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Erica Stanley
Engineering Leader, Community Builder, Speaker, Contributor
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Code & Conscience #003
Code & Conscience is my way of thinking out loud with friends (that’s you, btw) about how we as technologists–builders, creators, leaders–impact the world around us with what we choose to build and how we build it.
In this Issue
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Building a Better Tech Future for Women
Hiring, retaining, and promoting women isn’t just about diversity quotas, it’s about making tech stronger, more innovative, and more effective.
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Beyond LLMs: SLMs, RAG, and Safer AI
While LLMs have shown incredible promise, they aren't a magic bullet for every AI challenge, especially when safety is paramount.
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The gender pay gap and AI
Is AI "mid"? How to be thoughtful about building with AI, Celebrating Trans Day of Visibility and Other Stories Around the Web
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Building a Better Tech Future for Women
On this last day of Women’s History month, it feels both timely and critically important to reflect on cultures that affect the success and retention of women in tech. Recently, Mark Zuckerberg suggested that cooperations need more "masculine energy". This framing is not just misleading, it’s actively harmful. If you’ve been working in tech or following many major tech companies, you may have noticed tech has been shaped by aggressive, competitive, and exclusionary work cultures. These cultures are often described as "masculine." (And don’t get me started on these rigid, short-sighted explanations of masculinity–a newsletter for another day, perhaps.)
A major problem is that ideologies like this contribute to poor retention of women technologists rather than driving innovation, collaboration, and success. This is visible in Zuckerberg’s company. One example is the former Meta executive Kelly Stonelake, who recently filed a lawsuit against the company, citing a toxic pattern of silencing women and reinforcing an exclusionary workplace culture.
Alienating women under the guise of “masculine energy” isn’t just a moral failing, it’s bad for business. The National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT) found that over 50% of women in tech leave by mid-career, often due to unwelcoming work environments, lack of growth opportunities, and systemic bias. Meanwhile, according to McKinsey, companies with diverse leadership teams are 25% more likely to outperform their competitors. The data is clear: a more inclusive tech industry isn’t just about fairness; it’s about better outcomes.
Women’s History Month is a reminder that tech has always been built on the contributions of women. Going down memory lane, Ada Lovelace conceptualized the first computer program and Grace Hopper developed the foundation for modern programming languages. Today, women still lead innovation at the highest levels, and workplaces mustn’t stifle them:
- Fei-Fei Li: Co-director of Stanford’s Human-Centered AI Institute and a pioneer in computer vision.
- Timnit Gebru: Leading researcher on AI ethics and bias.
- Kate Crawford: Expert on the societal impacts of artificial intelligence.
- Gerri Martin-Flickinger: Former CTO of Starbucks, driving digital transformation.
- Daniela Rus: Director of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL).
Hiring, retaining, and promoting women isn’t just about diversity quotas, it’s about making tech stronger, more innovative, and more effective.
For women in tech: Always remember that your work is valuable. Your presence is necessary and the industry is better because of you.
Finally, if we want to retain and support women in tech, we need to move beyond reductive ideas about gendered leadership. The goal isn’t more "masculine" or "feminine" energy, it’s smarter leadership that values creativity, collaboration, and long-term impact.
Beyond LLMs: SLMs, RAG, and Safer AI
Is pointing an LLM to every AI challenge the smartest way to go, especially when we're talking about AI that's safe and trustworthy? It's time we talked about alternatives, like Small Language Models (SLMs) and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), and how open source tools are making them key playe
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