“Sadly as we empower women today, we force them to become masculine.” - Mo Gawdat

I had my short essay prepared for this month’s newsletter - but then Mo Gawdat’s analysis on our hyper-masculine world and how it creates suffering for all of us (men and women) expressed so succinctly what I had felt over the last years but wasn’t able to pin down. I felt seen, I felt heard, I felt understood. I had to include it in this month’s newsletter.

Who is Mo Gawdat and why is this so powerful?

Mo Gawdat is the former Chief Business Officer of Google [X], a trained engineer and mathematician, very analytical and logical as he says about himself. He achieved everything our society today values and he possesses the exact attributes our society gives credit for: money, power, extremely sharp intellect. Him recognizing our world to be hyper-masculine is so powerful - who can dismiss the message when it comes from a man with this background and these credentials? I needed to hear it from him to give myself permission to talk about it.

Feminine and Masculine qualities

Masculine and feminine is not man and woman. Feminine and masculine describe different kinds of qualities. Feminine is associated with creativity, intuition, nourishing, being, life-giving, the masculine is associated with analytical thinking, strength, discipline, control and doing. As Mo says in short: “The feminine is, the masculine does”. We all have both qualities in us - the tendency to be more in one than the other can correlate with gender. He argues that none of these qualities is inherently good or bad. Instead OVERDOING any of them harms you and others. Overdoing being prevents you from getting things done. Overdoing strength leads to violence. Overdoing doing leads to doing a lot of things without really being aware of all the consequences this headless action creates. As a woman you can be too much in the masculine too!

Hyper-masculinity

Mo says: “Creating this hyper-masculine world is I think the biggest mistake humanity has ever done, and I think humanity is paying for that and will pay more in the future”. He also stresses that men that have really changed the world like Gandhi and Steve Jobs were more in their feminine than in their masculine. Gandhi stressed peacefulness, non-violence and communication. Creativity, appreciation of art and design and empathy towards the users needs is what made Steve Jobs so successful (his masculine qualities of being pushy rather took away from that as Mo argues).

Mo started empowering his feminine side about 5 years a go and says he is 10 more times intelligent now as compared to when he was solely focusing on his masculine qualities. He admits: “To become a successful executive I had to empower the masculine side, until I realized that true leaders don’t do, we be. And being is what the feminine is about.” He also recognizes masculinity as a tool for survival in today’s capitalist society and most importantly understands: “Sadly as we empower women today, we force them to become masculine, we force them to become competitive, we force them to become tough because the way the game is played is that way. We should empower the feminine.“

Wow isn’t that powerful? I feel relieved - like a big burden that I can finally let go off. Subconsciously I have felt for a long time that I needed to focus on my masculine qualities if I wanted to be valued by others in this world. I always sensed that what is associated with the feminine is valued far less if not even devalued. Emotions, intuition, softness, being. That is why I never wanted to come across as feminine. Which at least to some extent even drove me to pick a profession that is associated as masculine and male-dominated. I wanted to prove my value and got the hunch that this works best through developing masculine qualities. I also understood success comes with masculinity and I wanted to be successful. I was too much in the masculine.

Reconnect to the feminine inside of you

Only quite recently I realized that I need to balance all this masculine energy that surrounds us all, and particularly in the tech industry, not only to feel good but to actually be successful (my own definition of success). Through yoga I learned to rediscover my feminine qualities like intuition and creativity. Especially Kundalini yoga, which I am now a trained teacher, is something I do almost every day to nourish my feminine side.

I encourage you (male or female!) to look for the tool that works for you to nourish your feminine energy - it can be a creative outlet like painting or dance, it can be yoga, meditation and mindfulness, it can be connection to nature or anything else you find. Remember it is not so much about what you do but rather how you do it. Do you force yourself to do it, are you competitive with it, do you apply a lot of discipline or do you do it with a lot of playfulness, creativity, flow and intuitively?

Studies and stats 🔢 

Still a bit of work until we get to a more balanced representation of women in tech.

Source: McKinsey Study Women in tech: The best bet to solve Europe’s talent shortage published in January 2023

AI 🤖 

As you can see from my recommendations, I spent a lot of time familiarizing myself with the EU AI Act this month. As a practitioner, I find it important to be aware of its implications even though of course when developing new AI solutions I always advocate for involving the legal department from the start.

• The EU AI Act itself - all levels
  It is good to come back to the source itself from time to time, especially when you don’t get enough clarity out of the resources around it. I found the parts I read surprisingly easy to understand - so don’t be afraid to go back to the source.

• Examining the EU’s Artificial Intelligence Act - all levels

  Good overview of the EU AI Act, also talks about how it affects the work with foundation models

• The Finalised EU AI Act: Implications for Businesses, Engineers and Entrepreneurs - all levels
  This is a recording of an event at the Merantix AI campus. It is a nice presentation of what the EU AI Act means for practitioners. It points out what is clear so far and what remains to be clarified.

• The Rise of Mixture-of-Experts for Efficient Large Language Models - all levels

  Nice and easy introduction to the Mixture-of-Experts architecture - the architecture that has become very popular for LLMs to reduce compute and speed up inference. The first released model utilizing this architecture was Mixtral-8x-7B, then Gemini 1.5, Grok-1 and just now DBRX (Databricks) followed.

• Gemini 1.5: Unlocking multimodal understanding across millions of tokens of context - all levels
  The technical report for Gemini 1.5 - after all not that technical, at least not throughout. It contains a lot of concrete examples of what you can do with this dramatic increase in context length - up to 10 million tokens (before max context was 200k for Claude 2.1). Just skip the parts that are too technical for you. One example: Gemini 1.5 can translate into a low-resource language Kalamang that it has not seen during training by providing instructional materials in the context (ca. 250 k tokens). Longer context might reduce significance of now very widely used RAG in the future.

Wellbeing Hack 😁 

Another quote from Mo Gawdat in this section to emphasize the importance of wellbeing:

Take a walk 🚶‍♀️ 

I know that this is probably no news to you - I just want to encourage you to really implement it!

Taking a walk reduces anxiety and nervousness, it activates your creative thinking and it moves your body. Whether you do it before you start your work day, during your lunch break or in the afternoon or evening is up to you. Just do it! Even if it’s just for 10 min.
I take one in the morning and after lunch.

Even Steve Jobs made it a regular part of his routine. Ali Abdaal who recently released a book about Feel Good Productivity recommends it as a way to enhance your productivity AND feeling good. These are hopefully enough reasons for you to do it too 🙂 

👇❗From surviving to thriving 🙂 

👉️ If this sounds interesting to you, fill out this form to apply.

Events 📆 

Let me know if you are planning to attend any of these events - would be great to meet you in person.

• Empowering Women: Navigating Male-Dominated Industries with Confidence - ONLINE
  Apr 5th, 6 to 7.30 pm
  
  👉️ Confidence is something I discovered to be very crucial for our wellbeing and success in male-dominated environments - more on that in one of the future newsletters.
  

• Women in GenAI: Exploring Practical Applications (in-person) 
  @ Merantix AI Campus
  Apr 10th, 6 to 9 pm
  

• The Potential of RAG: How Does RAG Make Generative AI better? (in-person) 
  @ Merantix AI Campus
  Apr 10th, 9 to 11 am

Content recommendations 📚️ 

My favorite pieces of content to learn and grow!

• Kate Manne on Misogyny and Male entitlement - Podcast
  Kate Manne is an associate professor at the Sage School of Philosophy at Cornell University. More on her work in the next issue of this newsletter 😉 
  

• The Top 10 women in AI in 2023 - Article
  More women to add to your list of role models 🥳 
  

• Diary of a CEO - episode with Mo Gawdat, the former Chief Business Officer at Google [X] - Podcast
  Very fascinating conversation that reaches from how to choose happiness to how AI will change the world and surpass human intelligence. The episode ends with Mo reflecting on our hyper-masculine world (which served as inspiration for my piece in this newsletter).

What do you think is your biggest challenge to succeed in your career? ⛰️ 

 👉️ simply reply to this email - make it succinct!

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