We keep being told the problem is women's hesitation around AI, that we need to adopt faster, skill up, and get in the game. But what if the hesitation is the rational response? And what if the systems telling us to move faster are the same ones punishing us when we do?

This week, Kimberly and Jessica talk with Nikki Meller, founder and CEO of CreduEd and DocuCred AI, a member of the Tech Council of Australia, and the founder of Women in AI Australia. Nikki brings a rare combination of on-the-ground organizing and firsthand experience as a female tech founder who has navigated investment rounds, built a development team, and made it to pitch week in San Francisco — all from a nursing background.

The conversation centers on a problem that's structural, not individual: organizations hand employees an AI platform with no governance, no training plan, and no reassurance about job security, then interpret the resulting hesitation — which falls disproportionately on women — as a capability gap. Nikki makes the case that this hesitation is actually a form of due diligence, and that the "competence penalty" documented in recent research (AI-assisted work rated as less competent, with the penalty larger for women) reframes the whole "women are behind on AI" narrative as a trap rather than a failing.

Topics covered:

• What the Harvard Business Review's coverage of the "competence penalty" research actually shows — and why it reframes women's AI hesitation as rational risk assessment
• How organizational culture creates the AI gender gap before policy ever enters the picture
• Australia's National AI Strategy: what it gets right, where it mentions women (spoiler: mostly in the context of abuse and safety risk, not leadership or capability), and what that omission signals
• The data aggregation problem: why lumping women, First Nations people, people with disability, and remote communities into a single "disadvantaged group" makes the research almost useless
• Why "the leaky pipeline" is the wrong frame — and what better language would look like
• What governments and organizations would actually have to do for "innovation is inclusive" to become more than a tagline

Guest:

Nikki Meller is the founder and CEO of CreduEd and DocuCred, a member of the Tech Council of Australia, and the founder of Women in AI Australia. You can find her and the organization at womeninai.org.au and on LinkedIn.

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In this episode, Jessica teaches Kimberly quantum computing — and we mean that literally. Starting from classical bits and working through superposition, Schrödinger's cat, the observer effect, and Google's Willow chip, Jessica builds a surprisingly intuitive explanation of what quantum computers actually do and why they matter for the future of AI.

But the episode starts somewhere else, with the phone call Jessica made after we stopped recording, questioning whether she should have tried to explain something she isn't formally trained in. That moment opens a bigger conversation about why women hesitate to speak publicly in technical spaces — not because they lack knowledge, but because the social penalties for being visibly uncertain are higher.

We cover:

• How classical computers work (bits, binary, the basics)
• What makes quantum computers fundamentally different (superposition, qubits, the observer effect)
• Schrödinger's cat — what it actually means and why a physicist would argue the cat is both dead and alive
• The double-slit experiment and why watching something changes what it is
• How Google's Willow chip did in five minutes what would take a classical computer longer than the age of the universe — and why you should read that headline carefully
• Why quantum computers are kept colder than outer space
• The three possible futures for quantum computing and what each would mean for everyday life
• The connection to AI — why quantum could speed up model training and what that actually looks like
• Who controls access to this technology, and why that question sounds familiar
• The research on why women adopt new technologies more slowly — and what it has to do with self-silencing, impostor syndrome, and gendered penalties for public uncertainty

Links

Women, voice, and silence

• bell hooks — National Women’s History Museum:
  bell hooks
  
  
• bell hooks and feminism — Equal Rights Advocates:
  10 rules: following bell hooks’ instructions for our movement
  
  
• Dana Crowley Jack — Harvard University Press:
  Silencing the Self
  
  
• Self-silencing summary — TIME:
  Self-Silencing Is Making Women Sick
  
  

Tech adoption and impostor feelings

• Women and AI adoption gap — LeanIn.org:
  Women and AI: The Gender Gap in AI Adoption and Usage
  
  
• Women avoiding AI — Harvard Business School:
  Women Are Avoiding AI. Will Their Careers Suffer?
  
  
• Women in tech and imposter syndrome — IT Pro:
  Imposter syndrome is pushing women out of tech
  
  

Quantum computing basics

• Quantum computing intro — QCS Hub:
  Introduction to quantum computing
  
  
• Schrödinger’s cat — Yale News:
  

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What if the story we're being told about AI's inevitability is hiding something underneath? In this episode, Jessica and Kimberly sit down with George Kamide, anthropologist, community builder, and co-host of Bare Knuckles and Brass Tacks, to look past the headlines about the AI bubble and ask who actually has skin in the game.

This is an episode about following the money, but it is also about following the questions. What is the outcome we actually want from this technology? And what happens to all of us when the people building it cannot answer that?

Topics Covered

• Why the dot-com bubble is the wrong analogy for AI infrastructure
• How special purpose vehicles and obfuscatory financing hide AI debt
• The Magnificent Seven and concentration risk in the S&P 500
• Taiwan, TSMC, and the helium supply chain most people have never heard of
• The "everything machine" promise and why it cannot pay for itself
• Why an AI crash could starve the narrowly-focused applications that actually work
• The labor reorganization problem and why generalists may win
• What chatbot tutors get wrong about teaching
• Mythos, the open source ecosystem, and concentration of access to powerful tools
• Why we keep analogizing ourselves to whatever technology we just built

Referenced in This Episode

• George Kamide and Bare Knuckles and Brass Tacks
• Ed Zitron's reporting on AI infrastructure at Where's Your Ed At, including The Hater's Guide to the AI Bubble and AI Bubble 2027
• Paul Kedrosky's analysis at Honey, AI Capex is Eating the Economy, which compares the AI buildout to past infrastructure booms
• David Shapiro's earlier appearance on the show, Beyond Work: Post-Labor Economics
• DeepLeaf, the Moroccan agritech company using AI to help small farmers detect crop disease
• The MIT Antibiotics-AI Project that used deep learning to discover a new structural class of antibiotics against MRSA
• Khan Academy's Khanmigo and the recent reckoning with the limits of LLM-based tutoring
• Raffi Krikorian, CTO of Mozilla, and his New York Times op-ed It's the End of the Internet as We Know It on Mythos and open source access
• Michael Pollan's new book A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness

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Contact us: https://www.womentalkinboutai.com/