You’ve been careful about AI.
Perhaps you’ve used it and not mentioned it. Perhaps you’ve barely touched it, and there’s a low hum of being behind that you’d rather not examine. Either way you’ve filed it under something unflattering: not technical enough, no time, slower than you used to be.
It’s none of those.
Researchers ran an experiment with engineers. Identical code, identical tools. When AI assistance was disclosed, the perceived competence penalty for women was roughly twice that for men — despite the work itself being identical.
And the harshest judges weren’t the enthusiasts. They were the people who hadn’t adopted it themselves.
In a follow-up, women and older engineers were more likely to anticipate that penalty — and those who anticipated it were less likely to use the tools.
It isn’t only how the work gets read, either. Around 30% of women say their manager has encouraged them to use AI, against 37% of men — and men are considerably more likely to be praised when they do.
So the hesitation may not be a confidence problem at all. It’s an accurate reading of a real penalty — one you’ve been carrying as a personal failing.
I won’t leave you there, though, because holding back has its own cost, and it’s quiet. The people who seem ahead of you aren’t cleverer. Often they’ve simply had more months of small, low-stakes experiments. That gap compounds without ever announcing itself.
But there’s something more interesting underneath your caution.
While most of the conversation has been about speed, you’ve been asking a different question. What should stay human here. What we lose if the judgement goes. Who learns anything, if the work people learn on disappears.
You’ve experienced that as reluctance. It isn’t. It’s the question the next decade turns on — and you arrived at it early, then discounted it, because it turned up as doubt rather than as a strategy.
So the thing worth examining isn’t whether you’re behind on the technology.
It’s whether you can still tell the difference, in yourself, between hesitation and judgement.
I’ll go first.
I got interested in this early — courses, workshops, a fortnightly session I’m still doing. Not cautious at all. But when it came to making an AI version of myself, a synthetic Rosaleen to appear in videos and answer questions on my behalf, I didn’t.
I told myself I’d get round to it. Then I watched a few other people’s and felt something close to a flinch — that isn’t them — and understood I hadn’t been procrastinating at all. I’d made a decision about what shouldn’t be handed over and hadn’t noticed I’d made it.
The one I’m still unsure about is agents. I can’t yet tell whether I’m being discerning about what coaching actually requires, or whether I simply haven’t looked hard enough. That one is genuinely unresolved, and I’d rather say so.
They feel remarkably similar from the inside. And years of being the reliable one can leave you apologising for hesitation and mistrusting your own judgement.
Next time you notice yourself holding back on something, ask which of the two it was.
I’d like to know what you find — hit reply and tell me.
Warmly,
Rosaleen
P.S. If you’d like a clearer read on where your value actually sits — as distinct from the version of you built to meet requirements — a profile is the simplest place I know to start. Fifteen minutes, no commitment beyond that. https://realradiantlife.co.uk/work-with-me/