Speed is the defining factor of this moment in artificial intelligence, but the need to move fast risks leaving women behind. At a moment when nearly half a million women have left the U.S. workforce this year and the gender pay gap is widening, a group of female founders, executives, and investors came together in Gloria Steinem’s living room to talk about keeping pace in an AI race where speed matters, overwork is celebrated, and “996” schedules—where people work from 9am to 9pm six days a week—are increasingly normalized.
“Speed is actually not exaggerated in its importance here,” said Katie Burke, chief people officer at Harvey, an AI company for the legal field, during the conversation last week. “That does not mean annoying hustle culture or work Saturdays, Sundays for facetime. There’s a ‘bro-iness’ to that that’s unnecessary and frankly unhelpful.”
Several women in the conversation at Steinem’s pointed out that hustle culture’s constant urgency favors people who can dedicate every waking moment to work. It rewards long hours, undervalues the empathy and discernment that women bring to leadership, and is unfriendly to working mothers and caregivers. Instead, speed can be about greater clarity, faster decision making, and learning quickly—and doesn’t have to bring hustle culture’s downsides.
Julia Villagra, an advisor to OpenAI and its former chief people officer, suggested that the culture driving this current AI sprint is generational, with young founders emerging from the isolation of the pandemic now “finding community through work.” For them, she said, the 996 lifestyle has become both a source of belonging and a race against time before the arrival of artificial general intelligence (AGI), when AI hypothetically will have human-level cognitive abilities for any task.
Inside their companies, several women are designing new ways to lean into speed with systems and experiments that make progress possible for more people, especially women who are often balancing caregiving or leadership across multiple fronts. One leader realized her team wasn’t using AI tools often enough and started peer-led support sessions where employees share prompts, troubleshoot workflows, and learn from each other. Jasper, the AI platform for marketers, launched a similar initiative called the AI Clubhouse, where the tagline is: “it’s one thing to talk, it’s another thing to tinker.” Vanguard organized a hackathon for women, with a mission to solve real problems with AI tools, no coding experience required.
Running through the conversation among the leaders last week was a shared sense of urgency. “This is really clearly going to be [an] Industrial-Revolution-scale economic opportunity moment,” said Claire Hughes Johnson, author of Scaling People and corporate officer and advisor at Stripe. “A lot of the economic value creation is not going to land in the hands of women because they’re not creating with this technology at the same level.” To change that, she said, “you need to be a leader who is saying, ‘I’m not afraid of this technology, I’m not afraid to challenge my teams to learn it and to use it.”
The group also discussed how the fastest path to shifting power isn’t only through building or investing, but through buying. “A lot of technology is shaped by the people who buy it,” Alex Buder Shapiro, chief people officer at Jasper, said. “There’s a tremendous opportunity to get women much more excited about the purchasing power and consumer-led decision making.”
At large enterprises, women lead many of the teams where AI transformation and adoption sits. “The buying power, at least if you take my business, 90% sits with women,” Guild CEO Bijal Shah said. “The transformation of AI in large companies sits in one of three places: people, IT, or it sits in a strategy team—and two out of three of those, lately, I’ve come across women who are running those departments or divisions.”
For Databricks chief people officer Amy Reichanadter, the conversation about speed also revealed what kind of intelligence wins in this new era, which she called “the most exciting time that I’ve seen in my career.” “AI has the potential to really put women at the center because all of the things that we’ve inherently been good at—high EQ, great verbal skills, high intuition—I think will become more and more important.” The same skills that enable leaders to listen, synthesize information, act, and communicate decisively have been undervalued in traditional hustle cultures, but maybe help us redefine what it means to move fast. Meanwhile, “a lot of the hyper-technical skills that have helped men succeed in their careers will sort of become equalized,” she added.
How we pursue speed defines who benefits from it, and the women in the room want to prove that moving fast and leading well don’t have to be at odds. As Gloria Steinem put it to the group: “We’re operating by their rules without introducing some of ours.”
Erin Grau is an inaugural resident of The Gloria’s Foundation Residency along with investor Karin Klein. Their focus is on women, AI, gender, power, and economic opportunity.