People, places, perspectives: let's make tech inclusive

Announcer:
Ready to explore the extraordinary world of tech? Welcome to the XTech Podcast, where we connect you with the sharpest minds and leading voices in the global tech community. Join us as we cut through the complexity to give you a clear picture of the ideas, innovations, and insight that are shaping our future.

Debbie Forster MBE:
Hello and welcome to XTech Podcast by Fox Agency. I’m your host, Debbie Forster MBE. I’m a tech portfolio consultant and an advocate and campaigner for diversity, inclusion and innovation in the tech industry. Today I’m delighted to have Sarah Tulip, the CGO at Conquer Technology. Welcome, Sarah.

Sarah Tulip:
Thank you, Debbie. Wonderful to be here today.

Debbie Forster MBE:
So Sarah, for our community, we’d want to hear about tech, but we also want to hear about the human behind the tech. And one thing we love to find out is how people find their way into tech. Some are born with a laptop in hand, others like me have sort of woke up and found themselves there. What about you? How did you get into tech?

Sarah Tulip:
Yeah, so I would definitely say it’s nonlinear. So was I born with a PC in my hand? Absolutely. I grew up in a house where I think technology was really important and I think that it was something that inspired us all. But unfortunately I probably grew up in a place where you couldn’t really see how that would ever convert into a career. So, lovely place to grow up, grew up in a seaside town in the north of England. A wonderful place to be a child, but maybe not a wonderful place to see who you’re going to be when you’re an adult. In that sort of area surrounded by I guess a lot of older people. So there’s a lot of care homes, there’s a lot of hairdressers, but actually was there any professional services or technology organisations? Absolutely not. And I think that really reflected then in the schooling.

So a really specific experience to me, and I think that one that has probably only come to me recently, but I realised how clearly I was directed is I actually was really into gaming and computing and that was a big part of who I was. So where other people were really into sports, it was computers. And I would spend my time with my three best friends, John, Chris and Simon, and the three of us or the four of us would go and we would game and we would write code and we would do all those things.

And when it got to a point when we were 14, 15, I was kind of separated from them from an educational perspective and the ideas that we were given. So they were taken into a computer room that I didn’t even know existed and told about how they could build these careers and they were probably thought of as more geeky than me, maybe I didn’t fit into that geeky mode and I wasn’t a male. And I was taken into a room where I was taught where I could type and probably could get an office job.

Debbie Forster MBE:
You were put on the girl track. Let’s be honest here, Sarah. You were put on the girl track and they were put on the boy track.

Sarah Tulip:
On the boy track. And so when I look at the three of them, they had a really clear career into technology. Two of them working build computer games and one of them works for a large corporate in information security, but they went straight into that. They knew that that’s what they wanted to do and they’re A-levels at university, whereas I was almost, just wasn’t told that existed. And I think as well, taking that further, Debbie, when I reflect, there were no women doing that. So it wasn’t even like there was one role model or half a role model or somebody who might be a little bit, you didn’t hear or see of women doing that. And so I think for me that really put me on a track that I had no idea who I wanted to be. Truthfully, I wanted to be be a singer, I wanted to be an actress.

And actually I think that now comes a lot into what I do and my ability to be able to help speak publicly and lead teams. And I think all those things are skills that helped me in technology. But actually then I ended up having a career in sales, which eventually sort of snaked around into technology sales and I led a technology sales team and it grew quite large. And that got me to about 26, which is just maybe coming up to 20 years ago approximately, but I got to a point in my career where I was really, really successful at 26. I was running a technology sales team. There was a team of 20, we were a very fast growth business. We were working selling, I was selling network servers. I had a technology role, but maybe not in the world that I live in now, but I was working in technology and at that point in my career I really struggled then to, because I’d grown in that role and become very senior in that role, when I went out to the market, nobody would take me seriously.

And it was very hard then to find other roles in that space in technology businesses. And so I had a second career which was working in IT recruitment. And I didn’t do any IT recruitment, but what I did do was lead IT recruitment teams. So it was an opportunity to work with large technology businesses and I was working with leaders within large technology businesses and we were talking about, we have this large programme of work, this is what we want to do. We want to innovate. To do that, we need these sort of teams. And I was very much exposed to technology projects and how they worked and all of a sudden I was like, oh goodness, this is what I want to do. And I was just so close, but then just so far away from it.

Debbie Forster MBE:
You’ve been circling it, yeah, you’ve been circling around.

Sarah Tulip:
Yeah, I was touching it, but I wasn’t in it. And an opportunity came up to work for a fast growth technology consultancy, which actually people don’t like to say it, but technology recruitment isn’t that different to technology consultancy in very many ways, but that’s one to argue another day. I got the opportunity to join a technology consultancy and lead their operations and talent. And then all of a sudden I had moved into that world and once I’d moved into that world, I really felt at home. So that’s when I joined technology.

And it wasn’t early in my career as well, so I had to go through lots of learning to get there. So I was in my thirties, so I always feel like the career that I’m in now started quite late. But it’s made me very ambitious and it’s made me work very, very hard at maybe a time when women sometimes struggle because I did then go and have a baby and I did have other challenges, but actually for me, I felt that I’ve had to go fast because I found the thing that I wanted to do and really loved, but just a little bit later down the line.

Debbie Forster MBE:
And that’s lovely and I think there’s several takeaways for us within the XTech community. The first one, you and I both know this, Sarah, but it is so important that we look at how we are attracting people into tech. And that we’re working with schools to try and make sure there isn’t a boy track and a girl track. But then if we think of the other side when we’re hiring, you’ve already touched on a number of things that you get, skills you gained as a generalist that make you super at being in tech. And so there’s a key to anyone when we’re trying to hire to really look deeper, not just to look for the same old track, the same sort of degree, but to really understand. And I know from research that we’ve done that when people come into tech from outside, particularly if they’re able to upskill some, they move faster, they stay longer, they’re more motivated because like you, this is a very deliberate choice to get in and that’s vital.

Sarah Tulip:
Yeah, I think there’s a few things to unpick there. I think first of all, our education system has issues because our educators probably have never worked in technology. In fact, they’ve never worked in an office. They’ve probably graduated and gone into education. And the way that education is marked as such, those teachers worked as marked, is by an outcome in English maths and how many people go onto university. So immediately all the things that we’ve just talked about don’t fit into that. They don’t understand because they’ve never seen what’s a software tester, what is AI, how does that affect the modern world? How do we make digital careers sexy? How do we do those things because I haven’t got time to do that because if I do those things, it detracts from the things where I am thought of as doing a good job. And so there are so many barriers for education and children and how do you make technology careers attractive to girls?

How do they understand that it’s actually the world that they live in, that every bit of technology that they touch is that. And I think the generalist thing, I’ve been really exposed to a lot of the boot camp work that happens to convert people from other careers. And I think one of the most powerful things I’ve seen is part-time boot camps who are, people who want to, they may be a paramedic and they’re retraining into technology. So how powerful is that for somebody like NHS England when they’re building software, to have somebody who really is a subject matter expert within health and people from the police force, that’s a really tough frontline job.

If you could go and earn more salary working in a technology environment, then lots of people are doing that and changing their career. But then what does that lend to some of the public sector roles that appear? You can have subject matter experts convert. And I think there’s that thing as well that it does break that barrier that when I have run graduate campaigns, very much, we know that the people who are going through those are a very niche group of people. They’re probably from a certain demographic, a certain sex, all those things. And so they’re building technology and it’s the same people still building the technology as the majority. And so are we building the best technology that’s good for everybody? No.

Debbie Forster MBE:
You and I both sing from that same hymn sheet of, for great tech for everybody needs to be created by everyone. This is absolutely vital and I think we’ll circle back to that by the end ’cause I want to come back to that and you and I can talk about that until the cows come home. Don’t worry listeners, we won’t be talking until the cat cows come home. I wanted to look at where you are now because when I was looking into your role and where you’re working at Conquer Tech, you talk about providing sandboxes for other companies. Now, in the 20s, in the 2020s, why is that so important do you think?

Sarah Tulip:
Yeah, I think this probably reflects a lot from my experience. So I’ve worked in small startup, I’ve worked in scale up and then I’ve spent a period of time working in large tech. And I needed to get into large tech actually, it was really important because I’ve never worked in large organisations. And I thought, how do you advise large organisations unless you’ve been there? And I’m very about, you need to be there and do it to really have a thought around that. But what I noticed is, and I think we all see this is that you innovate or die as organisations these days. And from my experience during lockdown, everybody said they went through this tech transformation. It was digital transformation, but actually a lot of that work was just pulling, making businesses digital. So it was like how do we get our workers online? How do we service our customers?

How do we work for this new world when actually there are a lot of organisations that have disappeared. If we just took ecommerce as an example from our high streets, our experiences have changed. And if I think about just me as a consumer, and I think I’m a fairly, I like things fast, I’m that type of consumer and I think, I like to go on my Instagram, see something, one click, one click purchase, it comes to me the next day, and that’s how I like to be a consumer. And then I look at my child who, his attention span is 10 seconds on TikTok. So if you think I’m needy, he’s going to be worse. He only just found out the other day that you can’t watch TV, what live TV is and about missing, the world is changing fast. The world that I grew up in has disappeared and the world that I am living in will disappear.

That technology is driving on it as it is, it’s fast. And I think that larger organisations, culturally, sometimes they just can’t offer a sandbox within their organisation. They are often traditional. If we look at financial services, they’re monolithic pieces of technology that have been added onto and built onto. And there are regulation, there is data, there are things that you cannot touch and unpick and test in live. And so you can work with large technology consultancies and do things like that, but actually businesses like us are usually, and I think if I think about Conquer specifically, where people who’ve been expertise in our field, we’re tech leaders, we’re tech thinkers, but we’ve come together and we give organisations, I guess, an opportunity to experiment with their tech, with their ideas, with their products. But we don’t have to touch the stack, like reputational, we’re not going to damage their business.

We can do it fast, we can do it low-cost. There’s no bureaucracy. We can just say, okay, let’s get this done in six weeks. We can offer a fixed price. It’s not going to cost you the moon. And so organisations like us I think are really important. We can take you on a journey without damaging your organisation, without it becoming a cultural problem. I think one of the biggest challenges I hear is, yeah, but we’ve acquired this business, they’re very agile, we’re very traditional. When we try and do things like this, it becomes a, the internal politics often slow down any sort of change of organisation. So I think at times as if you can find the right partner, that’s where I think that we’ve been really successful. Yeah, we’re still a young organisation, but the change that we can make very quickly and very powerfully I think is value add to an organisation.

Debbie Forster MBE:
And I think you’re saying several things that not everyone thinks about because there is that obvious one as you say, it’s a quick safe way to build tech, to build a feature. But I think what you were saying that’s really interesting, and not everyone thinks about, it is a safe way of building up skills. It’s a safe way of bringing teams together, safe, fast, moving quickly, because we know sometimes great tech is about move fast and break things, but like you say, we cannot break the main stack. This is a wonderful way to creating that safe accelerator, but not just for products.

I think really interesting, Sarah, and I think people need to think about what are the other things that a sandbox can provide for companies. And that bringing teams together, developing their skills in a safe way is really, really powerful. When I’ve been looking at what you’re doing, as I know having been up there, you work in God’s own country up in Leeds and you’re quite passionate about that. You’re an ambassador for the area. You have chaired the regional productivity forum, etc. Now not just for the UK but anywhere, we’re starting to see this rise outside the main bubble. So outside the London bubble, we have places like Leeds, we’re seeing the same thing in the US. What are the challenges and advantages for tech companies to be outside the main tech bubble that they are aware of?

Sarah Tulip:
Yeah, I’m very passionate about this. So it was interesting, last year I spoke at London Tech Week and it was an organisation about bringing your company to the UK or growing a business in the UK. And there were hundreds of people in the room and there was a panel of people and it was all about London. And it was talking about why you should be in London. If you’re going to come to the UK, you must be in London. And I said at that panel, I was like, no, no, no, no. I was like, actually, it really matters about what you want to do as well. If you think about, and I think Leeds is a great example. Within Leeds, it is the UK hub for health. We’ve got NHS England there, which was NHS Digital. And from that, there’s a huge ecosystem of tech innovation that is built out.

So the two large medical records organisations are there. There’s a building called Nexus, which is part of Leeds University, and there are over 200 businesses in there that are working in health innovation. If that is a space that you want to work in and you have an organisation, come there, be part of an ecosystem, that is the place to be. If you want to do, and I probably shouldn’t say this because Channel 4 in Leeds, but actually thinking about Manchester, all the stuff that goes on around media, MediaCity, Salford, it’s an unbelievable place to be, to be the centre of that world outside of London. So there are places that you can do that, but then there are, you’re going to find that the cost of living is less so, you’re going to find the cost of office space is a 10th. Their access to skills are amazing universities.

So actually if you look at a lot of the skills that are in London, they weren’t grown in London, they were grown in Leeds, in Manchester and Birmingham. That’s actually where some fantastic universities are. So there are skills already there that you can have access to. So from that perspective, I think it’s amazing. And I think just to talk a little bit more about Leeds, because I love Leeds, there is a lot more decentralisation happening, especially around government, banking, finance. So Bank of England have announced that they’re going to be creating all their future roles there. The financial conduct authority are creating jobs there. We have Sky, we have Channel 4, we have Snowflake, and also we have Footprint, so Leeds as an example, is not a fully grown city. So we have the city, we have a river, and then on the other side we’re building a second half to our city.

So you can come and build and expand and do all those things where it feels alive, it feels like it’s still organic, it feels like you can put your footprint on it. So for me, from a northern city perspective, I’m very passionate. There are many, many issues, and the big one is connectivity. Well, actually the two that I think I probably would focus on, one is connectivity. HS2 was a real disappointment. HS3, the connection of the northern cities for me is such a way to unlock the north of England. You should be able to get from Manchester to Leeds in 20 minutes.

Wouldn’t that be amazing if the two came together, that’s what? Three Tube stops or something and all of a sudden, then you’ve got Liverpool on there, you’ve got Newcastle on there, it’s Sheffield, York. If we can connect those cities by 20 minutes, everything changes. So for me, I’m very, Bradford is a city. Bradford is so left behind, it doesn’t have a mainline station, it’s the largest city without a mainline station. Once you unlock that and you can get into London, that gives it the opportunity to actually grow and be the city that it should be as part as it was in the industrial revolution. The other issue is investment.

It’s getting better, but investment in the north has been very, very restricted. So you might build an organisation in the north, but then how do you get the money? And I think that traditionally the north has waited for investors to come to the north and say, “Hey, we’ve got all this money and we’re going to do that.” And also, yeah, there are unicorns in the north, but there are less. And I think as well there’s, being in an ecosystem where there aren’t as many fast growth businesses or you see a business that’s saying, I’m going for 500 million pounds worth of investment, well, what you might see in some of these smaller cities or, will go for a million pounds. And it’s about aspiration as well. I think the ecosystems, the size of an ecosystem and the power of an ecosystem and the network that you have inspires your own ambition.

So I think one of the things is how do we ensure that all these hubs are connected to London better? I mean HS2 would’ve been a great way to do that, but how do we make sure that there is that interconnection and that we are actually one UK because then that inspires these different tech hubs to grow and do more. And I think that’s one of the reasons I got involved with the Productivity Forum. So it’s part of the Productivity Institute, which is funded by UKRI, started in 2021, and there are eight regional hubs. So I got asked to lead a very large area, which is Yorkshire, Humber, and the North East.

Debbie Forster MBE:
Okay, and to our non-UK audience, that’s big. That is a big chunk of land.

Sarah Tulip:
Yeah, with lots of different historic issues. So we’ve got mining towns in there. We’ve got some really interesting historic things that once those places were very profitable, but the world changed. And so what we do is we bring together business and policy makers and we focus bringing together the public sector, the private sector, the civic sector, and we try and translate to what we can do around productivity gains, how we can identify which are the ones they need within the area, but the outcome is to improve living standards and well-being of people and how we bring everybody together, which is how Leeds is led is around inclusive growth. And it’s not just like monitoring GDP and actually the profit, it’s all about humans and it being a human-centric approach. Because we can be very, very rich as a city, but we can have 50% child poverty. And when we have that, the skills don’t come, nothing can follows with it.

Debbie Forster MBE:
So what I’m hearing, if someone’s listening, is to think about, always ask yourself, is the main city the best city for you to be in? Because there are real advantages to get into and be at the forefront of these new ecosystems that come. And it means that you can be fast moving, there’s real potential in terms of developing specialised hubs, but it does take a lot of intentionality. And this does mean that you’re having to get the, you want to keep lobbying for it, to get the transport right, to get the connectivity right, to get the services, to get the people to put it together. So it’s all to play for, and I think Leeds is probably one of the most successful success stories that we have in the UK of going from nothing to a hundred percent very, very quickly. But then I like the idea for a hub to be really, really effective, it needs to connect with the other hubs. It’s got to have that interconnectivity if you’re going to get the full rich benefit from being in that situation.

Sarah Tulip:
And probably what I didn’t mention, Debbie, is that actually because it’s smaller, it is very easy to connect. So you can come and land in Leeds and you might, if you bump into, it’s probably five or six people, if you could bump into one of them, and what will happen is probably Leeds Council or the combined authority will connect you in to one of those people. Then they will then super connect you out. And because it’s like a small ecosystem, you can network very, very easy, very quickly. Whereas in London, it’s lots of different hubs. Actually, Leeds really still is one hub. And so we do try and collaborate to bring in, so when Channel 4 came to the city, it was like, how do we get Channel 4? And so all the influencers came together and we fought together to do that.

Debbie Forster MBE:
And I’ve got to say, as someone who has come to Leeds to work on projects, it is absolutely the case to know one is to quickly know them all and to have this voice in a way that you could never do if you were down in London, if you were in Silicon Valley and those sorts of things. So it’s not for everyone, it’s not for every company, but definitely we’re thinking, cost of living, quality of living means a lot for the kind of talent that you can bring in and keep. That specialisation, that ability to build and spin up very, very quickly is all there to play for. So definitely, if you’re not in the UK, start Googling around. Have a look at what’s happening, look at the success stories of places like Leeds, like Manchester, If you’re within the UK and we haven’t chatted about your hub, think about in your area, it’s all to play for.

All right, now you touched on something, the start of the interview, you referred to it then and you know D&I is an issue that you and I both feel passionate about. One thing I had heard sometimes is once you get outside a big metropolitan area, leaving London to work in someone like Leeds, oh, you get people starting the excuse culture, it sounds so much harder. Do we really need to think about diversity? What does it mean if you’re outside the London bubble? What are the challenges, what are the opportunities in really being quite an inclusive company?

Sarah Tulip:
Yeah, it’s interesting ’cause when you say about being outside London, I never thought of it as that. I just thought of it as something that had affected me so significantly that I had to do something. So when I got my first exec role, I was running a telco and data centre called AQL, which is a really interesting business actually. It’s the internet exchange for the north of England, very important things for the north of England. And as part of that, I worked for a CEO, it was very hands-off, and he would expect me to do a lot of the big pieces for him externally, which was fantastic ’cause it gave me tonnes of exposure. And I was like, this is wonderful. I get to go and talk and be a woman and be representative and I’m going to lead the way and be this trailblazer. But then I would go to an event and there’s one very specific that will always stick in my mind and it was a chief exec event.

There was going to be 50 chief execs in the room. For me, I was like, right, I have to be very grown up here. Normally I’m a little bit more casual techy. And so I’d put on a navy blue suit completely out of character for me, but I know in those rooms it’s very navy suit world. So prepared myself. I got there and when I walked in I was quite nervous, went over to get a coffee because I thought coffee would steady my hand and a chap tapped me on the shoulder and said, can you get us two coffees as well, please? And at that point I was like…

Debbie Forster MBE:
Yes, ladies and gentlemen, that still happens. That still happens.

Sarah Tulip:
And I was like, no. I was like, do you know what? This isn’t my space. This isn’t my space and I’m being judged and just because I’m different and I understand in any circle when somebody doesn’t look like you, it’s harder to relate to them. You make presumptions and I do it, you do it, Debbie, we all do it.

Debbie Forster MBE:
Unconscious bias, we all have it.

Sarah Tulip:
Yeah. When there’s a room of 48 people and men who look similar and I look different, it’s presumed I’m different. And I was like, how do I do something about this because I know that a lot of women I knew when I spoke to them had stopped going to those events and they’d stopped going to dinners, for reasons like they’d have a conversation and it would be like, there’d be a business conversation. The person next to them at dinner would say, who has your children this evening? And the conversation, it wouldn’t be a business conversation. And because they didn’t feel right, they stopped going and it meant that they weren’t building the network that is important, and the reason to be at those events. I go to those events to build network, to either do business or to advance my career or to learn or whatever it is, I’m in those rooms for the same reason as everybody else, but I had a blocker.

And so I went and sat down and I was like, how do I build this but build it again in a different way that’s new, that feels like somewhere I can go. And I built an organisation which at the time was called Women in Leeds Digital. It’s now called WILD Digital because we don’t just talk about women in Leeds who are in digital. But it was very much for me, how do I help women build a network? How do I help women find people who want to do business with them? And it’s not exclusively a women’s network, as I said, it’s called WILD Digital now, but it was just a space where we could talk about business, where we could talk about, it wasn’t going to be on a golf course, it wasn’t going to be those things, it was going to be a very different…

Debbie Forster MBE:
And no one asked you to go get coffee or who’s looking after your kids.

Sarah Tulip:
No one asked me to get coffee. And it was a time that fitted maybe things like childcare, that other responsibilities, that we started putting these things together and we would have, I would put dinner on, but I would get a sponsor to fund it. So nobody had to pay to be at that dinner. But people could go there and it would be for women who were senior in their career. And we really wanted to support as well, mid-level women in their careers because everyone was stuck. They were stuck because they weren’t invited into certain rooms. And people generally will hire in those more senior roles, people who are like them, who are very similar. They were doing such a good job within the organisation. Nobody wanted them to move out of those roles. And it’d be a, you hold this business together, it’s so important that you do this role that they never got to step out and do those things.

So helping them and really empowering them to just apply for the jobs, take the risks. Women would often say, I’d love to step up, but what about my children? What will people think of me? And just trying to help break down barriers. And so WILD’s been around for about six years. It’s about two and a half thousand members. There are lots of people. It intersects all over the place. There are people from every walk of life, every background. It has a group of people who are volunteers. It holds no bank account, it makes no money. But what it does, it sits at the heart of the ecosystem of the city alongside the digital festival, alongside the council. And it calls out poor behaviours and it embraces the gaps that we have and it reaches out and says, what do we need? And it listens to the community.

And so for me, I think it’s unusual. I think it does kind of not capture all, but it tries to incorporate all and make a safe space for all. And we support the men in the community as well, so it’s for advocacy. So the back end of this year, our big focus is how do we support the guys to support the women who are in the next stage in their careers? How can we give advice? How can we make them feel comfortable, safe? So it isn’t just about one thing, it’s about making our city the most diverse city in the UK and something that we’re proud of.

And something that not just people come here because they want to build a tech business because they can make more money, because they’re going to find diverse talent, because they’re going to find strong female leaders, because they’re going to find the people who come out of the university are diverse and they stay in the city because they see that we care about them and that they’ll be looked after and there’s click, click or you know, all those things. We’re trying to build that ecosystem that’s different. And do I think we’ve made ways? Yeah, I think when people come to Leeds, they’re always shocked how many women are in a room, how many female leaders and how many strong female leaders, not just there because, to make up the numbers, we’re there because, quite often, we’re running the show. And I think that’s exciting.

Debbie Forster MBE:
And it’s something you can really be proud of that you’ve done and something if anyone’s listening to Google WILD. To look at what’s happening because it is replicable in other cities. It is possible. And I think I’ll take one last thread before we move on to do a shoutout to companies because I’m always hearing companies moan and say, it’s so hard to find senior women. And the question I always want to ask is, what are you doing for your mid-level women or any of the underrepresented groups? It’s not enough just to hire and then hope for the best because that kind of behaviour, however well-meaning that you experienced at that event, is what most underrepresented people face.

And that slows people or even pushes them to a door to find somewhere else where they can feel that they fit in and move forward at speed. So please can everyone on the call look around and understand what can you do? And it works just as well if not even faster in smaller tech hubs than it would in large, but there’s something anyone can do. Okay, so Sarah, we’re nearly to the end. I like to ask our guests to look to the horizon. What’s going on in tech at the horizon that interests you, good or bad? It’s got you really fired up and excited or leaves you awake at night being really worried?

Sarah Tulip:
Yeah, so I thought about this. I’ve been thinking about this a lot and actually it’s something that I can’t really get that deep on, but it’s something that I have my own opinions and thoughts around and it is around, and I think it’s leaning on from that last question, it’s AI and how it affects people who are minorities. It scares me because whenever I touch or use it, I don’t feel it represents me. Now, I’m a woman, I’m half the population. Once we start intersecting and going into further minorities, there’s a lack of representation at the way it thinks and behaves. And they’re really public examples of things in airports that don’t work because they don’t recognise dark skin and just things, when you ask it to draw a picture, it will make very specific conclusions that I think represent thoughts and behaviours that I don’t agree with. And so that makes it very, very hard.

Debbie Forster MBE:
And I couldn’t agree more because I think as well as doing at those simple levels, show me an engineer and they show men, showing, looking at how it does racial profiling, et cetera. And I think what worries me when we talk about AI and the different learning models that are coming through, linguistic learning models, it’s if we can see at the basic level what it’s getting wrong, what’s happening at a deeper level? You and I were talking at the start of the call about unconscious bias, etc. Those biases are built into data sets, historical data sets. And if we’re not really careful and making sure that when we’re looking at AI, I think it’s quadruply important that it’s being created by diverse groups to interrogate, to kick the wheels, to find where these flawed learnings are. Otherwise we’re going to start hardwiring some very dangerous things into tech that’s going to become ubiquitous.

Sarah Tulip:
And that goes back to probably one of the first things I said that software and engineering is being done by a minority group of people again, right? It’s being done by a very specific group of, like 80% has been done by people who look very similar. So they think that way. So they can’t see the bias that they’re building. And it’s that bias that was already sitting there is now being almost enforced. And so it perpetuates the situation. So was AI an opportunity to build again and have a fresh start? Maybe. But then because we don’t have that representation building it, are we doubling down? I think we might be.

Debbie Forster MBE:
Okay. And then last thing, we like to leave listeners with something new to put on their list to read, to watch, to listen to. What would you recommend that we put on our list?

Sarah Tulip:
So I was going to try and be cool about this Debbie and I thought I’d be honest because I’m one of those people who can only ever be honest. So I’m reading something at the moment, I’m reading a book, it’s by Matthew Hussey, and it’s called Love Life. And it’s about how to raise your standards, find your person, and live happily ever after. And I thought I’m going to raise it because I think it’s more about work-life balance, right?

Debbie Forster MBE:
I agree. No, I couldn’t agree with you more, Sarah, and I’m glad you’re raising that.

Sarah Tulip:
So people think that, I’m a single mom, I have a big job, I have a not-for-profit, I do all these volunteer things and it’s like people are always like, oh, you have everything. Well, something has to give. And sometimes I think that I’ve sacrificed various things and probably my love life is one of those things a little bit that I have. So I thought, you know what? Back end of this year, I’m going to do some research and some reading and make sure that I am thinking about that, ’cause maybe I’ll drop something and pick up a partner at some point.

Debbie Forster MBE:
And I’m glad for you. And we do have several guests who are talking about it, because like most jobs, but tech seems to specialise in burnout and…

Sarah Tulip:
True story.

Debbie Forster MBE:
Absolute laser focus that can maybe make great products but they break people on the way. And I think it is important to make sure that our reading lists, our listening lists, have the full picture. If it enriches us, we bring those riches back to whatever we’re designing and building. So absolutely and I, you and I over a separate cup of coffee, might have a talk about how that went for you on the back end of the year, so lovely. Right, so listen, thank you so much Sarah. You and I have known each other before the world of XTech, but it’s been lovely to have you there and thank you for joining us today.

Sarah Tulip:
Yeah, thank you so much for having me. I’ve really enjoyed it.

Debbie Forster MBE:
Thank you for listening. If you’re a tech innovator and would like to appear as a guest on the show, email us now at [email protected]. And finally, thank you to the team of experts at Fox Agency who make this podcast happen. I’m Debbie Forster and you’ve been listening to the XTech Podcast.

Announcer:
Keep exploring the world of tech. Subscribe to our podcast and never miss an episode. To discover more opportunities for global B2B tech brands, visit fox.agency today.