The research showed Ireland as having the largest gender gap in Europe in the use of advanced digital skills at work. While 44% of men in Ireland use advanced digital skills in their daily jobs, only 18% of women do. Advanced Digital Skills are high level tasks such as programming, AI & Machine Learning. A particular concern raised was the gap is largest not amongst women in my own age group (50+) but younger women. The gender gaps are larger and less well explainable amongst those under 35.

So, the question is why are women under 35 less likely than men to be using these tools? In an earlier article I spoke about the sheer joy and optimism of the days of the early internet and then how this has soured in recent years.

Having worked in technology for over two decades, I can’t help wondering whether part of the answer lies in the lived experience many young women have had of the digital world itself.

To be 35 now means you were 13 when Facebook launched, 16 when the first new iPhone came out and 19 when Instagram landed. You have been surrounded by technology most of your life. Some of it has been exciting and fun and a way to connect. But a lot of it has been darker.

To be 35 and under now means:

41% of you would have received unwanted sexual images ^[1]

Almost half of you would have received them when you were under the age of 18 (completely disgusting).

That is of course if you have managed to escape the “thinspiration” content so prevalent on Instagram & TikTok.

Here the facts are stark:

Between 2000 and 2018 eating disorders more then doubled globally from 3.5% to 7.8% of the population. ^[2]

In England, hospital admissions of children for eating disorders increased by more than fivefold (around 515%) between 2012 and 2022, with the greatest increases among girls aged 11–15.

And now we have AI marching into the picture. Let’s look at what delights this has brought in the short time since LLMs came into our consciousness:

The number of deepfake videos online had increased by 550% since 2019.^[3]

98% of all deepfake videos online were pornographic and nonconsensual.

99% of the individuals targeted in deepfake pornography were women.

It now takes less than 25 minutes and costs $0 to create a 60-second deepfake pornographic video of anyone using just one clear face image.

And most disturbing of all? 74% of deepfake pornography users don’t feel guilty about it.

Before we criticise younger women for not embracing AI, perhaps we should consider what the digital revolution has actually looked like from their perspective.

The ESRI has identified a skills gap.

I wonder if what is underneath it is also a trust gap?

If your experience of the digital revolution has too often been one of comparison, exploitation or harassment, perhaps your relationship with the next wave of technology is naturally going to be different?

But here’s the difficult piece.

AI is far too important for women to step back from.

We need more women designing it, questioning it, leading it and shaping how it is used. We need women in the room discussing ethics, compliance or even just asking the question “Is this really a good idea?”

Because women are not the problem (they never are).

The systems that have too often failed them are.

^[1] https://yougov.com/en-gb/articles/20179-four-ten-female-millennials-been-sent-dick-pic?

^[2] https://www.verywellhealth.com/eating-disorder-facts-5324263?

^[3] https://www.securityhero.io/state-of-deepfakes/

And yet, and yet there is a reluctance. People aren’t all in on AI and the reason being is that we have been here before and we got burned.

Like the old saying goes

“Fool me once shame on you, Fool me twice shame on me”

In my last article I wrote about the wonderful optimism of the early days of the internet. Much of this was accompanied by a progressive liberalism which felt very right for the time. It was young, it was hip and in parts it was kind of cute and cuddly. The original Google motto was;

“Don’t be evil”

The idea being that you could be successful and make money without doing bad things. This was just not new tech it was a new way of being. Gillian Tett captures it so well in her book “The Silo Effect” a senior Facebook executive said at the time;

“We want to be anti- Sony, anti-Microsoft- we look at companies like that and see what we don’t want to become”.

To be working in tech was to be in the cool gang. But people grew up and scale came at a price. In 2015 the original Google motto changed from “Don’t be Evil” to “Do the right thing”; somewhere along the way defining what exactly not being evil meant became more complicated.

An incredible insight into that world is Chaos Monkeys by Antonio Garcia Martinez. I wrote a pretty wide eyed review of that for Irish Tech News back in 2017. A sharp, witty writer it is a really funny book and what I took away from it was:

“They (Facebook) take users data far more seriously than I ever realized and for the most part come across as really smart people working very thoughtfully on trying to create a new type of organization.”

I have no doubt they were and still are really smart people working inside in Facebook but the explosion of social media, mobile phones and the impact it has had on our children has soured my own views and that of many others.

One of the most heartbreaking pictures you will ever see is parents outside courtrooms in the recent Meta lawsuit holding pictures of their dead children. They are all beautiful and far too young. Tech is now synonymous with phones, addiction and damage. Social media was trusted at the start. It was perceived as harmless and given free reign.

When my children were young it was very common for kids to be given a phone as a communion present. Average age of a communicant in Ireland? 7 or 8 years old. It is perceived as the age of reason by the Catholic Church. And they may have some reason but they did not have the ability to navigate the open sewer that is social media at that age. Now we see it for the addiction machine it is.

And that the addiction is man made and cynical. Sarah Wyndham Clarke’s also excellent book (if you have not read it please stop scrolling and get a copy of it now!) details all of this in “Careless People”.

Another insider story, very well told but one of the tales which stopped me in my tracks was this one. An advertising pitch deck was made by the Australian team. In it they outlined how they target young people when they are vulnerable. Advertisers were offered the opportunity to target 13–17-year-olds at moments when they felt “worthless”, “insecure” and “like a failure”. A practical application? A beauty company targeting a girl once she deletes a selfie intuiting that at that moment she is not feeling happy within herself and can therefore be targeted for sale. And that’s without even mentioning body confidence and eating disorders.

That book stayed with me for weeks afterwards. It was the prevailing sense that there was just no moral compass. At no stage did anybody say, “I wonder, is this a good thing to do?” or even “Is this the right thing to do”. And that is what is so scary. Instead, it seems to have just been growth at all costs and money was everything.

Social media arrived and was given free reign. We trusted the people building it.

We trusted their intentions. We trusted that if something became harmful, somebody would step in.

We are now a lot more cautious.

AI won’t be welcomed with the same unquestioning optimism.

It will have to earn our trust.

To understand where we are now with AI I think it is important to first look backwards rather then forwards.

Not too far, let’s just go back to a time when smoking was still cool and nobody knew what triple cleansing was. Basically the 90s, the last decade before the internet exploded.

I am old enough to remember a time with no email. I know. Inconceivable now. When messages need to be relayed companywide a memo was printed out and placed on everyone’s desk. As I worked for Guinness in Italy at the time the memo was printed in two languages; English and Italian. (For the record I am 52 not 92).

A year later I moved to Germany, it would have been around 1998 and the internet had started to creep in. I worked in a little satellite office across from the main office and it was deemed not important enough to bring the cable across the road so we soldiered on with our memos and A4 diaries large enough to whack a burglar with. My desk had a landline phone I used constantly and a brick of a mobile phone I used rarely. There was a pub in the office (wellness had not been invented yet) and after work drinks were the norm. Life was pretty much completely analogue.

From where we are sitting now a lot of that seems quite attractive. But there was a lot wrong with it too. Work was incredibly hierarchical in a way that simply does not exist anymore. Nearly all the managers were male and who you knew was an essential part of getting on or even getting in in the first place. It was not glamorous like Mad Men but it was warrens of little offices and secretaries sitting outside.

Today the open plan offices and exposed ceiling looks are so ubiquitous they have become a total cliche. But back then they really were kind of shocking - they announced a new way of working, far removed from the previously prized mahogany desks and filing cabinets of before. To walk into one of these open plans, light filled offices was a joy.

When I worked in Guinness I wore cufflinks on my shirts. It was very much traditional suits with skirts, tights and heels. At the time our suits were nearly always grey or black with a pink shirt if you wanted to be daring. We looked uniformly awful. When I moved to tech I remember being genuinely taken aback to see a senior executive walking the floor in shorts (it was Dublin but he was Californian to be fair). There was a lightness in it. Runners instead of heels. T-shirts instead of cufflinks. What you knew rather than who you knew.

But over and above all of that the reason I moved into Tech – and why so many others did as well – was the genuine optimism and belief that we were making the world a better place. We were at the forefront of a new society one which was going to be open, prosperous and shared. The barriers to knowledge were going to be broken down. The old hierarchies would disappear and citizens would be empowered. This was a new frontier and creativity was going to flourish. We really believed.

The internet revolution was real. So much good came from it. And yet, and yet.. the joy is nearly all gone. The optimism has evaporated. When we talk about AI there is some excitement but there is mainly anxiety and fear.

Why is that? Will be talking about that next week.

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