Questioning the System You’re Inside ft Dr. Sue Black, OBE

What if the biggest thing standing between you and your future isn’t your ability, but whether you believe you belong there? In this episode, host Brenda Darden Wilkerson and Sue talk about how a shy young researcher who dreaded networking found her people at a Women in Science conference in Brussels, then came home and founded BCS Women.

Sue shares how she learned that more than 80% of the roughly 10,000 people at Bletchley Park were women, and how a three-year campaign helped keep it open. The campaign ran on a petition, a letter to The Times, a BBC interview, and one tweet from Stephen Fry that sent her blog from 50 hits a day to 8,000.

The conversation then turns to AI. Sue describes a study her team ran on early large language models: they asked the models to finish “men can” and “women can” 10,000 times each, and the results were very different.

She and Brenda talk about who decides what counts as “normal” in training data, why Sue shows her first-year Durham students Coded Bias , and why she believes technology owes society nothing while the people building it owe everyone a great deal. If you’ve ever been the only one in the room, wondered whether your background disqualified you, or wanted to fix something everyone else had accepted, Sue’s story is a reminder that you can start where you are.

We Talked About A fast-track maths course, a computing degree, and a PhD she didn’t fully understand How a three-year campaign, a letter to The Times, and one tweet from Stephen Fry helped secure £4.6 million to save Bletchley Park, where more than 80% of the codebreakers were women What happened when Sue’s research team asked GPT-2 and GPT-3 to complete “men can” and “women can” 10,000 times each Why Sue says technology owes society nothing, and why the people building it owe everybody a lot Connect with Sue on LinkedIn Chapters: 00:00 Cold Open 00:51 A Word from 01:31 Meet Professor Sue Black, OBE 03:03 Leaving Home at 16 07:59 Starting Over as a Single Mom 09:52 Going Back to School for Computing 12:15 Facing the Fear of Networking 13:02 Founding BCS Women 15:45 Driven by Unfairness 20:07 The Hidden Women of Bletchley Park 22:22 The Campaign to Save Bletchley Park 24:46 One Tweet from Stephen Fry 29:45 What Community Gives You 31:15 Building Confidence with TechMums 35:50 What Real Access to Technology Looks Like 39:42 Testing AI for Gender Bias 43:45 Teaching Bias to First-Year Students 45:50 What Does Technology Owe Society? 48:40 What Excites Sue About AI 50:25 What Worries Sue About AI 52:55 What “B the Way Forward” Means to Sue #BTheWayForward #SueBlack #WomenInTech #BletchleyPark #AIBias #TechMums #ResponsibleAI #DiversityInTech #AnitaB #WomenInSTEM