Can AI help lighten the mental load for women?

15 May

  
    <a href="https://rss.com/podcasts/work-is-weird-now/2816780/">E57: Can AI help lighten the mental load for women | RSS.com</a>
  

Alex Issakova has spent 15 years working in tech and AI — from old-school systems thinking to machine learning — mostly in commercial roles for Silicon Valley companies. Last year she left corporate life to start her own company, now focused on generative AI: helping businesses figure out where to start, how to manage the change, and how to get actual ROI from it. Her MBA dissertation, written before ChatGPT launched, focused on how non-technical leaders can bring AI into their work ethically. She writes the Roadmap newsletter and delivers AI training and strategy to leadership teams and non-technical professionals.

The wild west

Right now, nobody really knows what they're doing. There are no real guidebooks, too much hype, too much FOMO, and a lot of self-proclaimed experts. Everyone's using AI but quietly — hiding it, unsure whether it's acceptable, unsure if it looks like cheating. The new standard, as Alice puts it, is: if it looks like AI, you failed. If it doesn't, you're doing it right. Which is its own kind of absurd.

The penalty for women

A study of software engineers found that when reviewers were told AI was used to write code, men received a 6% competency penalty. Women received 13%. And women judged by men who don't use AI themselves received a 26% penalty. Alex's response: "When I read it, I was like, oh, this is so boring. It's just the same societal things that exist — they just now exist in AI."

The gender gap in AI adoption isn't just about access. Alex's LinkedIn followers pointed to something subtler: permission. Women don't feel they're allowed to use it — at work, or sometimes at all. Boys, she notes, don't ask for permission.

The mental load problem - and the opportunity

AI is, structurally, almost perfectly designed to absorb the second shift: the mental load of running a household, managing children, tracking everything that doesn't appear on any job description. Alex's vision — a household chief of staff that knows everyone's allergies, the vaccination schedule, the house rules — isn't science fiction. There's no technical reason it can't be built right now.

Alice's current party trick: pulling her kids' schoolwork from Google Classroom, feeding it into Claude, and generating a personalised interactive revision tool based on each child's learning style. "I'm essentially outsourcing all the revision work I'd normally do with my kids to AI."

The barrier for most people, though, isn't the technology. It's headspace. If you're already running a household, a job, and a life, there's not much left over to play with a new tool that might not immediately pay off,

You don't have to give it the things you love

Alex's framework is simple: start with what you hate doing. Admin, chasing invoices, being the bad cop. Feed it the things that drain you and take back the time for the things that don't. She cites a copywriter on a client project who wasn't analytical — Claude did the analysis, which made her a better writer. She kept the part she loved. "I have a PhD. My zone of genius is not finding presents for a seven year old."

You also don't need to use every hack. The feeds are full of AI tricks and productivity hacks — ignore most of them. What matters is identifying the specific things that are creating drag in your day and removing them. Not optimising everything. Just the right things.

Job security and the IKEA question

For women in roles most exposed to automation — admin, internal comms, anything that involves summarising, organising, passing information back and forth — the anxiety is real and the advice is hard. Alex doesn't dress it up: those tasks are in the firing line. The question is whether your organisation responds like Klarna (fired thousands of people, discovered agents couldn't do the work, had to rehire) or like IKEA (redirected 9,000 people into a design studio service that now generates $1.6 billion a year).

Her honest answer: a lot of it is luck. But visibility helps. "If people know you, if they like you, if they know what projects you're on — you're so much more likely to survive a layoff."

The tsunami

To anyone who thinks AI is simply bad and wants no part of it: Alex won't try to change their mind. But her view is clear. "It's like a tsunami that you can't change now. The Pandora's box has been opened." You can choose not to engage. But the gap between those who do and those who don't is already opening up — in earnings, in career options, in the simple day-to-day experience of how much of your time gets eaten by things that don't need to eat it anymore.