Erica: Hey, girl. By now, you know I have Her Collective, my online community for ambitious women who are done doing it alone. Her Collective is for the women who are smart, capable, and driven, but they find themselves stuck on the sticky floors like self doubt, burnout, and waiting for permission that quite honestly never comes. Inside HER, you get more than motivation. You get real support, real strategies, and real momentum.

Erica: We work on things like clarifying what you want now and what's coming next, building confidence without burning yourself out, navigating hard conversations, career moves, and leadership moments with clarity, and surrounding yourself with women who actually get it. This isn't about hustling harder. It's about moving intentionally with the right tools and the right people in your corner. If you're ready to stop spinning, start choosing yourself, and build a career in life that actually feels aligned, I'd love to welcome you inside her collective. You can learn more and join us at www.joinhercollective.com.

Erica: Because honestly, girl, you were never meant to do this alone. Welcome to the Glass Ceiling and Sticky Floor podcast, the podcast where we get real about the challenges women face in work, life, and leadership. I'm your host, Erica Rooney, HR executive, keynote speaker, and executive coach, and I'm on a mission to get more women into positions of power and keep them there. This is the space where we call out the paradoxes, being told to lean in but not too far, to speak up but not too loudly, be ambitious but not too ambitious. Does that sound familiar?

Erica: Yeah. We're over all that. Here, we break down the sticky floors that keep us stuck from imposter syndrome and perfectionism to burnout and fear, and we give you real strategies to shatter those glass ceilings once and for all. So if you're ready to rewrite the rules, own your power, and take your career in life to the next level, you are in the right place. Today's guest is a visionary leader at the intersection of technology and human potential and empowering women to actively shape the future of artificial intelligence.

Erica: Y'all, we got doctor Felicia Newhouse here, and she is the host and founder of AI Powered Women Conference, a pivotal event that is dedicated to equipping women for the AI revolution. Through her work with Business to Human, she champions a human centered approach to AI, advocating for diverse voices, especially women voices, and to be at the forefront of its development and application. So y'all, please welcome doctor Felicia Newhouse to the show. I am so pumped you're here.

Dr. Felicia Newhouse: Yay. Thanks for having me, Erica. And, nice to see everybody out there. Yes. Excited to have a great conversation.

Erica: Well, girl, you are out there doing the damn thing, but you have this journey from AI product executive to founding this incredible conference that we're all gonna be at. And it's just incredibly compelling, super interesting. I wanna know what was the catalyst for this shift to focus on making sure that women are really leaning into the AI space.

Dr. Felicia Newhouse: Yeah. Definitely. I mean, my background is, I've got twenty years as a product executive across a lot of different start ups, most recently in machine learning and AI, launching a lot of different products. And around 2023, the height of AI was kind of peaking. And, you know, you had ChatGPT peaking at that point, and I just started to kinda step back and look at all of it.

Dr. Felicia Newhouse: And I'm like, I had had my second baby at that point. I was really starting to grapple with, you know, watching all of these leaders while they had all this tech. They were not slowing down and asking important questions. They were just speeding up. And as a product executive, you know, one of your big things is putting a tech stack together and ways to use tech to streamline your operations and save time.

Dr. Felicia Newhouse: And I didn't necessarily see that happening. I saw people more burned out, more checked out, just a lot of complicated tech just from logging into all these different the learning curve for these things. And then when AI came, I saw that kind of happening even faster. So I started to realize that stepping out of the corporate world, I was gonna have more of an impact. And I had been working with a lot of Fortune 500 woman leaders, and we talked about starting an online woman support group to support each other in AI and all of the changes because change management itself is such a big thing right now.

Dr. Felicia Newhouse: Transformative leadership, just thinking about how we navigate these changes as leaders. And so once I left that job and started up Business to Human, and I was working with a lot of different companies that were navigating these changes and transformations, and I was also thinking about my research that I've done. My PhD research was really focused on how we empower leaders to navigate changes in transformational and sustainable ways and in responsible ways using tech. And I started to put that all together, and looking at when we talk about AI, we're not just talking about tools. We're really talking about what kind of species we're becoming.

Dr. Felicia Newhouse: Right? And I think the systems we build today are shaping the consciousness of tomorrow. And if we design AI through the lens of extraction and speed and domination and just constantly speeding things up and not asking important questions, we really risk automating ourselves out of empathy and ethics and connection. And I think it's not only that that's not being a good human, that's also not being a good business. And when we think about how fast these businesses are moving right now and how fast AI is moving, we as a species have never seen change happening this fast.

Dr. Felicia Newhouse: So the conference that we are doing at MIT, this is our second conference, the AI Powered Women conference. Feel free to check it out, www.aipoweredwomen.com. We are really bridging all of these existential concepts. So we are upskilling women leaders. We're talking about AI, how to deploy it responsibly, and teaching practical skills.

Dr. Felicia Newhouse: And we have experts there to teach that. But we're also talking about these more important existential questions around the type of leaders this moment is demanding and how we can do better. And the World Economic Forum lists emotional intelligence and critical thinking and resilience as the top skills for 2025, yet only 30% of companies are actively training for them. So there's kind of that piece around what is transformative leadership? How do we navigate emotional intelligence and build soft skills?

Dr. Felicia Newhouse: Because there's really this theme around yesterday's soft skills, tomorrow's hard skills. So these qualities like collaboration and empathy and listening and human centered design, human centered products, human centered marketing is all really important. So all of that comes together with also the burnout rates. There's a lot of burnout happening. Teams are checked out.

Dr. Felicia Newhouse: And then women are positioned in this really interesting way, and a lot of the research is showing that women score higher in EQ on almost every dimension for emotional intelligence. And they really bring these indispensable qualities to the AI conversation that are often undervalued and, I think, desperately needed, but not popular conversations. We don't talk about heart centeredness around the corporate tables. We don't talk about the human qualities as much. I mean, some businesses do, but mainstream businesses, it's not as popular.

Dr. Felicia Newhouse: Right? And vulnerability and bringing your whole self as a leader, and that we're scared that there's a lot of unknowns right now, and saying "I don't know" as a leader, voicing that vulnerability. There's all this change and existential kind of questions that are being asked, I think, internally, but they're not really coming out in these corporate conversations. So that's what we're trying to do with this event, is to bring all that together and to bring the poets and the philosophers and the anthropologists and the historians and women from all different backgrounds, not just the technologists.

Erica: Yes. Because it's all about artificial intelligence meeting ancestral intelligence. Am I right?

Dr. Felicia Newhouse: Yeah. That's right.

Erica: I love that concept. And it's so fascinating. I was actually just talking with one of my keynote speaker friends. His name is Smiley. And he was saying we hear this all the time, that it's not that AI is gonna take your job, that people who know AI are gonna take your job.

Erica: But he actually rivals that, and he says it's people who know AI and who can still be anchored in those human skills and qualities like empathy and connection and all of those things that we've already said are extremely important, but we just don't know how to get them there. So when you think of it in that realm, I'm really interested to see your thoughts and opinions on how our organizations are gonna change. Are they gonna start training for AI and empathy at the same time? What's the future of work look like?

Dr. Felicia Newhouse: Yeah. I mean, I think that's my hope, that they will move into that. I don't see that happening as readily right now. I think what I see happening right now is that companies are speeding up instead of slowing down, and they're not asking these harder questions. And I think what's gonna happen is they're gonna eventually hit a wall where it becomes survival to incorporate some of these human centered qualities.

Dr. Felicia Newhouse: But right now, at the macro, we're struggling with that. And I think one of the biggest things we have to look at is a human centered AI approach means designing and deploying AI that prioritizes people over performance, and sometimes that means over revenue. And this is one of the challenges. We live and work in a capitalistic system that isn't designed for that.

Dr. Felicia Newhouse: Right? So I don't blame the humans. I really think that a lot of the research keeps pointing back to it being systemic. So when you think about AI, it's not just a technological shift. It's a human shift. And AI adoption is often treated as a tech or an ops problem. But what we're really managing is emotional change. And our brains are not designed to handle this level of complexity and change all at once.

Dr. Felicia Newhouse: The rate of change is unprecedented. There's this guy, Ray Kurzweil, if anybody wants to look him up, he created this law of accelerating returns. There's a lot of talk about AI around that, and AI is evolving exponentially, not linearly. So what that means is AI is actually evolving faster than our ability to measure it or manage it. And I think the question is, what does future readiness look like for human teams, and how do we lead without burning out because of this complexity and this emotional change? A lot of companies are still building these overhyped AI road maps to compete and keep up, but they're failing to deliver on them in a lot of cases because they're underestimating the human side of that transformation.

Dr. Felicia Newhouse: If you have this beautiful road map and this shiny new toy called AI, whatever that means to you, an agent or a model or a chatbot or however you're deploying it, but you haven't really incorporated the human side of the transformation, you've got burned out employees. They're also scared. They don't wanna be automated. They're concerned about how this is gonna affect their teams.

Dr. Felicia Newhouse: You haven't asked them about their experience with the customers and how the customers are experiencing this and how ethical it is. Is it solving a real problem, or does it just look cool for you to say AI powered? So these are all very real challenges at this moment.

Erica: So many challenges. And I do think there's a lot of people who are just moving fast because they are worried they're gonna be left behind.

Dr. Felicia Newhouse: Of course.

Erica: And I know you've seen the women's study that shows women aren't leaning into AI at the same rates as men. I love this because we are all over this. And I think for women, engaging with AI presents its own set of what I love to call the sticky floors, the limiting beliefs and toxic behaviors that keep us stuck. Perhaps they're intimidated by tech. Maybe they don't think they're a techie person or they're in a male dominated field. Whatever it is, a lot of ethical concerns.

Erica: What are some of those common barriers that you've seen, and how do you help women overcome them so that they can step into the power of AI without getting left behind?

Dr. Felicia Newhouse: Yeah. I mean, you mentioned the survey, and Harvard had that research, I'm trying to remember the name of that study. We'll have to cite it somewhere. But the study was showing that women are adopting AI tools at a 25% lower rate than men, even when the tools were equally accessible. So there's a few areas here that are challenging. One is just the bias. There's a lot of gender bias, discrimination, a lack of representation, and it's not lack of ability. It's not that women aren't smart enough. It's the system. 72% of women say that gender bias has blocked their promotions, and half report workplace discrimination.

Dr. Felicia Newhouse: And then there's the imposter syndrome and self doubt that that particular Harvard study, I think it was just a few months ago that launched, but it really beautifully outlined this, which is, eighty five percent of women experience self doubt. And in fields like AI, sixty percent of women engineers report intense imposter feelings. And so that study really went through, when women are using AI, they feel not only this imposter syndrome, but they feel almost unethical using it because they feel like it's almost cheating for them. So there's this kind of ethical layer of integrity that women uniquely experience. And this is what's been highlighted in the research that's really preventing them from adopting these tools more readily in their businesses and in their work.

Dr. Felicia Newhouse: And the third piece was tech intimidation and isolation. So only a third of women use AI tools versus half of men. So when I look at this research, I really think it's not just access. It's a fear of being judged. And women often fear that using AI will be seen as cheating or unethical, especially in workplaces where their expertise is already questioned.

Dr. Felicia Newhouse: So if you take a group that is already lacking psychological safety and feels like they have to go above and beyond to prove themselves, this is part of the challenge we see with women, and this was where my doctoral research highlighted a lot of that: the ideal prototypical leader in our minds is a white male. We all know this research. It's been talked about a million times over now, but women compare themselves to that as well. And so they push down and push away these more inherent, nurturing, feminine, vulnerable qualities that women leaders tend to exhibit around this emotional intelligence, but they don't feel comfortable bringing those aspects of themselves out in the current workplaces.

Dr. Felicia Newhouse: So I think this really goes back to us standing at a crossroads. It's not only that if we don't actively bring women into AI now, we'll hard code the very disparities we're trying to undo. There's also this bigger piece of just how do we exist as humans in a room when we're trying to solve problems? Are we able to bring all the voices to the table? Because this isn't just a male versus woman issue. Eighty percent of the AI tools and technologies are built in the Northern Hemisphere of planet Earth, and that in of itself is a massive bias.

Dr. Felicia Newhouse: So we need to start thinking about the different people that are part of these conversations, and how we create psychologically safe spaces for humans to show up and talk about these things, because all of that is going to be coded into the AI and the models. And I always tell people, the AI that you create is just a reflection of how responsible you are, and whether you're willing to take accountability for the areas of yourself, and the areas of your products or AI models you're putting out that have blind spots.

Erica: I love that. That is great. And I love that you talk so much about being an AI powered woman. So I wanna ask, what are those unique strengths and leadership qualities, outside of things like empathy and a few of the skills we've touched on, that are indispensable for the responsible and impactful evolution of AI?

Dr. Felicia Newhouse: Yeah. When I think of the word AI powered woman and how we use it, it's more than simply using AI tools. That's a part of it. But it's also about bringing your full humanity into this era as a leader, whatever aspect leadership means for you. You could be running a small coffee shop. You could be middle management at a corporation. You could be working at home on a virtual business part time. Whatever that means to you, whatever leadership capacity you're leveraging in your life, it means that you are choosing to be responsible with the leveraging of the technology, and that you're not allowing it to replace who you are, but to amplify the parts that make you uniquely human, which is amplifying your intuition.

Dr. Felicia Newhouse: It's amplifying your creativity. It's amplifying your care and compassion as a human, and the humans that you work alongside: your colleagues, the people who work for you, your employees, the people that you're launching products to, your customers. Do you really care about them? Have you really taken the time to drop in and think about what their needs are and what they struggle with? And then at a higher, more macro level, collectively as a planet, what we're struggling with: are you contributing to the planet technologies and products and businesses that are leaving this world a better place?

Dr. Felicia Newhouse: And if not, why aren't you? Do you really care about responsibility as a business? I think there's a lot of excuses that businesses make about having to speed up: well, we gotta compete, well, we had to just get it out the door, we had to ship it faster than we could really finish building it. So it's just kind of a half baked thing, which creates more blind spots and biases. So I do recognize that the system we are living in in the modern world for businesses is hard, because it's extra hard to be the leader that slows down. It requires extra courage to say "this AI deployment is not done thoughtfully."

Dr. Felicia Newhouse: We haven't really thought about the governance around it. We haven't really thought about the ethics and the biases that we've baked into it. We haven't really taken the time to get those extra voices in the room before we launch it. So that level of emotional intelligence and courage and leadership is really what's going to shift the path we're on to be a more inclusive one, a more equitable future, a future that's focused more on human flourishing. Or we could keep on the path we're on, which is not looking super great at the moment.

Erica: Dumpster fire.

Dr. Felicia Newhouse: Yeah. Yeah.

Erica: Oh my gosh. Well, doctor Felicia, as a women's leadership researcher, how has your academic understanding of the different leadership dynamics that we have informed your practical strategies for empowering women in the AI industry? Hey there, listeners. If you have ever felt like you're stuck in a place, held back by self doubt, perfectionism, or that pesky inner critic, you're not alone. We all face those sticky floors that keep us from reaching the heights we dream of.

Erica: But guess what? It's time to shatter those limiting beliefs and toxic behaviors to uncover infinite possibilities. My book, Glass Ceilings and Sticky Floors, is your ultimate guide to smashing through barriers, overcoming limiting beliefs, and stepping into your full potential. This book has been endorsed by none other than the great Mel Robbins, best selling author and motivational powerhouse. It's also been featured in Success Magazine, so you know it's packed with insights that work.

Erica: Inside, you'll find real life sticky floor stories, practical strategies to help you navigate your own sticky floor moments, and a whole lot of inspiration to keep you climbing. This isn't just a book. It's your roadmap to success, confidence, and freedom. Grab your copy of Glass Ceilings and Sticky Floors today at www.ericaandersonrooney.com. Whether you're in the boardroom, the classroom, or just starting out, this book is for you, because no one deserves to stay stuck, no one deserves to feel small, and you have glass ceilings to shatter.

Erica: Let's do this.

Dr. Felicia Newhouse: Yeah. So my research was done over about eight or so years. It was qualitative research across MIT and Harvard and Lesley University, and we studied the lived experiences of diverse women entrepreneurs and leaders, especially mothers, across industries around the world, in third world countries and first world countries. And what we uncovered was this recurring pattern: our question was really what prevents sustainability? In other words, if you were going to chart this on a curve, where do women just drop off and fail?

Dr. Felicia Newhouse: They close up shop. They stop their business. They start to sputter out in their career growth. They don't get promoted. What's happening? And the recurring pattern we really recognized was burnout. Women are twice as likely as men to burn out. And it wasn't caused by a lack of ambition or talent, but by a lack of support systems and meaning making frameworks. And what I mean by meaning making frameworks are the safe spaces and opportunities to collaborate with other aligned humans, women, fill in the blank, that can really make you feel seen and lifted up, and help you make meaning of yourself.

Dr. Felicia Newhouse: So there was this identity development that came out of the research: that our identity is always evolving, and that as adult learners, we're always learning, and we have opportunities for that learning to be transformational and uplifting. And if we're in these collaborative spaces and communities that really see us and get us and align with our values and help lift us up, we really can equip ourselves with the resilience, the internal resources to navigate change and chaos and turbulence in our careers and businesses.

Dr. Felicia Newhouse: So that really came out with this immunity model that we developed, which shows that women leaders build resilience not just through sheer grit, but through critical reflection around their identity, and doing that through this almost like infinity loop, if you could picture the number eight. It's like, I am learning about myself through my own mental processes and reflection process, but then I also filter it through the people I see around me. It kinda goes back to this age old thing around you are the seven people closest to you. That goes for your work, your business, your family, your friends, your community. So really making sure that you have those humans around you that are reflecting your healing and not your wounds. They're lifting you up.

Dr. Felicia Newhouse: And then the other piece was, in addition to that robust social support, is therapeutic support: making sure that we have the psychological support around us. That could come in the form of a coach or therapist or safe spaces. And then purpose driven business building: really having the right tools to build those business systems in a way that was sustainable, including tech education, education around things like AI, things like groundbreaking tech that's going to help keep your business not only growing, but also keep your burnout levels down if you learn how to use those tools correctly.

Erica: And you mentioned you had two kids. I'm interested to hear your thoughts on how AI is going to impact them, or just what are you excited about? What are you concerned about as it relates to AI and your kids?

Dr. Felicia Newhouse: Yeah.

Erica: That's the question, right?

Dr. Felicia Newhouse: I mean, we actually at our conference at MIT in September have a panel that's a teen panel, and it makes me think of that. We are bringing three young women on that panel to talk about kids and what they're navigating, what they're struggling with. And I think what I've seen with kids, my biggest concern is the mental health. It's one of the biggest crises of our time. There was a stat that I saw recently, a few weeks ago, don't quote me on this because it may not be exact, but it's something like sixty percent of teens have been experiencing chronic sadness and burnout or depression on a regular basis.

Dr. Felicia Newhouse: And a lot of that goes back to our tech. It goes back to how tech is separating ourselves from each other. The suicide rates are higher than ever before, especially for young people. Our youth is faced with a future that is unknown and uncertain. The kids that are graduating from college now are facing some of the hardest times in terms of getting a job. And it's confusing because as AI is helping and automating in some of these wonderful ways, it's helping certain groups of humans and not others. If you're middle management, you've been in a career for twenty years, AI might be a huge support for you, because this is wonderful to automate processes and help decrease your workload if you do it right. But then that's also very quickly automating some of these entry level jobs.

Dr. Felicia Newhouse: So when I think of the kids, one of my biggest concerns is how they're gonna stay relevant and how they're gonna work their way into some of these careers. I think one of the opportunities I see is for human centered professions: the psychological and therapeutic professions, any helping professions, helping the elderly, helping the sick, the dying, people that are teachers, educators, therapists of all kinds that are helping with mental health. I think those are gonna be really wonderful professions to go into. I see great opportunities in AI too, but it's moving so fast that we can't possibly predict even a year or two out right now.

Erica: Who knows what it's gonna look like?

Dr. Felicia Newhouse: There might be a lot of new jobs and industries that are created. So I do see that being kind of like a shining light for our kids, that we don't know because we can't predict it. There might be entire industries that come out of this that we can't see right now. But at the end of the day, those human centered professions, I think, are a shining light for sure.

Erica: I keep hearing a lot of things, and it's a lot of fear based stuff, but it's like, well, my kid's not gonna know how to do this, my kid's not gonna know how to do that. And it's like, well, guess what? I don't know how to ride a horse, but I damn sure know how to drive a car. So I think it's gonna be okay. And that's kind of the mentality I take, but I do get worried that they're not gonna know what's real and what's fake, what's real and what's generated.

Dr. Felicia Newhouse: Yeah.

Erica: I mean, because I struggle with that, and I'm a grown adult. So for me, that's where I struggle. But today was my kid's first day of school, so I wrote on our little chalkboard, "respect your parents, they graduated from school without Google or AI." And I was like, that's gonna be the mantra for this year.

Dr. Felicia Newhouse: Yeah.

Erica: So we've got a lot of change coming. It's gonna be different. It's not all gonna be good. But my final question for you, doctor Felicia, is especially as it relates to women, and we know that they struggle a lot from the ethical concerns, they feel like they're cheating: what piece of advice would you give to that person who does feel that way? Because I will tell you, I agree. A lot of the women I talk to who aren't using it say they feel like they're cheating. So what advice would you give them on how to move past that barrier?

Dr. Felicia Newhouse: Yeah, absolutely. Don't use it for cheating, first and foremost, because you can use AI for cheating, whether you're a kid or an adult or whatever. Are you gonna put a prompt into ChatGPT and just let it run and copy paste it right into your LinkedIn post? This is where human in the loop is really important. It's not only important for ethics, it's important for building trust. People recognize AI not only from the dashes and the emojis and the obvious things, but they recognize it just from the pattern of how it writes. So it's important to have your own tone of voice when you're writing. Content creation is one of the biggest ways people use AI right now.

Dr. Felicia Newhouse: So I would say just know that you're using it for the right things, and then you won't feel like you're cheating. Use it for brainstorming, saving time on that process, mapping out ideas, putting complex, huge pieces of data or information or ideas or knowledge together into organized groups. Think of decision support and strategy. Communication and influence: leaders spend up to 60% of their time communicating, so what are the ways you can use AI to reduce that time and create clear human centered messaging? Workload management: delegate your low leverage tasks. Look at your work processes on a weekly, daily basis and start chunking it, and figure out what areas just drain you and annoy you.

Dr. Felicia Newhouse: And you're just like, oh my god, I can't do another cold sales outreach email. Okay, well, automate it. There's great ways to do that with AI. And data insights: there's great no code tools out there, Notion AI and Power BI, Copilot, to make sense of data without needing a data scientist. AI helps you ask better questions, not just get faster answers.

Dr. Felicia Newhouse: So I would say it's really about chunking and parsing your business, not trying to automate at all, know what areas you shine. And this is part of what requires you as an individual, but also as a team, and as a company, to really get honest and reflect on your unique value prop. What makes you uniquely you? What makes you uniquely human? Think about that and make sure AI doesn't touch that, not even 1% of it, and make sure that shines. And then the parts that you just kinda suck at, that drain you and burn you out, make sure those are automated. Put the right processes in place so that you're really shining and magnifying the parts of yourself that are just brilliant.

Erica: I love it. You're delegating. We've been talking about delegation for years. This time, we're just delegating it to AI. It's not a big deal. Just delegate.

Dr. Felicia Newhouse: Right. That's what we did with people on our teams before AI.

Erica: 100%. 100%. Doctor Felicia, thank you so much for being here. If today's conversation lit a fire under you, this is your next move. Don't keep it to yourself. Share this episode with a friend, drop a review, and let's keep the conversation going. Remember that your potential is limitless, and the only thing standing in your way are those sticky floors. But guess what? You've got the power to break through them. So go out there, take up some space, and let's shatter some ceilings together.