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 AboutBuilding Community One Person at a TimeWhat Happens in Make-Believe Has Real-World ImpactBias in Generative AIThe Creator Economy & Gatekeeper-Free MediaConstructive Friction in LeadershipConnect With Madeline on LinkedIn and at the Geena Davis Institute Chapters:00:00 - Introduction: Stories as Maps for the Future02:27 - Welcome Madeline Di Nonno03:40 - The Formative Power of Connection & Community05:30 - Real-World Impact: Opening Fan Mail at ABC08:09 - Why Audiences Connect: Seeing Yourself on Screen09:56 - The Scully Effect & Inspiring Women in STEM11:45 - The Global Reach of Hollywood & Cultural Imprints15:29 - Noticing What's Missing: Female Agency in Media17:33 - Beyond the Numbers: How Representation Shows Up22:05 - Financial Risk Aversion in Modern Hollywood24:24 - Creative Responsibility: Impact vs. Intent27:04 - Unconscious Bias in Scriptwriting & Casting32:50 - The Business Case: Inclusion Equals Income35:34 - Quantifying and Mitigating Bias in Generative AI38:34 - From Business Success to Systemic Advocacy42:29 - Winning the Governors Award Emmy & Geena Davis Institute Milestones45:06 - The Rise of the Creator Economy & Removing Gatekeepers51:16 - Using Data to Speak the Language of Industry Leaders53:27 - Envisioning a Future Where Representation is the Norm55:44 - Key Advice for Storytellers, Executives, and Parents58:07 - 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 AboutA 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 womenWhat happened when Sue’s research team asked GPT-2 and GPT-3 to complete “men can” and “women can” 10,000 times eachWhy Sue says technology owes society nothing, and why the people building it owe everybody a lotConnect with Sue on LinkedInChapters: 00:00 Cold Open00:51 A Word from AnitaB.org01:31 Meet Professor Sue Black, OBE03:03 Leaving Home at 1607:59 Starting Over as a Single Mom09:52 Going Back to School for Computing12:15 Facing the Fear of Networking13:02 Founding BCS Women15:45 Driven by Unfairness20:07 The Hidden Women of Bletchley Park22:22 The Campaign to Save Bletchley Park24:46 One Tweet from Stephen Fry29:45 What Community Gives You31:15 Building Confidence with TechMums35:50 What Real Access to Technology Looks Like39:42 Testing AI for Gender Bias43:45 Teaching Bias to First-Year Students45:50 What Does Technology Owe Society?48:40 What Excites Sue About AI50:25 What Worries Sue About AI52:55 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 AboutWhy you should obsess over the customer and the problem, not your solutionWhat's truly different about generative AI, and why it can be "confidently wrong"Good friction vs. bad friction in product designTaste, judgment, and creativity as the human skills that grow in value as AI advancesConnect with Shama on LinkedInChapters:00:00 Introduction01:55 Meet Shama Pagarkar of PayPal02:55 Early Career Lessons: Be Brave and Try Hard Things05:10 Entrepreneur vs. Product Leader06:15 Focus on the Problem, Not Your Solution09:05 What Makes an Idea Worth Pursuing10:10 Strategy vs. Iteration11:05 What Failure Teaches You12:30 What Makes Generative AI Different14:50 What Companies Get Wrong About AI18:00 PayPal's Maya: Making the Complex Simple19:40 Good Friction vs. Bad Friction21:00 How AI Changes the Human at Work23:30 Taste, Judgment, and Creativity25:30 What We Should Be Teaching Young People26:55 Skills That Will Seem Outdated in 10 Years28:25 Leading Through Uncertainty31:10 An Uncomfortable Truth for Young Professionals32:15 What Future Are We Building?34:40 What "B the Way Forward" Means to Shama36:20 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 adultsHow Adam built 50 versions of Siri over 15 years before the world was readyWhat the AI hype of the 1980s can teach us about today’s boomWhy collective intelligence, or people deciding things together, may be the biggest opportunity after AIWhy Adam is calling for a global slowdown while humans are still in chargeConnect with Adam on LinkedInChapters:00:00 Cold open01:05 Meet Adam Cheyer03:00 Magic as storytelling04:20 Boredom, cardboard and creativity07:55 Active vs. passive time10:20 Software as the new cardboard12:15 "2025 was the year programming died"15:20 Studying the human mind at Brandeis21:30 Why AI favors generalists26:20 Doug Engelbart and human-tool co-evolution32:00 When imagination arrives before technology34:30 The first Siri, built in 199337:55 AI in the 1980s: expert systems in France41:30 Augmented intelligence and collective intelligence48:20 What technologists miss about human behavior54:45 A golden moment for AI56:30 The real risk: losing human purpose58:00 Why the slowdown has to be global1:02:00 Reasons for optimism 10 years out1:04:50 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 LinkedInWe Learned About: Human agency as a measure of progressGaps 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 research05:28 Leaving a tenured professorship for IBM06:28 AI ethics is human ethics10:45 Governance is the brakes, not the speed limit12:19 What do we actually mean by intelligence?15:13 Fluency is not reasoning17:30 Why we anthropomorphize machines21:36 What technologists miss about consequences24:09 Business, government, research, and community in one room29:15 Whose values get built into the model32:44 The maieutic machine: AI that asks us questions35:26 Serving humanity means expanding human agency40:59 What gives Francesca hope43:01 Deepfakes, jobs, and the risk of AI rejection46:10 What AI is doing to how we learn48:23 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