Kara Bombell spent 15 years in senior corporate roles before she saw AI coming like a train from the side and left to do something about it. Now cofounder of EthicAI and on the Governance Institute of Australia's AI Expert Panel, she helps organisations keep humans at the helm. Kara explains why the so called soft skills are the hardest, how biased data can screen women out, why she uses AI as a sparring partner, and how a Year 8 protest at Santa Sabina shaped her conviction.

Key Takeaways:

• Cognitive atrophy is the risk we're underestimating: If the next generation hands its questioning over to AI, Kara asks how it will ever build the critical thinking needed to challenge it.
• The so called soft skills are the hardest ones: Empathy, presence, opinion, creativity, hope and vision are what AI can't do, and they have long been undervalued as feminised traits.
• A human in the loop is not a human at the helm: Oversight means little unless people are given the time, context and information to genuinely own the decisions they sign off.
• Use AI as a sparring partner, not a ghostwriter: Kara always writes her own first draft, then asks AI to find the holes in her argument.
• Curiosity can take you further than credentials: Without a coding degree, Kara followed her curiosity from documentary film into digital, then out of corporate life to found EthicAI.
• Biased data quietly produces biased decisions: When hiring tools learn from historic patterns, capable women can be screened out without anyone noticing.
• Back yourself where you see a gap: Kara's advice to young women is the lesson she learnt the hard way, that the people around you rarely know more than you do.

Notable Quotes:

1. "I don't see AI as the next internet. It's not just another technical advance. It's actually a completely seismic change." — Kara Bombell
2. "Don't use it to replace your thinking. Use it to challenge your thinking." — Cynthia Myssy
3. "We've historically called them soft skills, but they're actually the most challenging skills." — Kara Bombell
4. "You can't say that the systems themselves are sexist. It's actually the data is sexist." — Kara Bombell
5. "There's so much opportunity if you open up into the world with that sense of curiosity." — Kara Bombell
6. "Realistically the work of art is yourself. It's your personality. It's your experience. It's your knowledge." — Kara Bombell
7. "I really needed to back myself at multiple points in my career, but I just didn't because I felt that everyone else knew something else that I didn't know." — Kara Bombell

Links for the show notes

• EthicAI: https://www.ethicai.au/
• Selma: selma.au
• Santa Sabina Ex-Students Association: https://www.ssc.nsw.edu.au/community/ex-students-association/

For any thoughts, comments and suggestions regarding this episode, feel free to contact us at santaexstudents@gmail.com. Join the conversation on Santa Sabina College Alumni Facebook Group.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Santa Sabina's first Rhodes Scholar didn't win the Rhodes on her first attempt. Dr Ashleigh Barnes missed the New South Wales place, steadied herself and went again in the national round. Now a constitutional law academic at UNSW, Ashleigh talks with Cynthia about imposter syndrome at Oxford, the school captaincy she missed, and why dignity sits at the heart of her legal work. She opens up about working with two babies under two. You'll hear why every application takes courage, and why having it all doesn't mean all at once.

Key Takeaways:

• Believing everything is possible is worth protecting: Ashleigh left school sure nothing held women back, and while she later learnt otherwise, she's glad she started adulthood with that conviction.
• The trajectory is only visible from the outside: what looks like a straight line was really other people tapping her on the shoulder, missteps, and working it out as she went.
• Imposter syndrome does not disappear with achievement: at Oxford she felt she'd crept in and had to do double, and found most people around her were thinking the same.
• Dignity sits behind the dry words of the law: her research asks judges and practitioners to look past the text of the Constitution to what its structures are trying to protect.
• Every application is an act of courage: putting yourself forward means genuinely believing you could get it, which is exactly why missing out can be crushing.
• Missing out can make you a better candidate: she missed both the school captaincy and the single NSW Rhodes place, then steadied herself and won in the national round.
• You can have it all, just not all at once: motherhood has changed her completely, and she wants to show it openly rather than hide it as earlier women leaders often did.

Notable Quotes:

1. "It looks like a trajectory, but it was actually more of an up and down, a left and right, working it out as I went." — Ashleigh Barnes
2. "If you don't believe in yourself, the assessors will see right through you." — Ashleigh Barnes
3. "It was very much a case of work as if you didn't have any children." — Cynthia Myssy
4. "I think we can have it all but not all at once." — Ashleigh Barnes
5. "Should I try for that? Will I fit in? Will I be okay in this scenario? You show up anyway." — Ashleigh Barnes
6. "Sometimes that period of endurance actually makes you a better candidate." — Ashleigh Barnes
7. "I would tell her just keep going. Just keep going because all these beautiful things are ahead." — Ashleigh Barnes

For any thoughts, comments and suggestions regarding this episode, feel free to contact us at santaexstudents@gmail.com. Join the conversation on Santa Sabina College Alumni Facebook Group.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Monica Serci has spent her career in family law, sitting with people at the worst moments of their lives. She's a special counsel at Walter and Elliot Family Lawyers, was named a Doyle's Guide Rising Star, and she gives her own time to advocacy work she believes in. In this conversation with Cynthia Myssy, Monica talks about the early warning signs of coercion and control, why the census undercounts what women actually do, and what happens when you treat a non negotiable as negotiable.

Key Takeaways:

• The warning signs are built to be dismissed: Coercion and control rarely announces itself, arriving instead as a comment about a friend, a preference that your mother visits less, or an offer to take over the budget, and it is the accumulation rather than any single incident that matters.
• A non negotiable has to look like one: If you treat something that is genuinely not up for discussion as though it is, it will be negotiated, which is why the moment to hold the line is early, while the thing is still small.
• The legal system is a tool, not a remedy: Courts can recognise what happened to you but cannot deliver emotional repair, so going in search of validation sets you up to leave disappointed whatever the outcome.
• What is not counted does not count: The census records paid hours precisely and caps unpaid domestic work at thirty, and that gap flows into the administrative systems that calculate child support, leaving two systems pointing in opposite directions.
• The relationship with yourself sets the ceiling for the rest: After a career spent watching relationships end, the one Monica worked hardest on was her own, drawing a clear line between self care and selfishness and treating her own limits as maintenance rather than indulgence.
• Imposter syndrome does not resolve with seniority: It is real, it is worse for women, and it persists in people with every reason to feel qualified, which makes the correction worth borrowing: you are the adult in the room.
• Courage is usually quiet: The most consequential acts are often private, unrecorded and witnessed by nobody, as one small kindness in wartime Sardinia proves three generations later.

Notable Quotes:

1. "If you have behaviour that is a non negotiable for you, but then you treat it as a negotiable thing, it will be negotiated." — Monica Serci
2. "Many people are taught to keep the peace, but sometimes to your own autonomy, there's nothing more that one should protect." — Monica Serci
3. "Thirty hours a week is almost a joke if they were to think about everything they did." — Monica Serci
4. "They're not just names. They're whole worlds." — Monica Serci
5. "You don't need permission." — Monica Serci
6. "Sometimes the greatest acts are quiet and deeply personal." — Monica Serci
7. "I think you see things that many of us don't see." — Cynthia Myssy

For any thoughts, comments and suggestions regarding this episode, feel free to contact us at santaexstudents@gmail.com. Join the conversation on Santa Sabina College Alumni Facebook Group.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.