A woman stops posting. She skips the panel. She keeps the AI experiment private. She decides the inbox is not worth it this time.
That is the harassment tax. And most leaders are not even aware they are charging it.
I have been watching this pattern for a while. When Reese Witherspoon told women on Instagram to learn AI and got torched for it, I could not stop thinking about what the backlash was actually about. Not the celebrity angle. The double bind it exposed.
So I wrote about it for my Human Input column at Colorado AI News.
The piece covers the gender gap data (it is not great), the mental spreadsheet women run before becoming visible, and why what looks like hesitation is often intelligence. It also includes two women I have enormous respect for: Susan Frew, AI keynote speaker and author of RECODED, and Melissa Reeve, founder of Hyperadaptive Solutions and author of Hyperadaptive.
And it ends with five things leaders can actually do. Because “women need more confidence” is not the answer I am interested in giving.
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