This coming week I’m speaking as a panellist on whether AI is pushing women and underrepresented groups out of tech (thanks to UX Crunch and Female Product Lead for the invite). My first thought on hearing this topic was, how true is it? What’s the evidence for this claim?
Turns out, there’s an abundance of evidence that women and minoritised people are leaving tech. According to Layoffs.fyi, roughly 45% of those who lost their jobs in recent tech layoff waves were women, even though women make up less than a third of the tech workforce and occupy less than a quarter of technical and leadership roles.
Separately, Findem's analysis of FAANG companies showed women were 33% of employees but 44% of those laid off, because the departments where women had gained the most ground (HR, talent, marketing) were particularly vulnerable to cuts.
This means that women are 1.6 times more likely to be laid off than men. This is even worse for black women, where by 2026 their unemployment had reached 7.3%, compared to 3.7% for white women.
The dominant story is that AI is driving women out of tech. But it's worth looking at what the data can actually claim. Two confounding factors stand out. First, this same period has seen a sharp increase in return-to-office mandates, which disproportionately affect women. The majority of caregiving still falls to women, and RTO removes the flexibility that allowed many to stay in the industry at all. Second, the roles most affected by layoffs aren't technical roles being replaced by AI. They're HR, talent, marketing, and DEI, departments where women had made the most progress. So before we accept the headline that AI is pushing women out, we need to ask whether AI is the cause, or just the most convenient explanation.
This is one example of how we can be given a story, and expected to respond in a binary way — accept or reject it. But I think there’s another, better way to respond: to reframe the story completely. If we don’t like the future we’re being sold, what’s the alternative?
Just this week the headlines have been full of stories about our future with AI:
AI staff ‘genuinely frightened’ for humanity’s future, ex-Anthropic researcher tells BBC
The U.S.-China race for AI supremacy risks driving us all “off a cliff,” analyst
The Cybersecurity Apocalypse Is Coming in ‘Months,’ AI Giants Warn
These headlines aren't designed to inform, they're designed to generate fear, and fear narrows our thinking to exactly two options: accept or resist. When people are scared they are easier to control. They all point to a bleak future where AI is going to wipe out humanity (unless we put our trust in authoritarian governments).
But is it really?
We don’t have to accept this future as an inevitability. The problem is, when we reject this version, what are we accepting instead? If there’s no viable alternative presented, it’s hard for people to imagine how the future could be different than the one we’re being sold.
That’s the key to changing this. What kind of future do you want? What should we be building towards instead?
The stories we tell ourselves
Our brains are meaning-making machines. Fed small amounts of data, we look for the patterns between them and relate them to our previous experience. We make sense of the data by creating stories to bridge the uncertainty.
Take for example, that friend who you called yesterday who seemed a bit distracted. You have the data point of how they appeared on the call. Your brain infers why they showed up in that state: they’re stressed with something going on at work, they’re thinking about their mum who’s been ill recently, or maybe they didn’t really want to see you — because they’re upset with you. Your brain collapses the possibilities based on what’s happened before: you had an argument with them last time, so you reason they’re still upset with you. Now your brain creates a whole story around that upset. What was actually a fleeting state for your friend in that moment becomes a whole narrative about your years-long relationship.
It matters less if the story is objectively true than how it feels in your body. Stories that explain how exposed we are to threats activate the limbic system. Notice what happened in that story. The moment your brain landed on 'they're upset with me,' your body responded. Tight chest, slight dread, maybe a flash of defensiveness. That's your limbic system reacting to the narrative as though it were a real threat, because to your nervous system, it is. Once that response kicks in, feelings override rationality. It's a survival mechanism, and it doesn't care whether the story is true.
What’s more, once the story has taken hold confirmation bias seals in it. You look for the evidence that supports the story, and reject the evidence that contradicts it. In fact, you may not even notice that evidence at all because of a phenomena psychologists call attentional blindness (see the monkey business illusion).
This response reduces the cognitive space for creative thinking to happen, to come up with different possibilities and options. Creativity needs a sense of personal safety to flourish. Both Barbara Fredrickson1 and Amy Edmondson2 have studied this, at individual and team levels — positive emotional states and psychological safety allow you to use your whole brain to think more flexibly.
In short, fear reduces your cognitive flexibility making you more willing to accept what is presented without question, whilst safety increases cognitive flexibility so you think critically and come up with more options.
To return to our friend, had the last interaction been positive then you would not have seen a threat in their distraction on this call. You would still have noticed that they were distracted, but you may have come up with other reasons that had nothing to do with you. Best of all, your flight-fight-freeze-fawn response would not have been activated, so you may have just asked them “you seem distracted, is something bothering you?”
Writing the story of our future
Let’s bring this back to AI but with a different example. This week I’ve spoken to three senior product leaders about how AI is impacting product roles, as research for a piece of work I’m doing in partnership with Mind the Product. One of the topics explored was how we bring on juniors.
The dominant narrative now is that AI is taking away entry-level roles. We can first stop to question, is this true? What’s the evidence for this? (as opposed to other reasons, e.g. the cost of running a business in the UK has increased). But going further, we can say — this isn’t the future that we want. All three believe we need to be investing in junior talent. Saying we can cut entry level roles as it’s more efficient to have mid levels working with AI is short sighted — what happens in five years when those mid levels have progressed to senior, or left to start their own companies? There will be a vacuum of succession with nobody trained or experienced enough to fill it.
We have the power to define and design what we want our future to look like. If we believe this is a problem we need to solve, that there is value in creating opportunities and nurturing junior talent, then why aren’t we building that? Miro is one company that invested significantly in creating its own graduate scheme for product managers, product designers and software engineers. For all the rhetoric about ‘product isn’t an entry level role’, here’s an example of a company rejecting that narrative and doing something bold — and with great success.
So the real question isn’t “is this the future we want?” That’s binary thinking, accept or reject, feel the fear and fight it or flee from it.
The real question is: what kind of future do we want to build? That’s a fundamentally different question, because it has no predetermined answer. It opens up possibility instead of closing it down.
The AI story we’re being told right now has technology at the centre and humans reacting to it. But we can write a different story, one that starts with people. What do we need? What kind of work matters? What does a thriving industry actually look like? How do we support the next generation to succeed? AI becomes a tool in service of those answers, not the thing that dictates them.
Nobody is going to hand us that story. The companies building frontier models aren’t going to pause and ask what we want because it’s not in their interests to do so. The media isn’t going to stop writing fear-based headlines because those are what sells. If we want a different narrative, we have to construct it ourselves, starting with the small, concrete decisions we make every day about how we hire, how we lead, and what we refuse to accept as inevitable.
If you enjoyed this article you may like these books:
The Chimp Paradox: The Mind Management Programme to Help You Achieve Success, Confidence and Happiness, Professor Steve Peters
The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human, Jonathan Gottschall
And if your goal is to build a better future, I can help you through 1:1 leadership coaching.
Fredrickson, B. L. (2001). The role of positive emotions in positive psychology: The broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions. American Psychologist, 56(3), 218–226.
Fredrickson, B. L. (2004). The broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 359(1449), 1367–1377.
Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383.