Hello. Let me do a little reintroduction, because there are a lot of new faces here lately and I would rather you knew who you were actually listening to.
I’m Gemma. I started Calm Back with Gem out of my own need for a bit of calm in the chaos of my life. I am a mum to two small humans who are the loves of my life and also make me swear daily. I am a late-diagnosed ADHD goblin in my full masking era, which apparently includes granny crafts and Birkenstocks. I love the witchy woo, a sauna, a sea dip, and coffee and cake, obviously. And I am very much into smashing down the patriarchal nonsense we all grew up with.
What I actually do is help brilliant women use AI in a way that is strategic, ethical, and built around how their business really works. Not the hype version. The real one. And I will always tell you when AI is not the answer, because sometimes it genuinely isn’t.
I am a bit obsessed with this because of something I keep seeing. So let me tell you the thing I most want women to hear.
You think you are behind. You are not.
Every single conversation I have about AI with a woman in business starts the same way. Some version of “I know I’m so behind on this.”
She isn’t. She is usually streets ahead and has no idea.
I used to feel it too. I would see some bloke on LinkedIn posting his ninth AI workflow of the week and feel my stomach drop. Everyone else gets it and I am over here still trying to remember my password. Then I actually sat down with the thing, and within about a day I realised I was not behind at all. I had been running complicated systems in my head for years. I just never called it that, because nobody ever told me it counted.
You are not behind. You have just spent your whole life being told the opposite, so it does not feel like it yet.
What AI actually is, underneath the noise
AI is a systems tool. That is the whole thing, once you strip out the hype. A way to take the messy, repetitive, draining work and run it through a structure so it does not all sit on you.
So think about who has spent their entire life running systems. Not the men shouting about it from a stage. The women holding the whole invisible operation in their heads. Who remembers the dentist, the school shoes, what is in the fridge, the client follow-up, the invoice, the birthday present for Saturday’s party, and the thing that quietly falls over if nobody catches it.
That is systems thinking. You have been doing it under a ridiculous load, with zero credit, for as long as you can remember. The mental load you have been told is your burden is actually the exact skill this stuff rewards. You have just never been handed the tool and shown what it is for.
Why it does not feel that way
It does not feel like an advantage because of who has been holding the microphone.
The whole AI conversation has been led by people who think the clever bit is the technology. So it all sounds fast and cold and technical, like a club you did not get the invite to. You look at it and think, that is not for me, I am not a tech person.
And here is the bit that should make you properly cross. The gap is not in your head.
Deloitte, Women and generative AI, 2024. Men are nearly twice as likely to be shown the way in.
So if you feel behind, it is not because you are slow. It is because the door has been held open for them and not for you.
Men have not been better at this. They have just had women running their systems for them for generations. AI does not need a tech brain. It needs a brain that knows how to delegate, hold the whole picture, and spot the thing that is about to break. You have that. You have always had that.
You are not late. You arrived early and were told it was someone else’s room.
What changes when the penny drops
Two things shift.
First, you stop trying to catch up, because there is nothing to catch up to. You are not racing the blokes and their nine workflows. You are pointing a systems tool at the systems you already run in your sleep. That is a much shorter walk than you have been led to believe.
Second, it stops being scary. The fear was never really about AI. It was about being made to feel, one more time, like the least capable person in a room you actually understand better than nearly everyone in it.
And I will be honest with you about one thing, because it is the whole point of how I work. AI is not a magic button. It is more like a keen ten-year-old who can do exactly one thing at a time if you give it very clear instructions in the right order. That is the skill. Not the tech. The knowing what to hand it, and when. And that, you have been quietly brilliant at your entire life.
Where to start
If this landed and you want to get clear on what you have already got before you go anywhere near another tool, start with the free Business Foundations Workbook. It is not about AI. It is about seeing the business underneath it clearly, which is where all of this actually begins.
So if you are at the start, in the messy middle, or just don’t know what the hell is going on with any of it, that is exactly who I am here for. Give me a shout. I would genuinely love to chat.
You are not behind, babe. You never were.
Source: Deloitte, Women and generative AI, 2024. 79% of men versus 49% of women reported their company invests in gen AI training.