DR CATRIONA WALLACE

FOUNDER AND CEO OF FLAMINGO AI

“I’ve got a million-dollar nose ring,” says Dr Catriona Wallace. Say what? “I had an investor who was going to put a million dollars into the business, but said it was conditional on me taking the nose ring out. Obviously I kept it in.”

Wallace may have a PHD and decades of entrepreneurship experience, but she still faces discrimination. “When I present to investors, to the market and to clients, I get comments on whether my hair is brushed, or saying my dress was distracting. I’ve had investors ask how I can possibly run a company when I have children.”

She neatly answers that question by commuting regularly, all five children in tow, between Sydney and New York. “I’m a woman in technology, in start-up, in finance and on the ASX [Australian Securities Exchange], all hyper-masculine environments. The only way I see it changing is that women in STEM need to get results.”

She’s doing just that with Flamingo AI, which creates virtual assistants (think: high-tech chatbots). Even there she faces gender bias. “Ninety per cent of coders are male and they’re training algorithms to behave in certain ways using their own, sometimes unconscious, biases. Google ‘unprofessional hairstyle’ and you’ll mainly see images of African-american women with afro hairstyles. The machine has been taught that. We’re hard-coding gender and diversity bias into machines running our world.”

Female support networks, government support for women in STEM and support for mothers is crucial, she says. “I encourage Australian women to think boldly – they should think global from day one. It’s possible to run an international business while you have children. We can go out and take on the world.”