I believe in a limitless world and my calling is to bring diverse set of roles into building exponential technologies such as AI and GenAI with my courses and teaching in multiple universities and executive groups.
Given all the excitement about Generative AI, this year I chatted with ChatGPT to find out who are the top women celebrated on IWD.
Guess what!
ChatGPT said IWD means “Internet Worm Database.”
Womxn are not waiting for ChatGPT to include them and have begun self organizing into meetups and communities to help each other in every possible field within technology, enterprenuership and more.
“watch last year’s womansplaining post listing self-organizing women groups”
For IWD, I host “Womansplaining”, a collection of 2-minute videos from several brilliant women who explain a topic of their expertise. (Link to
Google’s Gemini chatbot told me that this year’s IWD2024 International Women’s Day in 2024 is ‘Invest in Women: Accelerate Progress.’
Who is investing, and are we not accelerating progress for all genders?
So, I decided to write a post for my male friends who do not mansplain!
I have been lucky to have had many men who do not mansplain all through my life, starting with my family, then friends, classmates, colleagues, students, mentors …
I am talking to you!
Because we need YOU to be an ally!
Mansplaining is unsolicited advice or explanation of a topic assuming you do not know it, even for areas where you may be the expert about it.
This comes from patriarchy, growing boys to believe that their point of view is the truth and the world wants to listen to them.
Many of you were able to get past it and be normal and not be thin skinned about hearing the word mansplaining.
But for us womxn, mansplaining is simply insulting. And it is an annoyance in our daily lives. Everywhere!
As much as it annoys us, it should annoy you!
It’s not decent; it’s disruptive and as Irene Koehler shared in a recent LinkedIn post (
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/irenekoehler_womeninbusiness-entreprenuers-womanleaders-activity-7167916546332319745-dopt?) It costs us energy to ignore mansplaining many times a day. That could be better spent to accelerate progress for the world.
So here is what you can do!
- Look around you in company meetings. Women unfortunately do not lean in and wait to be called and when they speak up, they maybe mansplained on their subject area. You could jump in to stop this politely and bring the discussion back to the woman who will save your work and project.
- You may see this in your friend circles socially. Be a good friend and casually bring the question back to the woman who knows the answer.
- If you see this in a class gym or car dealer, do your part. I have bought my cars after much research, paid for them and when I pickup the keys, I have been mansplained basic things to drive the car back home. Every single time! And I am someone who teaches autonomous vehicles at Stanford!
- In a conference when you listen to a smart woman, if you see mansplaining, let the poor man finish his explaining, then ask the woman a smart question so she can give you the correct answer. Sometimes all we need is for us is to be treated like we have the expertise and experience we actually have and passionately excel in each day.
- In grocery lines, if you have ingenious ideas to stop us from having to hear how to tap our phone to do Apple pay one more time, we will buy you a drink.
Once a year on International Woman’s day #IWD we do womansplaining of many topics in 2 minute videos. Come learn about AI ethics from Susanna Raj, AI Inference from Jessica, peace technologies from Aishatu Gwadabe and lots more here at bit.ly/womansplainingplaylist.
In case you wonder how your helping us from mansplaining can help the world, let me tell you.
We will get to build cool AI that is as smart as both of us and for starters we can teach ChatGPT that IWD stands for International Woman’s Day and stop it from hallucinating about Internet Worm Databases.
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Sudha Jamthe is a technology futurist, AI, AV and GenAI author, educator and womansplainer from Silicon Valley. She can be reached at sudhajamthe.com or on LinkedIn where teaches AI with no code courses and hosts a weekly livestream called #Sudhalive (link to sudhajamthe.com)
