B The Way Forward

What happens when we become intentional about the stories we put out into the world? In this powerful episode of B the Way Forward, host Brenda Darden Wilkerson sits down with Madeline Di Nonno, President and CEO of the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media. Together, they explore the intersection of media, technology, business, and cultural change. From her early career across ABC, Universal Studios, and Nielsen to leading data-driven advocacy in Hollywood, Madeline shares how media does more than entertain—it shapes who gets to lead, who gets to be a hero, and who gets to see themselves in the future. Whether discussing the "Scully Effect" in STEM, the business case for inclusion, mitigating bias in AI, or embracing "constructive friction" in leadership, this conversation is a masterclass in turning professional experience into systemic advocacy. We Learned About Building Community One Person at a Time What Happens in Make-Believe Has Real-World Impact Bias in Generative AI The Creator Economy & Gatekeeper-Free Media Constructive Friction in Leadership Connect With Madeline on LinkedIn and at the Geena Davis Institute Chapters: 00:00 - Introduction: Stories as Maps for the Future 02:27 - Welcome Madeline Di Nonno 03:40 - The Formative Power of Connection & Community 05:30 - Real-World Impact: Opening Fan Mail at ABC 08:09 - Why Audiences Connect: Seeing Yourself on Screen 09:56 - The Scully Effect & Inspiring Women in STEM 11:45 - The Global Reach of Hollywood & Cultural Imprints 15:29 - Noticing What's Missing: Female Agency in Media 17:33 - Beyond the Numbers: How Representation Shows Up 22:05 - Financial Risk Aversion in Modern Hollywood 24:24 - Creative Responsibility: Impact vs. Intent 27:04 - Unconscious Bias in Scriptwriting & Casting 32:50 - The Business Case: Inclusion Equals Income 35:34 - Quantifying and Mitigating Bias in Generative AI 38:34 - From Business Success to Systemic Advocacy 42:29 - Winning the Governors Award Emmy & Geena Davis Institute Milestones 45:06 - The Rise of the Creator Economy & Removing Gatekeepers 51:16 - Using Data to Speak the Language of Industry Leaders 53:27 - Envisioning a Future Where Representation is the Norm 55:44 - Key Advice for Storytellers, Executives, and Parents 58:07 - Constructive Friction: What "Being the Way Forward" Means #BTheWayForward #MadelineDiNonno #BrendaDardenWilkerson #GeenaDavisInstitute #GenderInMedia #WomenInTech #WomenInSTEM #RepresentationMatters #InclusionEqualsIncome #WomenInLeadership #CreatorEconomy #MediaImpact

What if the biggest thing standing between you and your future isn’t your ability, but whether you believe you belong there? In this episode, host Brenda Darden Wilkerson and Sue talk about how a shy young researcher who dreaded networking found her people at a Women in Science conference in Brussels, then came home and founded BCS Women. Sue shares how she learned that more than 80% of the roughly 10,000 people at Bletchley Park were women, and how a three-year campaign helped keep it open. The campaign ran on a petition, a letter to The Times, a BBC interview, and one tweet from Stephen Fry that sent her blog from 50 hits a day to 8,000. The conversation then turns to AI. Sue describes a study her team ran on early large language models: they asked the models to finish “men can” and “women can” 10,000 times each, and the results were very different. She and Brenda talk about who decides what counts as “normal” in training data, why Sue shows her first-year Durham students Coded Bias, and why she believes technology owes society nothing while the people building it owe everyone a great deal. If you’ve ever been the only one in the room, wondered whether your background disqualified you, or wanted to fix something everyone else had accepted, Sue’s story is a reminder that you can start where you are. We Talked About A fast-track maths course, a computing degree, and a PhD she didn’t fully understand How a three-year campaign, a letter to The Times, and one tweet from Stephen Fry helped secure £4.6 million to save Bletchley Park, where more than 80% of the codebreakers were women What happened when Sue’s research team asked GPT-2 and GPT-3 to complete “men can” and “women can” 10,000 times each Why Sue says technology owes society nothing, and why the people building it owe everybody a lot Connect with Sue on LinkedIn Chapters: 00:00 Cold Open 00:51 A Word from AnitaB.org 01:31 Meet Professor Sue Black, OBE 03:03 Leaving Home at 16 07:59 Starting Over as a Single Mom 09:52 Going Back to School for Computing 12:15 Facing the Fear of Networking 13:02 Founding BCS Women 15:45 Driven by Unfairness 20:07 The Hidden Women of Bletchley Park 22:22 The Campaign to Save Bletchley Park 24:46 One Tweet from Stephen Fry 29:45 What Community Gives You 31:15 Building Confidence with TechMums 35:50 What Real Access to Technology Looks Like 39:42 Testing AI for Gender Bias 43:45 Teaching Bias to First-Year Students 45:50 What Does Technology Owe Society? 48:40 What Excites Sue About AI 50:25 What Worries Sue About AI 52:55 What “B the Way Forward” Means to Sue #BTheWayForward #SueBlack #WomenInTech #BletchleyPark #AIBias #TechMums #ResponsibleAI #DiversityInTech #AnitaB #WomenInSTEM

What happens when we stop asking what AI can do and start asking what it should do? Shama Pagarkar has spent more than two decades at the crossroads of technology, product, and people, culminating in leading AI transformation work at PayPal. In this episode of B the Way Forward, Brenda sits down with Shama to talk about building products people actually need, why "AI isn't a strategy," and how PayPal's Maya initiative turned a weeks-long merchant integration into a few hours. Shama also makes the case that as answers get cheaper, human judgment becomes the whole job, and shares what she told her team when she asked them to trade old-school PRDs for hands-on prototypes. If you're leading through change, building your career in tech, or wondering which human skills will matter most in the age of AI, this conversation is for you. We Talked About Why you should obsess over the customer and the problem, not your solution What's truly different about generative AI, and why it can be "confidently wrong" Good friction vs. bad friction in product design Taste, judgment, and creativity as the human skills that grow in value as AI advances Connect with Shama on LinkedIn Chapters: 00:00 Introduction 01:55 Meet Shama Pagarkar of PayPal 02:55 Early Career Lessons: Be Brave and Try Hard Things 05:10 Entrepreneur vs. Product Leader 06:15 Focus on the Problem, Not Your Solution 09:05 What Makes an Idea Worth Pursuing 10:10 Strategy vs. Iteration 11:05 What Failure Teaches You 12:30 What Makes Generative AI Different 14:50 What Companies Get Wrong About AI 18:00 PayPal's Maya: Making the Complex Simple 19:40 Good Friction vs. Bad Friction 21:00 How AI Changes the Human at Work 23:30 Taste, Judgment, and Creativity 25:30 What We Should Be Teaching Young People 26:55 Skills That Will Seem Outdated in 10 Years 28:25 Leading Through Uncertainty 31:10 An Uncomfortable Truth for Young Professionals 32:15 What Future Are We Building? 34:40 What "B the Way Forward" Means to Shama 36:20 Closing Thoughts #BTheWayForward #AnitaB #WomenInTech #AILeadership #ProductManagement #GenerativeAI #FutureOfWork #TechLeadership #PayPal #Innovation

What happens when your imagination shows up decades before the technology does? Adam Cheyer built his first version of Siri in 1993, before the web existed. He went on to co-found Siri and Viv Labs and was the first developer at Change.org. Now he’s saying something many people in tech won’t: 2025 was the year programming died. Brenda talks with Adam about why boredom made him creative as a kid, and how cardboard became software. They also get into Doug Engelbart’s idea that people and tools have to change together. Adam explains why he thinks we’re in a “golden moment” with AI, and why the thing that scares him most isn’t machines taking over but people losing their sense of purpose. If you’re excited about AI but uneasy about where it’s going, this one’s for you. We Talked About: Why boredom and “active vs. passive” time build creativity in kids and adults How Adam built 50 versions of Siri over 15 years before the world was ready What the AI hype of the 1980s can teach us about today’s boom Why collective intelligence, or people deciding things together, may be the biggest opportunity after AI Why Adam is calling for a global slowdown while humans are still in charge Connect with Adam on LinkedIn Chapters: 00:00 Cold open 01:05 Meet Adam Cheyer 03:00 Magic as storytelling 04:20 Boredom, cardboard and creativity 07:55 Active vs. passive time 10:20 Software as the new cardboard 12:15 "2025 was the year programming died" 15:20 Studying the human mind at Brandeis 21:30 Why AI favors generalists 26:20 Doug Engelbart and human-tool co-evolution 32:00 When imagination arrives before technology 34:30 The first Siri, built in 1993 37:55 AI in the 1980s: expert systems in France 41:30 Augmented intelligence and collective intelligence 48:20 What technologists miss about human behavior 54:45 A golden moment for AI 56:30 The real risk: losing human purpose 58:00 Why the slowdown has to be global 1:02:00 Reasons for optimism 10 years out 1:04:50 Closing thoughts #BTheWayForward #AdamCheyer #Siri #ArtificialIntelligence #FutureOfWork #CollectiveIntelligence #WomenInTech #AnitaB

What if the most important question in AI is not how intelligent we can make machines, but what we want that intelligence to do for us? In this episode of B The Way Forward, Brenda Darden Wilkerson sits down with Francesca Rossi, IBM Fellow and IBM's Global Leader for Responsible AI and AI Governance at the T.J. Watson Research Center, for a conversation about AI ethics, AI governance, and the human decisions behind every system we build. Francesca spent more than 20 years as a computer science professor advancing AI capability, before a year at Harvard's Radcliffe Institute changed the questions she was asking. She explains why AI ethics is really human ethics, why governance works like brakes and seat belts rather than a speed limit on innovation, and why the language fluency of large language models should never be confused with reasoning. She and Brenda dig into whose values get embedded in a model and who gets to fine tune them, what happens to democracy and the legal system when people can no longer tell what is true, and why the greatest threat to human agency may be the steady accumulation of small decisions we hand over without noticing. This is a conversation that sits right at the center of this season's theme of presence, passion, and purpose, because the future of artificial intelligence is not something arriving on its own. It is something we are building, one choice at a time. Connect with Francesca on LinkedIn We Learned About: Human agency as a measure of progress Gaps in training data How AI ethics is Human ethics What AI is teaching us about ourselves Chapters: 00:00 Just because we can build it, should we? 02:09 The bigger question behind 20 years of AI research 05:28 Leaving a tenured professorship for IBM 06:28 AI ethics is human ethics 10:45 Governance is the brakes, not the speed limit 12:19 What do we actually mean by intelligence? 15:13 Fluency is not reasoning 17:30 Why we anthropomorphize machines 21:36 What technologists miss about consequences 24:09 Business, government, research, and community in one room 29:15 Whose values get built into the model 32:44 The maieutic machine: AI that asks us questions 35:26 Serving humanity means expanding human agency 40:59 What gives Francesca hope 43:01 Deepfakes, jobs, and the risk of AI rejection 46:10 What AI is doing to how we learn 48:23 What working on AI taught her about humanity #BTheWayForward #AnitaB #FrancescaRossi #AIEthics #ResponsibleAI #AIGovernance #IBM #ArtificialIntelligence #HumanAgency #TrustworthyAI #GenerativeAI #AgenticAI #TechLeadership #WomenInTech #WomenInAI #FutureOfWork #AIandSociety #EthicalTech