What AI Gets Wrong: Miri Rodriguez on Designing Ethical AI for Women

Emma Fischer: Hi, everybody, and welcome to a new episode of the Aspire to Inspire podcast. I’m your host today, Emma Fischer, Content Marketing Manager at Staffbase. Today’s guest is Miri Rodriguez, the CEO and co-founder of Empressa.ai, a revolutionary AI platform built by women for women. Miri is also an award-winning marketer, global speaker, and two-time bestselling author who has been featured in the likes of Girlboss, Business Insider, and Forbes. She’s a champion of ethical innovation and a fierce advocate for inclusive leadership.

In this episode, she shares the bold thinking behind her newest mission, and that is building trustworthy AI powered by real women’s voices. Today, we’re going to explore how Empressa is challenging bias in tech by sourcing expertise from women across industries, what it means to tell emotionally honest stories that actually shift culture, and how to lead across borders with purpose, clarity, and heart. Miri, thank you so much for being here today. I’m really excited to get into this conversation.

Miri Rodriguez: Thank you for having me. I’m excited to talk about these things that are so pressing to all of us women, and in the era of AI.

Emma Fischer: I know you’re really busy, so I’m going to start with something that I think is right on your mind this week, and that is Empressa, of course. Myself, I’m not a very techie person. I work here in content creation. Please let me know if this is on the right line. For Empressa, it’s an AI model. I know a lot of people in comms were using ChatGPT, I think, mostly. You’re building this where all the input is just coming from women. Is that correct?

Miri Rodriguez: Yes. It’s a GPT model. The biz chat part of that is the output. Really, it’s a domain-specific large language model as well, meaning it’s architected and fine-tuned for a proprietary methodology where the source is women. The content is women’s insights. Think of it as we’re using women’s insights and knowledge and knowledge base to create our AI to then use it to enable our GPT-style model. It’s everything in between. Both for experts and users, it serves a really great purpose.

Emma Fischer: What people do you think is the ideal target group to use this platform?

Miri Rodriguez: As I said, it’s a hybrid model. What it does is basically enables expert leaders, women in their own space. This is actually very nuanced because I dare say all the research we’ve done, a lot of women who are leaders in their own space don’t ever get to explore channels, explore, and give visibility to their expertise. These are women who, the majority of women of us, do a lot of things in our space. We become thought leaders, and then not a lot of people get the visibility. They don’t get to be seen as much as they would.

On this side of Empressa, on the large language model side, we are embedding their knowledge. That’s basically, they come in, they use their digital space, they’re able to actually connect their content, whether they’ve created a piece of content or if they haven’t, Empressa helps them do that. If they have social channels that they’ve had years of content there where we’ve seen things like TikTok or Instagram changing their algorithm, or saying, no longer is available, is it available in the US?

It’s a third-party platform that now we’re bringing all of that to their own space. It’s a digital library, and they get to collect that as much as they want, and then use that to enable our AI to help other women on the other side. Who are the other women? This is experts here, and the other side we have early in career women who are just starting their own businesses, who are becoming entrepreneurs, who are pivoting in their career. There’s a whole space from early in career women to all the way to thought leaders and seasoned leaders.

The most beautiful part of this is on this side, on the users, they get accessibility to women like us that normally they wouldn’t. Think of someone in Africa, in India, that would not ever be able to talk to Miri about storytelling or about creating an AI. Now they can. They can pick my brain, if you will, through the platform. The beautiful part for experts is that this action is monetized for them. They actually are making royalties every time the AI is using their knowledge to help answer an inquiry from the user.

Emma Fischer: Okay. I really love that last part because I know a lot of the discussion people have about AI is like, if you use this AI art, you’re clearly like using that to have an artist. If it’s actually coming from women, like you said, that you wouldn’t have the opportunity to speak to and they’re benefiting from it, I really think that helps to bridge the AI humanity gap that a lot of people are trying to grapple with.

Miri Rodriguez: Absolutely. In today’s age, AI’s mass adoption is really accelerating, but there is concern about bias, about inequity, about emotional disconnection, especially

for women. This is rising, and we’re seeing a slow adoption from women because of that skepticism of what is this going to mean for me in my relationships, in my authenticity. We think that way, and that’s okay to think that way because we are asking the right questions.

You have current tools like ChatGPT, like Outlier, and they lack personalization, transparency, or even gender-specific design. This is where Empressa comes in because we uniquely respond to this gap with a trustworthy AI platform that prioritizes inclusivity, attribution, human connection. It’s really aligned to growing a fair workforce because we know and we believe that AI is the equalizer for women. Right now, gender parity for the labor force worldwide it’s 134 years away.

We still have so much work to do when you think about DEI programs, disbanding, and that kind of thing. I’m like, wow, this is the perfect time to think about AI as an equalizer, as a force that can help either close that gap or really grow it. We have a chance and an opportunity to make it actually enable it for us and create this AI that helps us in the workforce. Imagine women, just like you and I, and I don’t know your story, I would love to hear more about you, about the nuances.

The challenges that we’ve had in our career. It’s every industry, not just tech. We women come into the labor force, and we contend with the glass ceiling. We contend with lack of mentorship. We contend with so many challenges that are still very real today. We have not yet arrived. I really believe that Empressa.ai is going to accelerate this for us.

Emma Fischer: I love this because we had a different guest on in the past, Pia Frey, and she also pioneered her own company. She was saying sometimes she uses the confident white man ChatGPT output to help her remove from emails when you’re like, “I think this would work, or sorry.” How women, a lot of the times, we minimize ourselves with our words. I think having something specifically built for us to help empower us is really amazing.

Miri Rodriguez: Absolutely.

Emma Fischer: That’s why I’m not going to ask, why did you create this? Because I think every woman watching this, we understand, hey, why we need something specific. Even with science, they’ve only done research on men. That’s why everything we’re told is what works for men, how much sleep we should get, what we should eat, what we should do.

Miri Rodriguez: Everything. Medicine.

Emma Fischer: Everything.

Miri Rodriguez: Up until 1983, the research alone for medicine was for men only. Think about this. Think about the fact that 1983 was when they started to research about women’s biology and the impact of medicine in our bodies. It is unbelievable. Yes, we come in with this real skepticism to go, wait, for the longest time, technology, medicine has not been about us, has not been for us, has not included us. It’s not for us. When you think about AI coming in so fast and so furious in this space, we’re talking about large language models, generative AI, and all these tools.

Right now, already the biases are ingrained in these tools. This is a very specific opportunity that we have to enable women ourselves to integrate ourselves. I always say that inclusion starts with I. We can look back and just complain about it or say, this is what’s happening, and that’s it. We can create our own AI, and you can be invited to Empressa and help us create this AI and model after what you need.

Right now, we have 100 women who are founding members and are doing this as we speak. We have them going in, playing with the tool. We have users playing with the tool and telling us, “Hey, Miri, this doesn’t feel right.” “Hey, Miri, the UI, the UX, the actual AI, we would like this. We’d like to see this more.” I can tell you, it’s in beta mode right now. When we launch, we are going to launch with the conviction, the real conviction that this is by women and for women.

Emma Fischer: That was one of my later questions. I would love to get to that now, then. What can the users expect? How does their input also shape the final product? I’m really interested in knowing the people using it and then also the people who’s the contributors and their input went into this.

Miri Rodriguez: Right now, we have 100 founding members who we have handpicked. These are women that– I’ve been in the tech industry for over 20 years. My partner has been in the marketing industry for over 20 years. We have a large network of women that we trust, which is beautiful. As soon as Empressa was born, I don’t know if you have a list, but I always carry a list of people. Once I do my thing, they’re on my list. We reached out to our list. These women have been an incredible force of change and innovation within Empressa from the moment they got there.

They have been basically helping us innovate through each of the phases of Empressa. We started with a very raw tool where we began to train it. It is through their content that the large language model is training. It’s beautiful to see them upload their content. We have anything from, physicians to tech, women in tech, just every industry represented from actually different parts of the world. We have women worldwide. We have a group from Uganda, women who are both users and experts. They are playing with the tool on both ends, which is really exciting.

We have a tool, a feedback tool, that’s a live feedback tool where they go in and give us research feedback immediately. Then my dev team goes in and responds real time. It’s a real build, almost like a hackathon type of movement that we’re creating where they come in and they give us their feedback as soon as we create a new module or create a new phase, basically for the testing. They give us live feedback, and we respond and we iterate as we go.

It’s been really exciting. I think we’re almost there, which is even more exciting. They are very happy with not just providing this for Empressa, but knowing that this is something that’s going to go to market with women in mind. They are being bullish about that. I want them to be bullish about that. “Hey, Miri, this won’t work because or we need to iterate a little bit more.” I see their enthusiasm and their passion. I sit back and I watch and I’m like, “This is exactly what we needed.”

We don’t need women anymore just being at the table and raising their hand and say, “We should consider the fact that–” whatever. No, we need the woman to be like, “This is happening. We need to change it. We’re not considering stuff.” Inclusion is built in, not bolt-on or not enough of afterthought. We are building it with inclusion in mind, so.

Emma Fischer: Oh, this just reminded me of like my least favorite line to hear in the workplace, when you like say something with passion and then a man goes, “Please don’t be emotional. Could you try to be logical?” Something like this, it’s like–

Miri Rodriguez: Aargh. I will say to that, because I’ve heard that many times.

Emma Fischer: When women say it, they say it more fairly. They’re like, “Hey, can I explain it?” I’m like, “You know you’re right.” When men say it, it’s kind of like, “Please calm down.”

Miri Rodriguez: Yes, emotions are a beautiful thing. We women are emotional, and that is a beautiful thing. Emotion is energy in motion. We drive energy. We are driven by energy. We are driven by intuition and empathy. That’s a beautiful thing. We weren’t talking about those emotions or an emotional brand 20 years ago. In my storytelling journey, I can tell you that talking about empathy was not something we did in communication. It was a logical thing to do. It was a transactional thing to do.

Fast forward, and here we are where we’re talking about empathetic-driven communications and being empathetic. A man didn’t invent that. A man didn’t think about that. It was women who know and intrinsically know how to be empathetic, know how to be intuitive. We do a lot of disservice to business when we look at emotion or emotional beings or women being emotional as something that is negative. In fact, it’s what drives business because we know that it’s human to human connection that drives business. I find it fascinating what that is brought up.

When we think about logic, it’s also beautiful. Both of them coming together, create a beautiful synergy. It’s not one or the other, it’s both. When we learn that we all have both, we can drive ourselves with logic and emotional emotions. When we can separate the two, we all have that capacity, but it is a beautiful thing when we could also balance it in a way that serves our community. If I wasn’t passionate, if I wasn’t emotional about what’s happened to me as a woman, what has happened to my peers as women, what could happen to my niece as the next generation.

If I wasn’t emotional about that, at first, Empressa wouldn’t be here. A lot of our ideas are because we are emotional, and rightfully so, to drive what serves us best. I want to take that statement you made and the women that are listening and the men that are listening to this, to say, and just to reframe that from energy, emotion is a beautiful thing. Emotions are things that are happening, that are moving us, and what a boring and dead world it would be if we didn’t have that. All logic and no emotion.

We are driven, we’re human beings, we have emotions, and we should actually do business with emotion. Of course, take your logic with you and make logical decisions, but start that, start with passion, start with innovation, starts with intuition. I can’t tell you how many times in my Empressa journey as an entrepreneur in general, but now specifically with an AI, I’ve had to pivot immediately.

There’s been so many pivotal moments in my space, and if I wasn’t emotional about it, I wouldn’t have done it. I would have been logical and would have said, “No, the logical thing would be to do this.” I paused and I said, “Hold on, let me see what the universe is telling me here. Let me see what the lesson is to be learned here.” That has enabled Empressa and our team to thrive, and our women to thrive in this space as well.

Emma Fischer: I love this. Like you said, it’s not about making women higher, it’s about evening things out. Also, it’s the fact that you’re acknowledging the duality, not even just the duality, like the multi-layer aspects of women. Then there’s the intersectionality because you’re like, this isn’t just for one type of woman, it’s for women across the world at different stages in their life and in their career.

I think there’s something so safe about like spaces where it’s like a lot of women coming together. Something else you also mentioned is that this is a trustworthy AI. For someone like me, who is not super knowledgeable about tech, can you share what makes it trustworthy?

Miri Rodriguez: Oh, 100%. It’s so exciting for me to really talk about the actual innovation. For us, when we think about– let’s just call out some numbers here. Just in the US, we have 47% of the labor force that are women, yet still they remain underrepresented in leadership and persistent wage gaps, just in the US. When we talk about just America, go to other parts of the world, and the numbers are just sobering when you think about the stark differences. It is unbelievable.

Emma Fischer: Women of color as well.

Miri Rodriguez: Yes. When you add intersectionality, when you add geo-economics, when you add every single layer of what we are, the multifacetedness of who we are as women, we’re just saying women, 47% in the US. Then start adding stuff, and that number just skyrockets. Our innovation really centers on domain-specific large language models. As I said, this is basically a custom processor engine that brings the expert knowledge in vetting strategy and basically refining the pipeline that transforms that model into a differentiated system.

We have, for example, a bias mitigation engine, a proprietary adversarial training dataset that basically ingrains synthetic pairs, guiding the LLM, the large language models, to reduce those stereotypical things, those outputs that we create. Right now, if you were to talk to ChatGPT and you were to say, give me some recommendations on how to best show up in this next meeting that I’m going to have. I’m feeling a little bit disappointed. I’m not feeling confident, whatever. Uninspired.

It’s going to go and search out the internet and it’s going to bring out whatever it decides. It’s going to think however it wants, and it’s going to use whatever sources it wants. In this case, that’s not going to happen because we have that bias mitigation engine where it’s going to look exactly at the source. It’s going to say, if it doesn’t have the answer, I don’t have it. There’s no woman right now that has gone through something like you right now, so we can’t really talk to you about this.

Actually, we take that and we will have, actually, Ask Me Anything, we will have live experts sessions so women will actually get to connect with women live and we’ll talk about it. We don’t have to have all the answers, but we can talk about it and acknowledge that these things are happening, and it’s learning and it’s iterating as we speak. The fact that it doesn’t have that answer tells us in the back end, we need someone who has gone through this, and we need an expert to talk about it.

Now, what’s beautiful about the expert side is that, as an expert, you have three categories. It’s not just for business. You have your business and your thought leadership in business, but you can also do lifestyle, and you can also do wellness. For me, I am not a doctor, but I can talk about wellness from a breast cancer survivor perspective. I had breast cancer. I went through surgeries, and I learned through that process that self-advocacy in medicine was so important for someone like me.

What do I mean? A Latina. I walk into a room, I see a male person wearing a white coat, and my initial reaction is to say, yes, whatever you’re saying, you’re an authority. I learned really quick through that process, unfortunately, that I was actually hiring them. They were on my team. I’m the person who’s having this whole thing. I’m the person undergoing this. I’m the person feeling those emotions, and they’re not. I get to pick the team that’s going to touch me and heal me and help heal.

That is really important when we think about the multi-layers of our expertise into the system. I’ve been there. Here’s what I did immediately when that happened to me. Here’s what I recommend. Me and three other women that have gone through it. There’s that. There’s a personalization algorithm where the visibility is shared. The behavior is actually through storytelling because I’m so big on that. It doesn’t feel like ChatGPT is talking to you or Gemini or whatever. You know it’s a person.

It’s actually through a story. Hey, I went through something like that. It’s a beautiful, beautiful, trustworthy algorithm that is behavior, and it’s the sourcing. A lot of people have asked, “Hey, Miri, how do we make sure these women are real experts?” We vet them. We vet every single one of them. In fact, every one of them meet with me one-on-one when they apply. There’s an application process that they go through. There will be for experts that want to be a part of this when we launch. We’re in the beta phase, as I said.

If you are an expert, the first thing is, there actually will be an application process and fee. Why the fee? We have to vet you, but also we want to make sure that you’re serious about what you want to bring to Empressa. Not everybody that calls themself an expert or an influencer is. Trustworthiness comes from the source. Then from the source, we want to make sure that, hey, if Miri’s there, if other women are there, that I know that I can trust and I can pick their brain, then I want to go and source from Empressa. That brings accessibility to them.

If I, let’s say, Brené Brown, I’m calling you out, Brené Brown, come join Empressa. If Brené Brown comes to Empressa and she uploads her content and all her books, no longer do I have to buy all her books. I can just pick her brain and say, “Hey,” and have a chat with her and have her tell me in story form. It feels like I’m talking to her. It’s really ethical, it’s traceable, it’s trustworthy from a sourcing perspective, from an engine perspective. Then, of course, from the technology.

I am so proud to say that our technology is being built on the Azure Stack, meaning we are a Microsoft partner. I am an employee at Microsoft and also a partner. That’s exciting because I was, I dare say the first person who went and said, “Well, I’m disclosing I’m building an AI while Microsoft is building AIs.” Instead of getting fired and claiming IP, they were like, “Hey, welcome, let’s give you some Azure grants.”

They basically allowed us to build or invited us to build on their technology, which I love because having been at Microsoft for 13 years, the technology that I know and the mission that we drive at Microsoft is so in touch with what we’re doing at Empressa to empower every person and organization on the planet to achieve more. Our mission is to empower every woman to build her empire with AI to seek and trust.

The trustworthiness is multi-layered because we understand that women ask those questions and we are rightfully so skeptical about the things, about the people, about the machines, about everything we need to be. I do want us women to adopt AI faster. I would love if that happened. I would love that our AI literacy is faster than men because we have an equalizer, but I also understand why we’re not. I’m not pushing that agenda. I’m not saying “Go, go, go do it, do it.” No, we will tread with caution.

We have to, that’s okay. In that process, in that skepticism, ask the smart questions, dig in, get curious. That’s the women we have at Empressa, where they’re doing that with us. We’re learning as they go and we’re iterating as they go because we want to make sure it is ethical and trustworthy from that perspective.

Emma Fischer: One of the things that really stood out to me is addressing the concept of isolated or marginalized women, because I know loneliness is not unique to women. There’s the whole male loneliness epidemic, but that’s more because men can’t talk about their feelings as much as the society we pressure them not to so much. With women, I feel like we have this pressure to always be on, to always be like perky, happy, upbeat. When there’s something that actually can speak to your genuine experience, because like you said, I do not think ChatGPT caters to that. It really helps with visibility.

Then the second thing that really stood out was that Microsoft empowers you because I’m a writer. I work at Staffbase now, but before that, I’m doing freelance writing for a while. I moved to a new country, and a lot of the places are like, “If you write for us, you can’t even write for somebody else.” There’s this whole thing like competition. To have a company that genuinely like you’re here, no, they empowered me. I think that speaks really big. I know you work as a senior storyteller for them.

Miri Rodriguez: I do.

Emma Fischer: That’s another really big topic is storytelling. Can you talk about the framework for turning your stories into action? I want to go back a little bit to what you just said around that trustworthiness. Just one more thing I want to say, because you do mention something important around women, from different parts of the world in talking about topics that ChatGPT wouldn’t contain or another GPT model. We’re using ChatGPT as one, but it’s one.

Miri Rodriguez: That’s the one I usually use.

Emma Fischer: Right, that’s a very one. That’s a very popular one. In general, we could say GPT models. Empressa is being trained to contain the multi layers of women’s experiences that include hormonal, that include life experiences, such as abortion, such as giving birth, such as entering the workforce after. Such as ageism, such as menopause, such as a regular period that’s not ever regular. What the hell is a regular period? When we touch base with that, if you were to talk to GPT, ChatGPT, which I have to understand, nuances to say, today I woke up and I feel suicidal.

That’s a thing. I have to call that out because the hormones affect women that way. We don’t talk about it. I dare say, I have two children, my second pregnancy, I really believe after I gave birth, I had postpartum depression for three years. I did not go diagnosed, but my symptoms were all there. It wasn’t until years later, many years later that I read, and I was like, “Whoa, that sounds like me. It sounds like what I was going through.”

Nobody talks about it, nobody diagnoses you, and you’re supposed to act normal. I was going to work, and I was acting normal. This is where Empressa will not shut you down. This is where Empressa will not stop the conversation. If you try this conversation with ChatGPT, they’ll probably stop you immediately and say, “I’m not wired, I cannot answer that question. Let’s start another chat.”

It’s against the company policy. Trust me, I have a lot of experiences, and there’s also the thing where it’s like, people need to talk to people. Like I said, I moved to a different country. I can’t always find that connection, unfortunately, in person. To help understand myself, I read all the time, I write all the time. To help understand myself through any means, I think is really beneficial. Then there’s nothing worse than when you’re having a really difficult moment.

Okay, I can’t really figure it out with a person. I’m putting in ChatGPT, and it comes back. This is against our policy. Even in real life, I was asked to write a essay on womanhood and I was told, you have to soften some words. Your experience of womanhood is a little bit not correct. I had words about domestic violence, and this was like my experience with womanhood in part. It’s a duality.

I was asked to soften those words, and I was like, “Well, you kind of can’t as a woman.” The only person who would have wanted me to soften it was the person who did these things to me. He was the one who was like, “Don’t say these words, say lighter words.” You can’t soften womanhood. There’s so many beautiful aspects to it. I think this is just so beautiful to hear.

Miri Rodriguez: Thank you for sharing that experience and this is exactly why Empressa is here. This is exactly why, because of these very– and the women and the men who are listening right now, just let it be known, we’re all nodding. Women are nodding their heads right now listening because we know and understand we’ve been there. It may not be the very exact same situation, but we’ve all been in a situation where we are asked to say nothing, asked to bury it, asked to act normal in a very specific situation that shouldn’t happen.

Whether that’s mental health, whether that’s abuse of any kind, and everything in between, we have been taught to be quiet and not talk about it. We die a little bit every single time. Empressa is not going to have those limitations. We will be able to speak to someone. It’s not a doctor you’re speaking to. It’s another woman who may have experienced something similar will give you her perspective. Will share her knowledge and her insight.

This is where we turn knowledge into lived experience, and it becomes an insight where it’s conventional knowledge, work hard. What does that mean? For me, working hard looked like this because I was an immigrant in the States, and I had to do all these things and work three jobs, and learn English. That’s work hard. There’s so many beautiful stories that when they’re brought together from women from all over the world, and we share this and we pass it down. This is the legacy. This is how we’re still here as a race, as humanity. We pass down our stories.

That leads into storytelling for me and my passion for storytelling because I’ve always believed that stories are the catalyst for change, are the catalyst for culture, are the catalyst for legacy. When we remember that– we don’t have to learn to tell stories because it’s very part of us. We innately do that as human beings. That’s what we do. You ask a five-year-old, how was your school day? They start telling you a story. They don’t say fine, unless they’re a teenager. If they’re a five-year-old, they’ll be like, “Well, today I went and I did this and my friend did this and I did that.”

We speak in stories. It’s a very intrinsic part of us. When we take that to business, back to what I was saying, is that evolution of emotionally connected business. We have understood in the last 10 years, I would say, there’s been a huge shift in how we look at business and how we do business. Through stories, it enables that special connection that we need that is human to human. Right now, you spoke a little bit, just a tad about your own experience.

I already want to learn more. I’m already connected to you emotionally through the time zones, through everything. I’m already connected because you shared very vulnerably a piece of your story. That’s how it works. Now we’re connected at the human level, and now we’re more trustworthy toward each other. Now we can do business. Now we can ease up our communication. There’s so much that happens at the cognitive level once a story is told.

In my space, to answer your question, for me, I came into engineering to tell stories, and engineering at Microsoft when we were doing our digital transformation journey, basically taking our on-premises data to the cloud. It was a time where I thought I knew how to be empathetic. I thought I knew how to tell a story because I come from my home background. I didn’t because I understood immediately that I am not an engineer. I’m not a dev. I don’t know what it is to be building a product that I’m creating over here.

I’m at the same time involved in my own role. They were becoming cloud engineers because they were taking things to the cloud. Their own jobs were being shifted by the work that they were doing. That’s fascinating. It’s also incredibly complex. I didn’t have that. I didn’t know what it was like. I was trying to tell a story from the outside and make it look good.

Once I was able to penetrate the space and ask questions that mattered, and ask questions at the human level, beyond the product, beyond the digital transformation engine. Get into the ecosystem of the people behind it and ask the people questions about people things, those stories began to really surface in a beautiful way. I learned that story is a product. Now, as I’m building a product, it’s basically Empressa is a story elevated, really. It is a product that we have to really think about the design of it. We have to think about the inclusion of it.

We have to think about everything that happens at the design level from a UX and UI perspective. We have to understand our audience. We have to understand how it’s going to land. We have to prototype it. We have to test it. We have to iterate it. We have to think about the different ways that it can be delivered and why. This was something that took a long time for organizations to think about. Storytelling is not just telling a story about the CEO, making it look good.

Storytelling is to remind your audience why you exist every single time, why you’re still here, and why that is relevant to them. Why do they care? What is it about the brand? What is it about the company? What is about the story that they are connected to or will be connected to at the emotional level? At Empressa, I understand it’s an AI. It’s a beautiful thing that we’re doing, sure. The reality is what’s gluing us together is the stories of the women, which is ironically, it’s the source. I wouldn’t say ironically, actually, it’s very intentional. It’s the source of where we want to be.

It’s not just a product for product’s sake. It’s a product that delivers stories. Because the power of story is healing, it grows us, it changes us, it changes culture. it is the antidote to all the things that we hate right now about the world, to all the things that we’re concerned about in the world. It really is the antidote. When we tell the right stories, when we tell the stories that matter, the stories that grow us, the stories that bring peace and kindness to the world, we can definitely counterattack all the other things that are against us in that we’ve been living so much as women.

Not just as a human race, but as women, we’ve had so much to contend with that over decades, over our own history, our history from decades and from millennia. For us, we have a great opportunity. We also are very good storytellers, not only as human beings, but as women, we have the gift of communication. We have a brain capacity that’s different. We communicate better through stories, and that’s a beautiful thing because it comes really natural to us.

Emma: I think that made me think of two things. One of them is that that’s how you build psych safety. We’ve talked to a lot of behavioral scientists on this podcast, and they say like, if someone’s coming forward to their manager or to an internal communicator and they’re talking about something, you put that little piece out. And if the other person said—if I said that, and you looked uncomfortable or you were like really just full of pity and not empathy, then you don’t want to open up further.

When you have that connection through a story, I think that’s a really good space for the person to receive it well and then invites you to say more. Then the other thing it made me think of is this quote, “My silence is your comfort.” I think every woman can resonate with that. By staying silent and it’s not a fault of women, but we have stayed silent on things, and it’s supported or protected other people. I think this is like finally the chance for women to come forward, and not the only chance.

There’s lots of opportunities, but it’s one of the opportunities and a really empowering one for work where we can be like, “Hey, we don’t have to stay silent about something. We can actually speak up.” For me personally, this is a really– thing I struggle with is setting boundaries or speaking up for myself. You have like a moment, or you can rift off of this as well, where you think of a story and you’re like, “This really helped to inform change.”

Emma: For me, it was actually my own story. I want to say this storytelling is not only just about finding your voice and sharing your voice, it’s about enabling your story to people to understand you, to create empathy towards you. A lot of times we are misunderstood, misconstrued, misanalysed. In a world where we take one sentence out of something I said and can be retweeted or whatever 300,000 times for one little, two words that sentence that may have landed differently, and the people don’t pause to understand and hear the whole context or read the entire book, that happens all the time.

Stories enable that empathetic space where I can explain, I can share my heart, I can tell you where I’m coming from. If I do it in story form, I’m successful to land it if I do it

in a designed way, I’m successful to land it in a way that people can understand. If you design a product well, then nobody has to ask questions about how to use it. If you see a chair, you know it’s a chair, you’re going to sit in the chair. That was a good design. Nobody’s putting instruction manuals on a chair. They’re like, “Oh, this is a chair.” I get to sit in a chair as a user.

Same thing with a story, right? You hand over the story to your audience then what to do with it if it’s a story well told. For me, it took me years to get there. As a woman, I was angry about the injustices. I was angry about the things I had to go through, and that anger stifled me. It allowed me to just say things or not really tell the whole story, or just be rightful about my space and my rightful anger. Righteousness was a big thing.

As I’ve grown and evolved, I’ve learned that, the outcome may be the same, but the story is different when I approach it from my perspective, and I’m able to deliver that to people so they understand the why. Yes, I am an immigrant. Yes, I came here when I was to the States when I was 13. I had to learn the language, I had to work three jobs so I can go to school. I had to get full-ride scholarships. My parents couldn’t afford to take me to school. It was a hard thing. It was like so many other stories.

All of us have our own stories. It’s not that my story is special. It’s that my story is my context to my lived experience, and therefore that moves my behavior. When I deliver that, I give people an opportunity to understand my why. It doesn’t mean I’m not angry today. I still am. I deliver that righteous anger, I should say, in a way that people get the why. I could be angry and just yell, and I found my voice and everybody hear me out, or I could be like, hey, here’s the story.

Here’s what’s happened to me. When that happens, here’s how it’s impacted me. It’s going to be a legacy. It’s generational. That impact is generational. When things have happened to me, I can choose to say nothing or I can choose to say something in a way that is calculated and intentional so that we can make positive change. I can choose to say everything and make positive change through other means. It really is, we are all authors of our own stories. You as a writer know that.

You also know as a writer that once we begin the story, it almost takes a life of its own. The character of the story itself is just like, “Oh, I see where this is going. I thought it was going here, but it’s going here.” I’m so grateful to allow that flexibility in my own story because it’s still being written. That pivotal moment was the decision I made to go out and share who I was. Outside of Microsoft, Miri at Microsoft, I’m Miri. I’m at Microsoft, but I’m also Miri. My brand began to evolve from, yes, I’m this, but I’m also that, and I’m also that, I’m also that.

I’m a mom, I’m a sister, I’m a wife, I’m a friend, I’m a worker at Microsoft, I’m a writer. I’m all these things that make up who I am, and none of them are me, but all of them are me, collectively. When I choose to share that with people, they begin to see me with the multi layers that I bring. Now, if I say something about something that matters to me, they understand the fullness of it versus just that one sentence that I said or that one thing that I’m always talking about. Does that make sense?

Emma: Oh, that makes total sense. That makes me think of a conversation I was just having with my partner in which I had feedback that I was being a little closed off at work, and I could be more personal. I was telling him like, “I always thought like there’s these two sides of you. There’s the work side of you where you’re professional, and then there’s a side of you when you’re yourself.” Because we have the internet, it’s really like getting blurred because it’s like, my coworkers are following me on Instagram and they’re like seeing me, whatever, my cat, or on vacation.

Miri Rodriguez: That’s right,

Emma Fischer: I’m like, you have advice for someone, and we’re trying to blend these versions of ourselves. For me, myself, I’m like, my writing is quite intense. Then I get nervous. Do I share it on my personal platform?

Miri Rodriguez: I want to read your writing. I’m so curious about your writing.

Emma Fischer: Oh yes, it’s on my LinkedIn. I have my blog. I’m a very open, I guess an intense person, but I’m like, hey, I’m working right now. People want to see like the happy bubbly me, but I’m really this very intense, passionate person. If it comes to like an internal communicator and they are– we just had this conversation, a really nice one with our host Lottie. She talked to a former Obama speech writer, Terry. He was saying, “Every person has a special story.” No matter if you think you’re boring, you’re not. You have something to say.

Miri Rodriguez: No, you’re not.

Emma Fischer: As Miri, how would you tell somebody if they’re like, “Hey, I’m working in internal comms, I’m really nervous. How do I start to merge these two aspects of myself?”

Miri Rodriguez: Yes, that’s a great question. I do get asked that a lot. I always go back to the origin story, writing, and understanding your origin story. What is the origin story? Well, the way that I do it, it’s very practical. I’m just giving you a practical step. You literally take a blank sheet of paper. You put a dot on the left further left side, and you put the date you were born there, and then begin to trace the next thought, it’s going to be your next memory. Doesn’t have to be grand. It doesn’t have to be. It can be a person, it could be a smell, it could be whatever, a vision, an actual moment, it could be one thing.

Just start going back to those early childhood memories and trace them all the way through, all the way across the paper all the way to today. I know it’s a long a long way to ask, especially if you’re old like me. What that’s going to do is– and then you begin to actually think about the patterns that you start seeing from those memories. You’re going to see patterns. You’re going to see things that you did not remember that your brain’s bringing back up about who you are always and who you’ve been at the core.

A lot of times what happens is that we lose ourselves in our place in the world. We lose our identity. We lose who we are and what we’re about. Going back to your origin story brings you back and reminds you who you’ve always been at the core. One of the things that was really important for me when I was doing this exercise, when I decided to create my origin story. Again, not using words I was just putting data points and using charts, almost like a line, a squiggling line of ups and downs. If the memory was a good memory, it was a high memory, low, and I could see those patterns.

One of the things that stood out to me was, I was seven years old and I once got in trouble. It was a memory that just came to me. I got in trouble with my mother because I stole– she had a stack of composition books that she had bought for us to start school. I stole one of them because I wanted to write poetry. I indeed took it and filled it up with poetry, and I put stickers around it and colored it. It was really beautiful. I wish I would have saved it. Why was that important to me? At the time when I went back to my origin, it was the first time that I was being asked to write the book, Brand Storytelling.

I was filled with imposter syndrome, and I was filled with fear. I was like, “Oh my gosh, a book is a whole different thing. It’s published, it’s out there for the people to read. It’s like a baby, just put it out there. That’s it, it’s out in the world doing its thing.” I was petrified. When I went back to my origin story, I was like, oh my gosh, wait a minute. I’ve always been a writer at heart. I could have been playing dolls. I could have been watching TV. I was writing, I was writing poetry. I’m a writer at heart. That was just reminding me of the core.

The origin story is a beautiful place to start to remove the noise of all the things that have– I wouldn’t say plagued us, but have influenced us in so many different ways that we may have lost some of ourselves or all of ourselves in this process. For me, it stripped me of looking at, “Hey, is this my core value? Is this something that was instilled in me, and I just took it and made it mine? Is this truly me? What is authenticity? What is my core?” From there, you actually create ways and start thinking of ways of how the story can serve other people.

Truly, what we’re here to do, if we want to understand the legacy of humanity, is we live our experiences and then we share them so that others can learn, so that others can understand, so that we can leave a little bit of ourselves here. Through that process of origin story, you begin to unveil who you are and how that shows up today. You can ask yourself, because I did, “Hey, is today who I am? Is that what I want to be? Have I become who I wanted to be?” If the answer is no, there’s a lot that I can do here to change that. I am the owner. I’m still writing my story. I’m the author.

I’m the CEO of my life. I get to change that, and I can get to evolve that, which I have, obviously. We are always evolving, hopefully, and changing for the better. The vulnerability there depends on how much you are willing to serve, how much you are willing to understand that, that story that is very yours, it’s the gift that’s yours, but it’s also the gift to humanity if you choose to share it. I’m not saying share everything. Please don’t. Privacy is very important. I do keep a lot of my stories to myself.

I do and I have chosen to tell some stories that I know in my heart that will reach someone that may need that moment, that may need that message, that may need that inspiration, that may need the understanding of like, “Hey, you’re not alone. I’ve gone through something like this.” That has never returned any other way, but in a positive way to me, never. Every time I’ve chosen to do it, every time I’ve chosen to say something that’s happened to me in a story form, not for me, for others, with a mission to inspire, then it always returns with good returns.

The origin story is your place to get started. Create it, use tragedy to help you. There’s so many tools today. I didn’t have them back then, but just get creative. I did it with a blank piece of paper. Maybe paint your origin story. I don’t know, have fun with it. Create your story from zero and create and see, begin to see those patterns and uncover those for yourself, and see, “Oh, wow, I’ve always been this thing. I have always done this thing. This has always been a part of me, and I want to share that with the world today.”

That also gives you an idea of where you’re headed because of course,

as we look at history, we can predict the future. The patterns that you’re going to see are if you don’t change them, if you want to change them, if you don’t change them, you’re going to have the same future. If you change them, you’re going to have different futures. There’s a lot that comes from that origin story that’s very yours. I’ve done this plenty of times. My very first story that I wrote in this paper was actually one of those, like big boards, whiteboard papers, and I still have it. I folded it.

It’s funny because I used symbols and I used pictures. I didn’t use words. As a writer, I wanted to challenge myself. I go back to it a lot. I go back and I look and I was like, “Wow, how interesting that when I wrote it back then, it looks like this. If I write it today, it’s going to be different.” It’s the same story, but it’s different. What’s different? I am. I’m different. The way I look at life is different. The way I’ve evolved is different. It’s the same story, but it’s not because I look at it differently.

Storytelling enables people to look at your story differently. If you’re not telling your story, somebody else will. They might not say what you want, and they might not drive it the way you want. They might give an opinion of you that they have, but it’s not really you. You find your voice, and you find your platform through the story. If you’re in communications, if you’re in any industry, whatever industry you’re in, your voice is yours. Your voice is not the company’s. It’s your voice. Your story is yours. It’s not anybody else’s. Nobody can take that from you.

If you encourage yourself to tell that story, it’s yours. It’s your understanding of the world. It’s your convictions. It’s your core values. It’s your purpose. It’s your mission. That’s something that no company can claim as IP. It’s very much yours. That’s when you begin to make that distinction. People begin to disassociate you from what you do to who you really are.

Emma: I love that, because I was not expecting that at all as your answer, but I was like, “This was so nice to hear,” because my manager, he just gave me really good advice. That was like, “The more anything in your personal life is worked on or looked into, the more anyone’s professional life grows.” You can’t think of these things as separate. It’s like working on yourself. What you described is like, exactly. I’ve done research a lot on trauma healing through writing.

One of the things is that people who have had traumatized lives, which is a lot of women, we can relate, it’s your narrative gets really disjointed and you see your life as these individual events that led to this outcome. By writing it down and connecting the thread of your life, it can help to heal you because you can see these aren’t these separate pieces of what happened to me. This is the whole of who I am. It’s looking at the sum. Then by understanding that, that informs your work, that informs what you want from your future. I think that is really beautiful advice to give.

Miri Rodriguez: Absolutely. I love it. You brought it home perfectly. That’s exactly what that is. Absolutely. 100%.

Emma Fischer: I want to keep talking to you for so long, but we are at the end of our time. You’ve given so much advice, but if there’s one thing at the end, like what do you wish someone had told you 20 years ago when you said you started your journey? What would you now tell to a woman just getting started?

Miri Rodriguez: Oh, what a beautiful question. Thank you. Thank you for that. I would say we are not done, and we need women to be courageous, to stand up against systems, against processes, against institutions, against people who continue, whether they know it or don’t, because there’s a lot there. It’s very nuanced and very complex. Because of the history, it continues to bring us down, keep us down, create limitations for us. Wherever you are, and then when you can counter that limitation, you have a choice. You can sit back and watch it and say, okay, well, it is what it is.

This is the system. I have to succumb to it, or I’ve been taught to just ignore it, or I don’t want to fight it because it’s too much. You have that choice. We all have that choice. You have a choice to be courageous and decide to unite to a group of women like us that are going to be here. We’re only here for just a little bit amount of time, but we are the Rosa Parks of the digital age. We’re sitting in front of the bus and saying, “Not today, not on my clock. It’s going to get hard, but I’m going to be here.”

It’s going to be hard either way. Because I want to leave something to the next generation. What we’re doing here it’s not about us, honestly. I won’t get to see it. I don’t think I will get to see a day where we don’t have to think like a white man or ChatGPT. What does it look like to be a white man? We could just say, I’m a leader. I’m this. I don’t have to think about the fact that being a woman alone provides so many nuances that I have to work through before I get to where I’m actually going to go to. It’s so exhausting.

The call really is for that is if you feel inspired to do this, to have the courage because it’s beyond ourselves and we get to be a part of it. How beautiful that is that we leave a little small footprint in the big picture of women, gender parity that we need so much in the era of AI that is accelerating so much. Technology is neutral, but in the hands of bad people, it becomes bad. In the hands of good people, it becomes good. I’m hopeful that we are doing good, that it’s AI for good, that’s AI for women, and that we enable the next generations that come after us.

That they could say, in the era of AI, a group of women stood up against all odds, and they did something big so that we could be here today. How beautiful would that be? I hope that we can be courageous enough. It’s not that it’s, there’s no fear in it. It is fearful. That’s why I’m saying courage. We’re standing up against that fear. I understand very much that fear, and I’m empathetic to it. Beyond that, we can move through it, and we can do something bigger for ourselves and for our next generations.

Emma Fischer: Oh, I think that’s a beautiful ending. I love that you work in tech and I’m working in marketing, but we have the same connecting force, it seems, to our lives, which is doing something for the greater good—and mostly, women—to empower people who don’t have a voice. Thank you so much. It was a beautiful conversation. Could you just let the listeners know where they can find you and more about Empressa? I think a lot of women are going to hear this, myself included, and we’re like, okay, now what do we do?

Miri Rodriguez: I’m so thankful. Thank you for this platform, and thank you for allowing me to share this with your audience and all the women listening. Grateful for all of you. You can find me at mirirod.com, M-I-R-I-R-O-D.com, and also Empressa.ai, that’s E-M-P-R-E-S-S-A, Empressa, that’s an Empress, and there’s a story there as well, Empressa.ai. Of course, on LinkedIn and different channels, at Miri Rod, I’d love to connect, I’d love to answer questions beyond this channel and anything you’d like, I’d love to help.

Emma Fischer: Thank you so, so much for this conversation, and thank you to our listeners. I’m Emma Fischer, and that was the Aspire to Inspire podcast, and I hope to see everybody next time.

Miri Rodriguez: Thank you.