Chatgpt first,

(07:32):
thank you for acknowledging that,
you know, he's not a woman,
but then why is he on my list when,
you know, I was asking for women
entrepreneurs. So that makes me wonder what
is going on in the training data and the
reinforcement that is causing it to give this
answer. Here's a more recent example.
A couple of months ago,
I was co-hosting a writing and speaking

(07:54):
retreat, and one of the activities that we
had the women do was to write on post-it
notes and ask that they have an A give that
they would offer. So an ass could be
something like they needed help with social
media strategy, and to give that they would
offer to be beta readers for someone's books.
So they put out their post-it notes on a big

(08:15):
white piece of paper, and then we needed to
transcribe that into a spreadsheet to hand
out to all of the women.
Now, I could have transcribed it,
but I figured, well, ChatGPT could do this
and save me time.
So I gave it the photo and I gave it very
specific instructions.
I told it just transcribe what you see in the
post-it notes, do not add to it,
do not change anything,

(08:36):
just transcribe.
So it did it. That was great. I'm looking
over the spreadsheet and it looks good.
And then a row sticks out to me under the ask
column it says the per the request.
I'm looking for women to interview who change
their career path after marriage.
And I'm like, huh? There is no woman here

(08:58):
who's working on a book topic related to
that, so that seems kind of odd.
I go back to the original post-it notes and
everything is legibly written.
Here's what the original post-it note said.
Looking for men to interview,
not women looking for men to interview.
Who changed their last name upon marriage for

(09:19):
whatever reason when it was,
quote, transcribing.
I assume that ChatGPT is neural network,
which is based on word associations and
likelihood of what words go together.
Decided that the words interviewing men who
changed their last name upon marriage was so
unlikely that it changed it to interview

(09:43):
women who changed their career path after
marriage, because that seemed much more
likely to it based on all of its training
data and its word associations.
So you can imagine, as more and more of us
are using AI and more students are using it.
How are biases and stereotypes getting
reinforced in AI versus being challenged and

(10:06):
questioned and even noticed?
So this is why it's so important for us to
use AI. So I'm not saying don't use it.
We absolutely need to use it so that we
understand what it's doing,
and we can be part of the conversations to
question how is interacting with our kids,
whether it's at school or with the AI
companions, and how it's going to impact our

(10:26):
work. I want us to be in the driver's seat.
This is how we can make sure that we are
collaborating together,
using our voices and amplifying the voices of
other women. I think of women I follow who
are making a big impact,
like Joi Palomino and her Algorithmic Justice
League, which is making sure that the
algorithms that are right now are influencing
hiring decisions, criminal justice,

(10:48):
law enforcement, and so on are more fair,
transparent and unbiased in women like
Fei-Fei, Li is Stanford University professor
who created ImageNet.
Without ImageNet, ChatGPT and the other AI
tools would not be able to see and analyze
images or create them.
That's how innovative that technology was

(11:10):
that she created. So I invite you to have
conversations about AI in your workplaces,
your schools, your communities,
your governing bodies,
and more. You could even set up an informal
AI council where you work or at your
children's school to bring people together to
talk about what their ideas are around AI,
what are their questions, their concern to

(11:31):
share resources.
Now, this Christmas break,
hopefully I will not be at my laptop working
on things. Instead, I'm busily having.
I helped me to automate much of what I do on
my computer in my business,
so I can get back to the work that I want to
do, which is being human and interacting with
other humans. And I invite you all to do the

(11:52):
same, because when future generations read
the history books of this AI era,
I want them to find plenty of women in them.
Thank you.