Let’s Womansplain
▶ WATCH: THE MEETING WITH NO WOMEN IN IT, 27 SECONDS
Ifeoma Ajunwa has a test for every new AI product. Who asked for this? Her guess at the answer is a meeting with no women in the room.
It's a good question to carry around this week. Try it on the hiring software that never shows your application to a human, or on the tool you were told to start using at work (which may record how you do the job while you do it.)
INSIDE THE EPISODE
Four things for you to take away
01 · Your employer is taking a third thing. The old bargain was your time and your labor for a wage. Ifeoma's argument is that a third thing got added without anyone renegotiating: your data. Keystrokes, emails per day, how you lift a box, how you think through a problem. She calls it captured capital, and she is specific about where it goes. The keystroke log that scores your output this quarter is training data for whatever does your job after you, and she says the paycheck never went up to cover it. The book →
02 · If you've been careful, you're not behind. Women adopt AI at work at lower rates than men, and Ifeoma reads that as a rational response to the bargain above. Her observation: a guy uses AI and he's tech savvy. A woman uses it and she needs a machine to think for her. And she says most of these tools have zero long-term studies behind them, so being slow to adopt is reasonable. Then she turns it around. Head in the sand isn't an option either. Somebody has to sit in the meetings where these tools get pitched and write the AI policy at your company, and she says that somebody is you. Mara and Ifeoma on this →
03 · A red light means no human ever saw you. Ifeoma's fieldwork started with people coming out of prison who kept telling her the same thing: I hate computers. They'd taken the interview classes, were working on the GED, applied online, and never heard a word back. Hiring software green-lights, yellow-lights, and red-lights applicants, and a red light goes in the trash before a manager sees it. They never saw the system. They still called it exactly right. Her paper on auditing hiring software →
04 · Who would we hand over? Ifeoma's Afrofuturism paper started with the Kenyan workers paid under $2 an hour to label the worst of the internet so ChatGPT would be safe. From there she retells Derrick Bell's Space Traders, the story where aliens land and offer America untold riches in exchange for its Black citizens. In her version the aliens ask for whichever group the country wants least, and the argument over who that is becomes the story. She adds two endings of her own: one where the aliens were liberators all along, and one where the country decides no group is expendable. Underneath it is Ubuntu, the idea that human beings don't exist in a vacuum, and that a harm landing on one group first will reach everyone. The paper →
THE DOC · FREE, NO SIGNUP
Before you say yes to the AI tool at work
Seven questions from this episode, plus a plain-words version for meeting notetakers and an email you can copy to your manager. Already using the tool? Pick the one or two questions that matter most. Take it, share it, paste it into your own notes.
It's Kenyan workers today, but in the future,
it's going to be all of us.
LET'S WOMANSPLAIN
Who asked for this? Your turn.
New segment, starting this week. Each episode we take one listener's AI situation and work through it on the show, with the guest when it's her turf. The first one records in the next few days. Anonymous if you want.
The kind of thing we mean:
My company won't let me use my own AI at work. Can I strip out the confidential parts and hand the rest of the mental load to my AI at home?
Or hit reply and type it, or email [email protected] any time. Shorter version welcome too: which AI feature did nobody ask for? The meeting bot that summarizes a meeting you sat through. The chatbot guarding the one phone number you needed.
LISTEN
Listen to the episode
Want to hear the whole conversation? Episode 26, Who Asked for This?, is 45 minutes with Ifeoma Ajunwa, Mara Bolis, and Logan Currie.
Short on time? The seminar note starts at 6:02, the hiring gatekeeper at 7:07, captured capital at 15:35, the San Francisco billboard at 24:22, and Space Traders at 34:01.
A few more references from the conversation:
The Quantified Worker
Ifeoma's 2023 book on how hiring software, bossware, and wearables turned the workplace into a data operation, and where the law has fallen behind. The book →
The Space Traders
Derrick Bell's 1992 allegory, the one Ifeoma retells with two new endings. Short, and free online. Read it →
The Kenyan workers behind ChatGPT
Billy Perrigo's TIME reporting on the content moderators paid under $2 an hour to make ChatGPT safe. Reading it is what started Ifeoma's Afrofuturism paper. The story →
NEXT EPISODE · THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 17
Pam Boiros + Luda Kopeikina
Co-founders of Women Applying AI. They join us to talk about what they've learned from a community of women who use these tools every day.
WRITTEN BY
Logan Currie & Mara Bolis
Women, work, and the messy middle of AI.
P.S. Mara records the next episode from Riga this week. Send your situation before then and it might be the first one we take on.
