The AI Career Maze. 16 Points Where AI Invisibly Acts on Your Career
What you can't see will hurt you. Eyes wide open will help.
AI Told Her to Ask for $120,000 Less
Women Who Code (in a post on Linkedin) amplified the reach of an important study:
Researchers gave five major AI chatbots the same résumé. Same job. Same experience. Same city.
They changed one word on the profile: her gender.
The AI told her to ask for $120,000 less.
If you wonder how this happened here’s how. The training data that is foundational to AI has created - and continues to create - fundamental flaws that prove that the promise of reducing bias is a marketing claim, not a design principle.
AI is built on 50 years of data written by men, published by men, for men. It’s the knowledge drawn from what I call the cellar - decades of books, articles, studies and salary benchmarks evaluated by the very same men who controlled what got published and what got cited. Women’s voices are there, but they are so far outnumbered by men’s that they don’t surface. That’s neither intentional nor an accident. It’s a system that has been self-perpetuating for a very long time. AI is giving it a new engine.
Here’s my personal example. My books and TED Talk (over 4.6 mil views) are old enough to be inside of the training data’s window. When I asked several different AIs to identify the top career advice to women. Not one explicitly called out the importance of business, financial and strategic acumen. In spite of the fact that ChatGPT says this, "The Missing 33% is a genuinely consequential discovery…” It’s a single sentence among the billions of articles that keep conventional advice spinning. Consequential enough to acknowledge but not to recommend. AI is built on consensus not what’s consequential.
Positive Stereotypes Catch Us Up as Well
The embedded biases found in the cellar are foundational to AI whether they are positive for men or negative for women. Surprisingly, positive stereotypes about women also work against us through a dynamic I call Praised into Place: the stereotypes that sound like compliments but keep us where we belong.
You know them. “You’re so good with people, you should go into HR.” “Her team loves her, but can she make the tough decisions?” And the career advice found abundantly in top career advice research: keep working on your personal greatness and get even better at engaging others. (Go ahead little lady, keep polishing that diamond and forget about strengthening its setting!) Not a word about business, financial and strategic acumen.
AI Solidifying the Hedges
Every inequity that arises from these biases - unequal pay, unequal opportunity, unequal credit - is in the foundation from which AI draws what it does behind the curtain and what it tells you in front of it. Every system being built on AI draws from this flawed base. Career guidance, including asking for help with salary negotiations, is one small manifestation of a monumental problem.
So far in my research I’ve identified 16 points along our career paths where AI’s biases have already been proven to disadvantage us - or soon will be. I call it the AI Career Maze. We’ve always had to navigate a career maze. AI is making it harder, doing it in the shadows and, as AIs like to say, at scale.
Here’s an example from my book Built Without You that illustrates the salary negotiation situation in the study.
Here’s one that illustrates why Business Savvy is the tool that keeps you visible to AIs.
AI’s adverse impact shows up at every corner and dead end in the maze, from how your resume is screened to how your ideas are credited in meetings to who gets tapped for high-visibility projects.
Once you see it you can’t unsee it. And the only way to deal with it is to see it.
I’m shining a light on it for all of us. I’d love to hear your insights and experiences. Comments are open.
Lead ON!
Susan
If you’re following all the advice and it still feels like something’s in the way, I’m telling you, you are not the problem. You are working inside a system that’s withholding something from you. And now AI is making it permanent.
I’m here to offer what that system and embedded AI won’t and can’t: the business, financial and strategic acumen that keeps you visible and opens doors. I do that through the complete 6-part ecosystem that is being built for you here.
❤️ Please like, share or restack this post — it’s the best way to help other women find it
📘 Explore the ecosystem:
Your Business Savvy Coach - the only AI tool that coaches you on developing and demonstrating your business savvy as you engage with it on projects, pitches and priorities. Its Coaching Integrity layer guards against the embedded bias that generic AI tools carry in unchecked.
Built Without You: How AI is Hardening the Glass Ceiling and What to Do About It
The AI Intercept Pack - tool for working efficiently with AI while guarding against its embedded biases. (coming soon)
They Never Told You There Was a Horse in the Barn: The Business Savvy They Never Taught You. Why It Changes How You Work and How Far You Go
Be Business Savvy Course - self-paced, online course equipping you with the business, financial and strategic acumen skills you need to succeed and outrun the ways AI is hardening the glass ceiling.
Be Business Savvy articles here on Substack.