Greetings from Huntington Beach CA,

I’ve been waiting for Safe Space Summit week for sooooo long, and it’s finally here! 🙌

I’ll deff report back next week once I’ve processed all the feels and had a chance to rest, but I look forward to sharing the highlights + some future announcements you won’t wanna miss.

Until then, we have to talk about female-presenting AI getting paid less for identical work, because being made of code doesn’t spare you from sexism, which is pretty wild. 🙃

Next, this week’s podcast recap reiterates why AI still needs human judgment, and we’re talking about job applications so repetitive that candidates abandon them halfway through.

Interesting? Infuriating? Both? I’m gonna go with both! Let’s unpack!

🗞️ Here's the Tea:Copy anchor linkCopied

🤯 There’s even a pay gap between male and female AI Agents

The TL;DR: Would ya look at that…we’ve found a way to underpay women who don’t even exist?? In a study of 189 people, a female-presenting AI assistant received 10.25% LESS money than its male counterpart for identical work. Participants still insisted the AI’s gender didn’t matter.

Y'ALL WHAT IN THE WORLD IS HAPPENING.

My POV: I’d love for EVERYONE to officially retire the idea that adding AI automatically makes anything "more fair" retire it forever, please.😒

People brought their biases into this experiment, then even denied that those biases influenced them!

If your org is introducing digital coworkers, ask how their presentation might shape whose contributions get trusted and valued. Because I bet there is something to unpack there.

🎙️Mic Drop Moment:Copy anchor linkCopied

“If we overrely on AI without using proper judgment, that could lead to declining decision quality.”Copy anchor linkCopied

On the mic this week: DeAnn Alcantar and Kelly Pacatte bring L&D and HR compliance expertise to TriNet. DeAnn designs learning experiences that help employees build skills and belonging, while Kelly brings more than 20 years of experience navigating employment law and workforce risk. Together, they’re helping orgs figure out AI without forgetting the humans using it.

Pin this:

• Employees need practice spotting bad AI outputs, because as we’ve experienced, a confident answer can still be spectacularly wrong.
• Start with a problem worth solving before leadership buys another shiny tool and hands HR the aftermath.
• HR needs to understand where AI tools get their data before trusting recommendations that affect employees.
• AI can help make a decision, but the humans involved still have to answer for it.
• Short, interactive learning gives employees a chance to practice instead of sitting through another information dump.

My H*ly Sh*t Moment: You can delegate a task to AI, but when its output damages an employee’s trust, you’re still the one who has to sit across from that person and answer for it!

▶️ Press Play

📊 Data Is My Love Language:Copy anchor linkCopied

Stat: 52% of Gen Z and 51% of millennials say they’ve stopped applying before they finished applying due to repetitive or unnecessarily long applications

My spiral: Candidates are already super exhausted, and asking them to enter the same work history multiple times gives them a lil preview of how much your company respects their time.

HR could be losing qualified people before a recruiter ever sees their name, then sitting in meetings wondering why the pipeline’s thin.

Go apply for one of your own jobs and see how long it takes before you wanna close the tab!

🗣️ UNMUTE YOURSELF

I know I know, getting feedback on HR can feel like volunteering to be roasted.

But employees might have stopped bringing you a very fixable problem because the last three times went absolutely nowhere.

Give yourself permission to hear something uncomfortable without immediately explaining why it’s complicated:

What's one thing your employees would fix about HR if you actually let them?

🛠️ TRY THIS TOMORROW:

“That's how we've always done it” might be one of my least fav sentences ever. 😑

It has kept some truly questionable policies employed longer than most of us!

A rule can make perfect sense to the person who wrote it and be a daily pain in the ass for someone living with it. Tomorrow, give one of those rules a little scrutiny.

Find one policy and ask: Who does this help? Who does it unintentionally hurt?

👂 OVERHEARD IN SAFE SPACE

A friendly reminder that anybody who tells you HR is easy is straight-up lying! 😉

Read what members had to say here.

See ya on Friday!