In this episode of the Inclusion on Demand podcast, Karen Catlin discusses her work in building better allies and the intersection of this work with artificial intelligence (AI). Karen Catlin is a highly acclaimed workplace influencer, speaker, and author. She has published four books in the Better Allies series, and emails a roundup of “5 Ally Actions” to over 40,000 newsletter subscribers every week. Previously, Karen spent 25 years building software products and serving as a vice president of engineering at Adobe.

WEBSITE: www.betterallies.com

NEWSLETTER: https://betterallies.com/subscribe/

SOCIAL MEDIA:

LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/kecatlin/

Instagram: @BetterAllies

YouTube: Better Allies

Learn more about Inclusion On Demand: https://www.inclusionondemand.com

Connect with Brian Fishbone on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brianfishbone/

Welcome to the Inclusion on Demand podcast. I'm your host, Brian Fishbone. My purpose in life is to help others do, be, and feel better so that they can thrive in life and change the world in their own way. In this podcast, we'll explore the world of diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging, called DEIB for short, through the lens of best practices I've developed over more than a decade in this field. We'll discuss everything from inclusive leadership and psychological safety to bias mitigation in HR practices and building sustainable, enduring employee resource groups, or ERGs for short. We'll feature interviews with leading inclusion experts and practitioners, and we'll analyze what's hot and what's not in the world of DEIB. In this episode of the Inclusion on Demand podcast, Karen Catlin discusses her work in building better allies and the intersection of this work with artificial intelligence, or AI. It's my pleasure to introduce Karen Catlin.

Karen is a highly acclaimed workplace influencer, speaker, and author. She has published 4 books in the Better Allies series and emails a roundup of 5 ally actions to over 40,000 newsletter subscribers every week. Previously, Karen spent 25 years building software products and serving as a vice president of engineering at Adobe. During that time, she witnessed a sharp decline in the number of women working in tech. Frustrated but galvanized, She knew it was time to switch gears and focus on creating better workplaces where everyone can do their best work and thrive. Welcome to the Inclusion on Demand podcast, Karen. I'm so glad you're here.

Brian, it's my pleasure. Thank you so much for having me on the show.

Well, you know what? We will just dive in. I love asking my guests for their— well, what I call their career origin story. So tell us a little bit about your path to launching Better Allies.

Sure. Well, some of it you summarized in that very lovely bio overview of my work. So thank you for that. And just to elaborate a little bit, you mentioned I was working in tech. And as a woman in tech, I was definitely part of a minority group. And I had a great experience, but I decided I wanted to do more to help other women, you know, kind of pay it forward as so many people strive to do at some point in their career. And I decided I wanted to start paying it forward for women. And I started our employee resource group at Adobe for women and started sponsoring women, doing kind of all the things you might expect someone to do if they were passionate about supporting women and gender equity in a company.

And I loved doing that so much, Brian, that over a few years I decided I didn't want to be a VP of engineering anymore. I wanted to just focus on helping women grow their careers. And so I started my own business as a leadership coach. That was my first sort of focus was a leadership coach for women. And Brian, I have to tell you, I love leadership coaching. I still do that today. I've been doing it now for 12, 13 years. But I, early on as I was starting this business, I realized that I'm not sure I'm solving the right problem.

My clients are amazing. They're all like leaning into their careers, doing what they want to be doing, growing, learning, being curious. But they were all working in companies where the closer you got to the C-suite, to the very top, just the malar and paler it got. And with all due respect to anyone who's listening to this podcast who's male and/or pale, I'm white myself. This isn't about shaming or blaming. It's just looking at what the demographics in companies tend to be like. And so I realized that to truly help my coaching clients, I needed to create more inclusive workplaces where they could get ahead based on their merits, the skills they're bringing, the experiences they have. as opposed to some part of their gender identity or demographic identity.

So that's when I started focusing on what can we all be doing every day to create more inclusive workplaces? What are the small everyday actions we can take to be more inclusive, not just for women, but for anyone who might be underrepresented or underestimated or overlooked because of some aspect of their identity? What are these everyday actions? And I'm kind of laughing at myself, like, look at me. I'm just like this person used to be a tech executive, whatever. And here I am trying to change the world and make workplaces everywhere more inclusive. I'm kind of laughing at myself. You can probably hear that coming through. It's like, who am I to think I can do anything here, make a difference? But I was naive. And that naivete, I think, was really important because that allowed me or encouraged me or opened a door for me to start trying to make a difference here. Now, the first step most people do to make a difference and change the world is, you know, go over to a social media platform and start the account.

So back in 2014 is when I started my Better Allies Twitter account because Twitter was all the rage back then.

Oh, Twitter. Yes.

And I started just tweeting Simply simple things I thought people could do to be more inclusive. Things like, and Brian, I'm sure you could add to this list too. This is the focus of our joint work here is just like, notice who is being interrupted in a meeting and stop the conversation. Say, hey, let's go back to what she was saying. Or notice when women are expected to schedule the meetings, the follow-up meetings, or take the notes at a meeting or other office housework and say, hey, let's set up a rotation for this kind of work. These are simple things that we can do if only we realize that they get in the way of some identity being prevented from growing their careers because they're saddled with doing this work, extra work, or they are— I should say they're saddled with doing extra work that's not really recognized or rewarded. They are not allowed or enabled to speak in meetings. They're not thought about for pilot projects, whatever it might be.

When we realize that there are so many things that get in the way of people growing their careers and doing their best work, there are often simple things we can do to create a more inclusive culture. So that's what I was doing is tweeting these simple things that people could do. And over time, Brian, people started asking me to speak about better allies and I love public speaking. So I'd always say yes. And you surprise someone who loves public speaking. I know it's a rare quality, right?

I know we're, we're, we can be unicorns that way, but go ahead. Okay.

I love that. And in the early years when I was giving talks about the Better Allies approach, I would get questions. It happened every time I gave a talk. The question would be some form of, hey, Karen, we love this talk, but we want more. Do you have a book? And I'd be saying, no, no, no, no book, but I have this Twitter handle. Go check it out. And literally the next time was no book yet. Third time, book coming soon.

Fourth time, book coming next month, you know, that type of thing. So I did write my book, Better Allies, and now I've written a total of 4 books in the Better Allies series. And as you mentioned, I have a weekly newsletter where I share things I have learned, things that have been in the news, new research that's come out, things that I've learned from audience members. in my talks or people who subscribe to my newsletter. And I also share mistakes I make along the way to show that even someone who focuses on this full-time doesn't always get it right. It's okay to not get it right. It's better to make a mistake than to not take any action at all. And I share all of that in a weekly roundup.

So anyway, that was a very long answer to your question, but hopefully I provided the insight you're looking for.

I love a long answer to a short question. I use that quote all the time when I do training courses because someone will ask me a question and I'll give them a very detailed answer. And that's how I always say it. So you're free to use that one. That was a long answer to a short question. But no, super helpful, Karen. There's so many things in your answer That I loved, and I would love to, to just share some things here that resonated with me. Of course, I'm a big fan of anybody who wants to pay it forward.

So I love that that was kind of a driving factor for you. I also appreciate that you're a systems thinker, that you went to root cause analysis in your leadership coaching. You recognized there was a bigger systems problem, and you started going after that. Love that. Thirdly, small everyday actions of inclusion. I am on board with you. We can all change the world in small ways. I always think of this Mother Teresa quote, right? It's, uh, I want to get it exactly right.

We may not all be able to do great things, but we can all do small things. With great love.

That's beautiful. I love that.

I know it's a really great quote, isn't it? I get goosebumps each time I say it out loud. And I usually also say too, I'm not a particularly religious or spiritual man, but I love me some Mother Teresa. And, you know, I also appreciated— I wrote down in my notes here that Twitter was like your gateway drug. To, to speaking and then to writing a book. So I loved, loved, loved hearing your story. I have a follow-up question for you, Karen. I'm always interested in pivot points or defining moments, especially for folks like us who kind of decide to leave full-time corporate work inside of companies, right?

Yeah.

So I wonder, was there a defining moment for you when you decided I'm ready to leave this company and, to quote you from earlier on, go change the world in my own way?

Yeah, what a good question. You know, I As you're asking it, I am remembering sitting in my car driving from my home in the San Francisco Bay Area down 101. And I know you're from the— are familiar with the Bay Area. Driving down 101, probably in a little bit of traffic, and kind of checking in with myself about like, okay, what am I doing that day? What's on the schedule? Just like thinking about what the day was going to bring. And there was one day I was doing that and I was like, okay, I'm going to work. The next day I remember thinking, I'm so excited. I can't wait to get into the office. And the difference between those 2 days was what was on my calendar.

The day that it was, I'm so excited to get into the office, was I was doing something with the Women's Initiative. And I don't remember what exactly that was, But it was something we probably had some programming or a lunchtime discussion, or I was going to be on a panel or something. I can't remember, but it was this, I am so excited feeling. And the other day that there was nothing going on with the Women's Initiative, it was just like, I'm going to work. And I remember realizing that on my commute and just realizing I need to change something up here. I need to do something different. I need to focus on supporting women full-time. And not just at Adobe where I was working, but for women everywhere.

Bravo. I know this is an audio-only podcast, but I'm smiling from ear to ear and silently clapping for you. I love, Karen, that you listened. I call it listening to the whisper. And I love that you put it in the context of checking in with myself. Now I'll transition. I am such a fan of your work, most of all your Better Allies Weekly newsletter. I mean, honestly, when I started emailing you directly, I'd give you a comment on it, or I liked this, or I liked that.

I, I really started becoming a huge, huge fan, and I thought, what an act of love to do this every week. Then of course I got more curious about you, and I was like, I have to have her on the podcast, right?

Right.

Right. So I'd love for you to tell us now about how you're helping build systems of allyship through that newsletter that I adore, the books you mentioned, and your speaking engagements.

I look at allyship as a new habit that we need to build, or a muscle that we need to build. It doesn't have to be hard to do this, but it's, it's something we need to think about frequently so that we start embracing doing things differently, that we embrace these everyday actions that are allyship, and that we make a difference in the hallway conversations we're having, the Zoom meetings, the Slack conversations, whatever is going on. We just have to make it a habit and have it be something that becomes the way we react to things. We need to just have a constant reminder that these are things that we can be doing. And I'll admit when I first started my newsletter, I did it because, well, that's what book authors do. Book authors need newsletters to reach out to people to promote their books. So I must admit I started it because of that. And I called it 5 Ally Actions because I think somebody else, some famous author had 5 whatevers.

And I'm like, well, 5 must be a good number. And that author sent his thing out on Friday. So I was like, okay, I'm going to send mine out on Friday. Someone's done all the market research. I'll just apply it to my domain. So I called it 5 Ally Actions so that I could share 5 tangible things to remind people that there's not one way to do allyship, that there are all these different things that we can be doing. And depending on what is your natural inclination, your personality, or your setting, where you are in a company, an organization, individual contributor or leader, and I just wanted to give people a range of options of things that they could be thinking about doing the next day or the next week at work. And so that's my approach is I think people need a regular reminder, a drip almost, of activities that they can choose from, decide to pursue, decide to share with their coworkers and talk about how to do more of it or start just doing it themselves.

And I love, I mean, I can't not share what I've learned. I don't know who to quote for this quote that I'm about to mention, but someone smarter than me once said, knowledge shared is knowledge squared. And so that sort of underscores what I'm trying to do here. I'm learning and I want to, you know, to help other people learn along with me.

Ooh, I love that. Knowledge shared is knowledge squared. And I love that you talk about giving people a range of options. I'm really taking away from your answer this idea of allyship as a muscle, that it's not hard, but it requires commitment. So excellent. I love that you're giving people everyday actions. And I know about you from reading, from getting to know you, that you also want to build systems of allyship. How are you doing that within a system?

So there are always approaches in the whole diversity, equity, and inclusion space. And I know you're very familiar with these. We can have top-down approaches to changing things. And top-down approaches are going to be strategic initiatives that we're rolling out a new performance management system to make sure we're doing things in an equitable way, or we're going to do a pay equity review for the whole organization to make sure that we don't have any pay differences by any kind of identity. Those are great top-down systemic things that we can and should be doing, but that's not what I am focused on with allyship. I'm focused on the individuals and the individuals who can create more inclusion in the smaller settings. It's bottoms up, it's grassroots. And I know that ripple effects happen.

I know that, and that's the systemic part to answer your question. The ripple effects when someone who is respected regardless of what role they have or who they are, but they're respected by their peers. And when they start showing up in a different way, when they start advocating for more inclusion in a meeting or, hey, let's do something like before we start discussing candidates, let's make sure we're all aligned on the job skills that we are looking for and only focus on those. Or let's make sure that we remind ourselves of the common biases that candidates can face before we start talking about hiring for a role or a promotion slate. These are things that can affect the whole system, but they're also within our reach. Individuals can promote or recommend that we change something. Hey, let's try a pilot where we do X, Y, or Z. And it doesn't have to be this overwhelming, oh my gosh, we have to do this for the entire company.

I need to be the head of whatever to make this change. Oh no, there are things that each of us can recommend or start doing ourselves. And that's the ripple effect that I hope to have. And I know I do. I hear from subscribers and from people who read my books that this is making a difference. So that's my approach.

I love that. Thank you so much for sharing more about your commitment to allyship. After a short break, Karen and I will examine the intersection of allyship and AI, or artificial intelligence. We'll be right back after a short break. I'm Brian Fishbone, and I'm glad to have you with us on the Inclusion On Demand podcast. In each episode of the Inclusion On Demand podcast, we'll explore the world of diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging, called DEIB for short, through the lens of best practices I've developed over more than a decade in this field and via interviews with leading experts and practitioners. We'll discuss everything from inclusive leadership and psychological safety to bias mitigation in HR practices, and building sustainable, enduring employee resource groups, or ERGs for short. We'll also analyze what's hot and what's not in the world of DEIB.

I currently serve as a principal of my own consultancy called Inclusion on Demand. My specialties include employee resource group strategy and evolution, inclusive leadership, mitigation of bias in HR practices, and development and delivery of inclusion training. You can find out more about my consulting work at www.inclusionondemand.com or find me, Brian Fishbone, on LinkedIn. Welcome back. Ugh, I guess it's time I addressed a topic I've tried to avoid for so long on this podcast, Karen. AI. You can see, like, you sometimes have to drag me kicking and screaming, right?

Oh, but Brian, I think you're going to be excited to hear about some of the things that you can do. And we're going to share them with your listeners as well about how we can be better allies in this AI world. So I know you don't like this topic, but I think you're going to appreciate what we're about to talk about.

Okay, you're looking at AI from a different angle, the intersection of allyship and AI. Can you tell us more about that?

Yeah. So here's what I am learning. I am learning that there's disparity and bias in how people, not in how, in just the usage of AI within organizations. Now, a little side note here. There's definitely bias in the models themselves. These large language models are built on biased material. And so bias in, bias out, garbage in, garbage out. That is well known.

And we also know about the problems with algorithms, um, with like visual identity and all sorts of other things. Anyway, there's problems with the actual output of these AI models, but I'm talking about the bias that is in the orbit around the usage of AI. And so here's some of the research that I have been studying. there's this hidden penalty for some groups when they use AI. The hidden penalty can be for, for example, older workers who are in a youth-dominated field or women in tech who are in a male-dominated field. Any kind of stereotyped group that uses AI, and stereotype means that they just don't, quote unquote, look the part. They don't fit the usual model of what people doing that work are, those stereotyped groups, when they use AI, they can face this penalty of like, oh, I knew they weren't up to the task. I knew that they weren't up to doing this job.

Look, they have to use AI to get it done. As opposed to people who are not stereotyped, who are part of the majority in that discipline, they'll be applauded for, oh, look how efficient they are now. Look how innovative they are. And so we have to be aware as allies that this bias can happen. And perhaps that percolates into any kind of performance review or casual discussions that we might be having. So we need to make sure that we're aware that some people may be basically, their usage of AI can backfire because of the bias around what others think of their performance. So that's just one thing called a competence penalty of sorts. It extends beyond the stereotyped groups.

Another study I found was that physicians who use AI are perceived as less competent, less empathetic, and less trustworthy. Isn't that interesting? So when patients find out that physicians have used AI, that's how they're viewed. And then I'll just mention one other thing about bias and usage is that there are so many pilot projects that are being run on AI deployment. How are we going to use agents? How are we going to integrate this into our workflows? How are we going to do whatever. There are pilots going on all over the world as people race to understand how to leverage this technology. And there was a study that found that women are underrepresented in these AI pilots at their companies. They just aren't part of this strategic initiative to go figure it out. And there's more research that goes back decades, not on AI, but just on pilot projects in general, in that these high-profile kind of career-growing opportunities these pilot projects that executives care about, they give so much career visibility and career growth as a result, but they tend to go disproportionately to men than women.

So this is not a new thing that's happening, but because of AI and how much executives want to know about it, it's just amplified that women are being left out of these opportunities. And then there's also research finding that women are more cautious more risk-averse than other people about AI adoption. They're probably asking the ethical questions that you posed a little while ago, Brian. They're asking, is this going to be helpful? Is the output going to be accurate? And they're being dinged because of that, because they're being more cautious about rolling out AI. So there's a lot of bias in this space. And then as I think about Allyship, awareness is the first step of that the bias exists. And then we need to start pausing and asking the questions about, well, if we are going to use AI here, why do we only have a certain demographic that we're investing in and asking them to lead the charge? Why are we ranking people if we're doing performance reviews? Well, why are we ranking people talking about their work in such different ways depending on, it might be their AI usage or their risk aversion or whatever. We need to just be looking out for this bias and saying, and looking for it like actually appearing in the conversations, the selection criteria, the performance review feedback and so forth.

So I'm going to pause there. I bet you have some questions or thoughts, but just like, that's a whole lot of bias. That is new and didn't exist 5 years ago.

I like that you put it into 2 categories, right? There's some new biases surfacing, and it's kind of amplifying some of the old biases that we as DEIB practitioners have been talking about and trying to interrupt for years and years and years, right?

Right.

So I'd love to get more specific with you. In all of this, like, what do you think the responsibility is of people leaders, human resources, DEIB practitioners? Maybe you could address one or more of those interested party groups.

Yeah, sure. There are many tools out there, off-the-shelf tools that we can be using, we can be licensing, whatever. And a whole category of those tools are hiring tools. So resume screeners and things to facilitate conversations with candidates and screen them, um, and bring them into the interview process with hopefully real humans. Although who knows what people are doing with agents now, and maybe there's some interviewing being done by AI agents as well. So if your company or organization or client is deploying a hiring tool that has AI capabilities in it, check it for bias. There was a study, I think it was by University of Washington, that found that the current crop of AI hiring tools overwhelmingly prefer white male job candidates. Then there was a Stanford study that found generative AI tools can reinforce age and gender bias, especially against older women.

So we need to make sure and just kind of assume that there's going to be bias happening in these hiring tools and maybe look out for some, run some experiments. Like, let's run some resumes through here with same resume with different names at the top, maybe one name being more male presenting, one more female presenting, one more white Christian presenting, one more a name from another culture that's not white Christian. And just The simple question of like, before we finalize candidates, let's review the AI-generated materials for biased assumptions about race, gender, ethnicity, and so forth. Asking that question can make all the difference. And in a similar vein, there are also AI performance management tools that are out there that people can license. Or people might just be using ChatGPT as like, oh, I got to write 12 performance reviews. Let me use my favorite LLM to help me out here. Just be aware that if anyone is using AI in the performance management process, whether that's writing 360 feedback, writing a performance review, or maybe there is a tool that helps people collect feedback and summarize it, just assume there's going to be bias in that too.

And just check yourself. Like, if I'm writing performance review feedback for 3 people or 360 feedback for 3 people, let's just take a look at what this chat bot is helping me write, and is it fair? Does it seem like it's equitable in terms of treating people for and rewarding and commenting on things that matter to the business and don't appear to be biased? So as I said, let me step back. Assume that there's going to be bias coming out of any AI tool that we use and be aware of it, look for it, check it, and hopefully do the course corrections.

I am so with you. One of the things I'm always talking about with training participants and my consulting clients is slow down your decision-making, right? So that you can make better decisions and approach things with a curious mind. Ask good questions. Be more curious and less certain. So I think it goes back to your point of we can use a lot of those allyship behaviors that we've been talking about for years, for generations, because there's an even more amplified need for it now, right? Because of our usage of AI.

And the promise of AI speeding up everything, we even need more of what you're bringing to your workshops and clients is like, it's speeding things up so quickly, but we need to take a pause. We need to slow down and to make sure it's the right kind of speed.

Ooh, good observation. Okay, so let's take a step back and ask what I call a VBQ, a very big question. Karen, should we even be using AI at all? All right.

Well, let's say that there are some amazing applications and uses that are going to help our humanity, our world, and so forth. I mean, it's furthering scientific discovery at an incredible pace. And yes, I do think that we should be using AI, but making sure we're doing it in the right places. Again, getting back to your approach about ethical reasons is like, who is this going to benefit and who is it not? And understand that. But The scientific discovery has me very excited, but wouldn't it be wonderful if all that slop that's coming out, you can spot it now, um, so easily because there's just this certain, definitely a format that I am reading so many, for example, LinkedIn posts that just like pose a question and then like, it's not this, it's that. Like we can just see it and, and it's just, it seems lazy. It's slop. It's like no one's really saying anything important anymore.

It feels like, so wouldn't it be wonderful that slop and sloppiness are around AI just stopped and we really just could focus on the benefits to humanity and our planet.

Okay, maybe you've taken a step toward convincing me there's some benefit there. So thank you for that.

Thank you for asking the VBQ.

On a personal level, well, of course, Gosh, Karen, I could talk with you about allyship, should we or should we not use AI, for hours and hours. This has been a delightful conversation. I'd like to wrap up with one of my most favorite questions to ask folks during these interviews, and now I'll ask it to you. What's one insight and/or action you'd like listeners to take based on our conversation today?

Yeah. Well, I hope that you are interested in joining me on the journey to be a better ally. I'm on this journey myself. I learn all the time about new ways and approaches and things we can be doing to create the kind of workplace that we all want to work in and that others really need to work in. And so I hope that you're curious about learning more. And if that's you, please subscribe to my free newsletter. It will appear in your new— your inboxes every Friday. It's called 5 Ally Actions, and you can find it at betterallies.com/subscribe.

Thank you for that, and I will highly endorse the newsletter. It is my favorite email of the week, and I'll make sure too, Karen, that we link to your website in the show notes.

Thank you.

Well, Karen, thank you very much. I appreciate you slowing down and coming to talk with us today.

Brian, it was a pleasure. Thank you. And thank you for being open to, to so many things that we talked about that I know you have this adverse reaction. You're probably going to have to go like take a shower after this or something because we talk so much about AI and I know that's not your favorite topic. But I appreciate that you were open to learning about it. Thank you.

Well, thank you. We're all on the journey together. That was my interview with Karen Catlin. Karen is a highly acclaimed workplace influencer, speaker, and author. She's published 4 books in the Better Ally series and emails a roundup of 5 ally actions to over 40,000 newsletter subscribers Every week. Looking for more support with your diversity, inclusion, and belonging programs? Inclusion On Demand is a consultancy focused on helping clients implement a comprehensive, systemic approach to advancing diversity, inclusion, and belonging in their organizations. Specialties include employee resource group strategy and design, interim inclusion staffing, training, and speaking engagements. For more information, please visit www.inclusionondemand.com or find me, Brian Fishbone, on LinkedIn, or check out the show notes.

I look forward to connecting with you in our next episode.