981 Stephanie Georges:

Wings of Inspired Business Podcast EP981 – Host Melinda Wittstock Interviews Stephanie Georges

Melinda Wittstock:

Coming up on Wings of Inspired Business:

Stephanie Georges:

One of the things I’m most excited about for AI is that we as women have the ability to form it the way we want. I think it’s important to just know it and really understand it.. What we’re doing and what’s beautiful about what’s happening with AI now is that we’re creating a small language model that sits on top of this large language model. And this small language model is being trained for women. So, it is clearly defined by what women, you know, informed by women with content and resources defined by women for women. So, when we talk about heart attacks and symptoms of heart attacks, they’re not generic symptoms of heart attacks. They’re heart attack symptoms for women. When we talk about workplace challenges, they’re not generic workplace challenges. They’re challenges for women. 

Melinda Wittstock:

When a bill comes in the mail, we can ignore it. Problem is, it doesn’t go away. It just gets bigger. So too with all things AI. Ignoring it is like ignoring the Internet in around 1998. For AI to work for us and not against us, it’s vital women step up both to shape its development, and its application. Stephanie Georges, the co-founder of the Meraki Dignity Project, is doing just that with her immersive AI platform dedicated to restoring dignity for women over 50.

Melinda Wittstock:

Hi, I’m your host Melinda Wittstock and a happy belated Mother’s Day!  If you’re a mom, and yes, a dog or cat mom counts, I hope you had a wonderful day and took time to truly appreciate yourself. Today on the show we’re talking about dignity for women over 50, and how an immersive AI platform is making an important difference.. If you’re new here, this is the place where we share the inspiring entrepreneurial journeys, epiphanies, and practical advice from successful female founders … so you have everything you need at your fingertips to build the business and life of your dreams. I believe in paying it forward as a five-time serial entrepreneur, so I started this podcast to catalyze an ecosystem where women entrepreneurs mentor, promote, buy from, and invest in each other. Because together we’re stronger, and we all soar higher when we fly together and lift as we climb. If you’ve been listening to any of the past 980 episodes, please help us get the word out about the show. Please subscribe so you never miss an episode. Tell your friends and colleagues, share the episode and leave a quick 5-star rating and review on Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. We really appreciate it. Thank you! 

Melinda Wittstock:

Today we meet an inspiring entrepreneur on a mission to help women over 50 navigate key life transitions with dignity and intention. Stephanie Georges is the co-founder of The Meraki Dignity Project, a movement with an immersive AI-enabled platform offering evidence-based and women-informed resources to foster an empowered community.

Melinda Wittstock:

Stephanie began her career as a top-ranked Wall Street analyst during the telecom deregulation era before moving into C-suite roles in telecommunications and technology, and all too often found herself the only woman in the room. She’s spent four decades guiding organizations through disruption, reinvention and large-scale transformation, and as a Harvard Advanced Leadership Initiative Senior Fellow, Stephanie began to think about how to restore and reimagine dignity, equity and agency for women.

Melinda Wittstock:

With the Meraki Dignity Project, Stephanie is building a powerful platform to help women get past the pitfalls of the traditional zero-sum narrative around gender equity. She says true dignity is expansive and inherent, and that community, clarity, and a mindset of abundance are crucial to systems-level change. Today we talk about overcoming persistent barriers like the pay gap and venture funding inequalities, to the importance of listening, supporting, and lifting each other up. And yes, we talk about AI—in particular, why women’s voices are needed to make AI work for us as women. 

Melinda Wittstock:

Let’s put on our wings with the inspiring Stephanie Georges.

[INTERVIEW]

Melinda Wittstock:

Stephanie, welcome to Wings.

Stephanie Georges:

Thank you. So great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Melinda Wittstock:

So, the Meraki Dignity Project. This is all about restoring dignity for women. Where have we lost our dignity?

Stephanie Georges:

Well, that’s, that’s a good place to start. And I really appreciate your sort of picking up on the word dignity. In our project. So, you know, as we started to explore this system change on how we think about equity and women and how women have been in these systems that are not designed for them, we started on this journey about 2 years ago. It’s been a longer journey for me personally, but in terms of this endeavor at the Meraki Dignity Project, and it started to become clear to us that the narrative about, around equity was broken. And what I mean by broken is it had kind of been co-opted as a zero-sum game. So, think of it as women are winning at men’s expense, and that really created tension that has played out in a lot of recidivism. In terms of women and their opportunity.

Stephanie Georges:

So, in that process, we kind of started to think about dignity and the unique aspect of dignity, which is inherent in all of us, and so it cannot be taken away. That’s what we believe, you know, the dignity. A lot of, you know, dignity kind of is a big word and it conjures up a lot of feelings, but in the end, it’s a In a way, it’s generative. The more people that kind of honor people’s dignity, the more dignity there is, and it doesn’t come at the expense of someone else. Right.

Melinda Wittstock:

So, this gets into this whole scarcity versus abundance paradigm, like this whole idea that scarcity thinkers have that just because one person or a group of people are succeeding, it means that they are not. This idea of there’s this scarcity, there’s so much scarcity that you can’t be happy for someone else’s success. And that plays into the whole dynamic between women and men. Just because women are doing really well and are self-actualized and whatnot doesn’t have to— and it doesn’t take away anything from men as long as we’re thinking in a more abundant-minded place. So how does that play into—

Stephanie Georges:

It does. I love the word abundant because I think that— I mean, we’ve been thinking about it as generative. Absolutely, that dignity allows us to sort of think about things or reframe the narrative around something that can grow and can expand. And therefore, it’s not a zero-sum or one loses at, you know, one gains at the expense of others. And I think, you know, what we’ve been finding is that’s a really important way to think about system change as well. Because a lot of times when we think about these big systemic issues, like bias, you know, like sort of the zero-sum game that we’re talking about, what happens is people design things or think about it as I have to take share away from somebody else or I have to take something away. But the beauty of thinking about system changes and thinking about dignity is they both give you a chance to think, to your point, expansively, and the pie is just much bigger. So that’s why we love dignity, not that we don’t feel that that doesn’t mean that we’re not thinking about equity, but I think dignity gives us ground to allow people to think we all can win.

Melinda Wittstock:

Right. I mean, the other interesting thing that we see in our society right now is just such a reaction, right, against women because women have progressed. And so, you have a certain cadre of men that are very threatened by that, are just very threatened by strong, quote unquote, strong women. So how can we be in our strength Because our strength really is our dignity, right? And if we allow our strength to be taken or we allow all this to, I don’t know, cause us to minimize ourselves or shrink ourselves or like minimize our voices because we’re afraid of offending anybody, I mean, that to me implies a loss of dignity.

Stephanie Georges:

I agree. And actually, I have— we could go on this for quite a while, but I also feel that it works both ways, not only minimizing yourself, but also kind of schools of thought that suggest women have to be like men in order to succeed. So, it’s both ways. It’s how women have been in a position, and I would argue that this has been going on for a while. I do think that to my point earlier, there’s been some, there’s just been some recidivism, there’s been some pushback and a lot of pressure on women to kind of shrink back and hide. And DEI programs are going away and all of that. Stuff. But I think that what we’re, you know, it’s not only shrinking, but it’s also kind of contorting into being personas that you’re not.

Stephanie Georges:

And I have to say, one of the things that, one of the things that’s inspiring me right now is that I am seeing women demanding to be seen finally. And, and I’m not suggesting that this is a moment where everything is going to change in one instance. This is a process. But I think I think we are seeing examples of women rethinking their careers, women role models like Lindsey Vonn and Chloe Zhao and Alysa Liu, kind of giving us a path to sort of say, I’m demanding to be seen for who I am. So that’s been encouraging. I completely agree with you that women have been asked to shrink and be marginalized. But I am more of an optimist and starting to see that this has been inspiring.

Melinda Wittstock:

Right. Yeah, it’s true. I mean, it’s funny right now though, because you see all these, I don’t know, efforts like, I don’t know, this whole tradwife thing, right? And then being advocated by women who are CEOs and fully in their power. And it’s like, wait a minute, you’re advocating for something that you’re not.

Stephanie Georges:

Like, what is going on?

Melinda Wittstock:

What is up with that?

Stephanie Georges:

Well, I think one thing to think about, or what we keep thinking about as it relates to dignity and coming back to that, is it really is about honoring people for who they are. So, you know, one of the things that we’ve, you know, one of our values is, you know, is obviously we’re interdependent. We have values around how we allow we allow women to be seen for who they are. So rather than creating places where we’re judging, I think what Dignity allows us to do is kind of see that there’s a lot more connection between women. And we can get into that in terms of how you create community and how you use AI to leverage creating community. But I think that there is— I hear you 100%. It’s very confusing. It’s very conflicting.

Stephanie Georges:

But again, if you sort of pull the veil back and sort of say, look, I’m gonna, I’m gonna honor someone’s dignity, I’m gonna respect them for who they are. I think that it sort of gets us away from this fragmentation and, um, defining people, you know, allowing society to define women.

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah, I mean, that’s it.

Stephanie Georges:

I mean, you sound skeptical.

Melinda Wittstock:

Oh no, I’m, I’m not. I just think there’s— I agree that there’s room for women to be anything that they want to be, right? But there’s so much judgment. There’s judgment from men, but there’s also this other bit where women really, I don’t know, judge each other. And I, and I, I find that that’s kind of almost lacking in dignity. Like, it’s— if we want to be free to be ourselves, we have to let other people do that as well. So, in this whole paradigm of like being, say for instance, women who are up against a lot of structural issues. For instance, you know, close to my heart, trying to raise venture capital money. You know, less than 2% of women succeed with that, right? Even though we return anywhere from 60 to 72 cents more on every dollar invested than exclusively male teams.

Melinda Wittstock:

And yet the 2% number hasn’t changed in 30 years. So, like a real structural issue, or just even equal pay stuff that’s still unresolved. You’ve got all these kind of structural issues. And we say on this podcast all the time that we can soar higher when we fly together.  It’s necessary that we all step up for each other, but also in that dignity in our full diversity. So that to me implies getting out of judgment and that’s easier said than done. Like I’m just—

Stephanie Georges:

Well, I totally agree with you. And I would add, absolutely completely agree with you. And I want to keep going on that thread. I want to pull on that thread a little bit more. Women, you know, we have been because of the zero-sum narrative. I’m not suggesting this is entirely the reason, but, you know, it is a game of musical chairs. And women, you know, whether it’s in venture capital, which absolutely those numbers are staggering, and they’ve not changed for years. And no matter how much women talk about the 2%, you know, the number has not moved.

Stephanie Georges:

Same thing in corporate, you know, board seats for a while, we were getting up to 30%. But then that’s kind of retracted. Same with women in leadership. I think part of the challenge is as women, you know, in an environment and a system that kind of creates this feeling that there are only a few seats for women, I think it is hard for women to just kind of find it within themselves maybe to work together or feel that there’s only room for a few. And I think as long as we can continue to open the aperture again, with, you know, using dignity as one lever to do that sort of honoring and creating space for people to sort of see each other for who they are, I think those seats can start to open. Again, it’s going to require a much bigger system change. The second thing that I would add— so I absolutely agree with you. The second thing I would add is for women, you know, one of the premises of the way we’ve structured our technology platform is thinking about helping women and supporting women in having clarity.

Stephanie Georges:

So, part of the challenge is that there’s, there’s not a lot of women-informed insights out there, whether it’s in health or finance. So, the more we can create clarity women had the ability to gain confidence because now they have the knowledge to make decisions more confidently, and that gives them agency. So, this idea of, right, we know we’re operating in a system that’s not designed for us, but if we can within that system support women by giving them clarity or giving them the resources that brings clarity, that allows them to be more confident and to your point, not contorting or feeling marginalized. And that starts to create agency.

Melinda Wittstock:

So, these are really, really big questions because, you know, like, not all men are the same, not all women are the same. I think within us as women, we, we have both masculine and feminine kind of archetypal characteristics, right? Um, within men, like, the men have some feminine, archetypal feminine characteristics, like men who are you know, more empathetic than most, or men that are more intuitive than most.

Melinda Wittstock:

On the women’s side, women who are, you know, more decisive or action oriented. All these different paradigms. Isn’t it really about just being sort of in balance kind of within ourselves and like leveraging the best of these characteristics?

Stephanie Georges:

Yes. I mean, I think in an idealized world, absolutely. And that would be, you know, that is— that’s a— that’s a— that’s a very, you know, like with anything, having a perspective that gives us something to, to shoot for. I think you’re absolutely right. It’s just how do we get from here to there in steps that allow— and that I agree, how do we get from here to there in exactly baby steps?

Melinda Wittstock:

So, the type of women, I suspect with your Wall Street background, certainly with mine, where I spent most of my life in my 20s, 30s, into my 40s, as the only woman in the room. So invariably, you end up finding yourself leaning into your more masculine characteristics. I mean, it’s almost like sort of survival, right? Let’s take that kind of environment for a woman who’s in a male-dominated field, um, either corporate or entrepreneurship or like whatever she’s doing, and how to exhibit that strength and confidence and whatnot, um, but still, you know, maintain her feminine dignity, right? What’s the best way for someone in that context? Let’s break that one down first.

Stephanie Georges:

Well, I think, you know, I think for me, I can really speak for myself. And again, sort of some of these ideas that we’re bringing into how we’re thinking about designing our platform is really building your own personal confidence, which is having the clarity around what you’re doing and having the confidence that what you’re doing makes sense. And I know that sounds a lot easier when you say it that way, but I think sort of going into a room and recognizing that you are, you know, you’re informed, you have the resources that you need to make the decisions. And I think that recognizing that it’s not every meeting or every environment that you’re in isn’t necessarily going to be perfect.. So, it’s not going to be a straight line, and that doesn’t mean you have to give up. I think that’s one of the— I think it’s easy to go in and say, I’m the only woman in a room, I’m really fighting hard and sort of burn out. But I think sort of giving yourself the space and giving yourself permission and recognizing that you are informed, you know what you’re doing, you have confidence going into the room and not necessarily changing yourself, but kind of exuding that confidence. I think that’s one thing.

[PROMO CREDIT]

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Melinda Wittstock:

And we’re back with Stephanie Georges, co-founder of the Meraki Dignity Project.

[INTERVIEW CONTINUES]

Stephanie Georges:

I think, you know, what I’ve done, what I did early in my career just to get started was just force myself because I was in rooms, like you said, very much probably like you were, male-dominated, whether it was on where I began my career on Wall Street or ended my career in the defense industry, both really very— in fact, I was the only person in the room who actually had hair on their head. So, there was— it was just forcing myself to ask questions and not be talked over and just kind of creating those boundaries for myself. I think for me, having the knowledge, going in confident, being prepared. Secondly, not allowing myself to be talked over. But to your point, the third thing is not contorting myself, not apologizing. I think one of my pet peeves is women apologize all the time and say, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I’m really kind of control, you know, resisting the urge to apologize for behaving or acting or operating in the way that you operate. I don’t know if that’s— I mean, that’s— those are some of the things that I found helpful.

Stephanie Georges:

And even still, I will say It’s been, I mean, you know, it’s been, it’s been an uphill battle for 30 years.

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah, it really is. I mean, and there’s other women who just sort of reject that. Oh man, it’s going to be so hard to fit myself into that. So go to more quote unquote feminized professions, or increasingly I’ve seen this trend in entrepreneurship, just like all female teams. And just choose to just kind of, you know, and that’s sort of a, I guess, a different approach.

Stephanie Georges:

And I don’t think there’s a right answer. I think if you sort of take a step back, there are a lot of different paths to system change. And, you know, one of the things that gets me really excited about, you know, thinking about it to the discussion we had earlier, sort of taking a step back and thinking about it from 30,000 feet, you know, there could be a lot of different initiatives and a lot of sort of ways to get to system change. The key is, in my view, is it’s all about power, right? So, what is power? Power is if you have something that I want and I want what you have, then you have power. I think one of the challenges for women, or one of the huge opportunities for women, is we have a ton more power than we believe we do, right? As consumers, we have an amazing amount of power. $38 trillion wealth transfer happening. Women are the largest beneficiaries of it. That is power.

Stephanie Georges:

If we can aggregate our efforts again, so whether it’s, you know, all women organizations or, you know, women sort of leaning in, you know, there are a lot of different paths to get there. But I think to the extent we can look at it as we are powerful, and we have the ways and the ability to wield that power if we can act more collectively rather than be fragmented. So, any effort that allows women, from my perspective, to defragment and not be competitive with each other but really sort of coalesce and support each other allows us to galvanize that power and drive system change. Exactly.

Melinda Wittstock:

So, tell me, what was it that inspired you to launch the Meraki Dignity Project?

Stephanie Georges:

Yeah, exactly what we’ve just been talking about. I think all of these things, and I think it was just this slow drip of years and years and years of feeling like, um, you know, I’m riding my bike uphill in the wrong gear. And not that I didn’t love what I did or I wasn’t, you know, kind of good at what I did. I felt that it was just, you know, it was grinding. And I did find, you know, as I got older, and I think this is another bias that we didn’t really talk about directly, but you started to see as a woman that you were being passed over a lot more readily. As you got into your 50s for a variety of reasons. And it just took an incredible amount of effort to really continue to stay in the game, both in terms of the pressures that, you know, the headwinds, but also just the energy and frankly, the joy I was getting out of it. And that’s where, you know, like I said, it happened over time.

Stephanie Georges:

It wasn’t like a big light bulb moment. But at one point I was like, you know what, I think I could have more impact supporting women at this point in my career by stepping out and developing a movement through the Moroccan Dignity Project than I can trying to fight it within the corporate organization. So that’s what inspired me. Amazing. Amazing.

Melinda Wittstock:

It has this immersive AI-enabled platform. So, tell me about that. Like, describe what that actually means.

Stephanie Georges:

Yeah. Thank you for asking. We just came out of our, what I would call, alpha phase, which is really kind of a very crude prototype. And what we found is that, you know, what we do is women kind of access the platform and they are onboarded through a series of questions. And what’s been interesting about those questions is some of the experience we had, I mean, it’s a very sort of trusted, safe environment. So, we don’t know, it’s pretty anonymized, it’s anonymized, but women come in and they answer these questions. And what we were starting to see, I’ll be honest, in the first week women were coming on and then dropping off, and we were panicking. We were like, oh my gosh, we failed, this is a disaster.

Stephanie Georges:

And what we ended up finding was, as women started to answer these questions, they realized they needed space and time. And so, they would re-enter and re-log in and sort of give themselves time to answer these questions. About, you know, are you being served with the resources you need in health? Are you being, you know, are, do you find that you have the tools and framework you need at work? So, there were questions that really require, you know, what is Meraki for you? And we can get into that, but there were questions that really required some time and space. And what we found was women would spend 20, 30 minutes kind of engaging with our AI ally, our AI agent Sophie, on these questions. And once they answered the questions, what we could start to do is populate their dashboard with resources that were specifically geared to what they were looking for. And what was important about the resources that we started to populate their dashboard with was that they were all evidence-based and women-informed. So, they were not sort of generic resources, and it was really looking at women and the resources and what they needed holistically. Because when things happen, when things hit the fan, it’s not just health and it’s not just work and it’s not just finance.

Stephanie Georges:

It all happens at once and it all kind of plays out in the white spaces. So, the AI is both engaging you, so the agent is engaging The AI is allowing us to serve up resources and tune them to you as a woman, what we call as an N of 1. And then the AI is able to help you find and engage with community that are, that are in a similar place than you so that you don’t feel alone. So, it’s really those 3 ways that we’re integrating AI. AI for us is not the end. It’s the means, right?

Melinda Wittstock:

I mean, life’s a journey, you know. So, this is all geared really at women over 50 who are going through profound life changes. So there’s all the, the changes of, say, your kids are going off to college, or you’re now— like, I, I see so many women in their 50s launching businesses, for instance, or finally it’s like, I have the space to actually do the thing that I’ve always wanted to do but I’ve put off, or like just perimenopause, menopause, just all these different things. So, what tend to be the things that people are asking for the most? And, and give me an example of some of the resources that populate.

Stephanie Georges:

It’s such a good question, and I’m glad you asked it, because I— and first of all, I just want to, you know, it’s really interesting, we started this thinking, oh, 50+, and then as we were going through this and doing one of the things we did spend time doing research. We talked to 1,000 women. We did quantitative and qualitative research. And in one of our focus groups, the woman was like, you know what? Stop putting a number on us. And that was like an awakening. You know, one of my, one of my pieces of advice would be just always listen to the customer and bring the customer into the room. So, so while it is really our cohort is sort of 45 to 60, we do think it’s really more about women who are navigating a transition. And that does tend to happen more acutely at those ages.

Stephanie Georges:

So, what we’ve learned from our research and from just our alpha and early pilot is that there are 4 moments, you know, 4 sort of triggers that really come up over and over again. They are: my work life is not manageable. You know, I’m really not loving what I’m doing at work, whether it’s work being defined as a career or work being defined, you know, loosely by how the woman sees what her work is. The second one is, you know what, I’m, um, I’m really concerned my finances are— I’m unclear about whether I’m going to be able to have enough, or I’m unclear about even where my finances are or what I need to do. And this is a big area for women where there’s a deficit in sort of clarity around financial and financial planning. The third area is health. I’ve had a health event, one of my family members have had a health event. My parent was a big one.

Stephanie Georges:

It’s sometimes my, you know, someone in my family, but that’s caused me to have to rethink where I’m going. And then the final one is relationships and sort of obviously I’m going through a divorce or I’m changing my life status Or just, I really feel like I don’t have connections to anyone. I feel really alone, and I feel that I’ve, you know, I’ve worked all my life, but I don’t really have a community of women or a community around me. So those are the 4 big moments that trigger these pivots and that what women find really appealing about being able to spend time and think through what are the resources I need. The— what’s, what’s been most interesting is as women stay on, when they come to the platform, they generally start with career. That’s the highest pain point. I’m really, you know, I’m tired of my job, or I’m tired of what I’m doing, or I’m feeling like I’m, you know, cycling uphill as I described. But as they stay on the platform, and the women that stay and engage and get resources and start to see, get clearer, they evolve into relationships.

Stephanie Georges:

And that becomes sort of a bigger, you know, that becomes a bigger area and a bigger pain point, which really gets to our view that while women will come to the platform for resources, the real benefit of what we’re doing is the ability to kind of create community. So, I don’t know if that answered your question, but those are, those are definitely some of the pain points. And, and it’s over and over again, um, those four. And I think what we’re finding is as women feel that they are in a trusted place and they can, they can see more clearly and understand, um, they really move from sort of easy-to-talk-about subjects to harder-to-talk-about subjects, right?

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah, there’s a certain level of, of comfort there. And I mean, one of the things many women are grappling with is just the use of AI in their lives. I mean, they’re just generally consumers. It runs the gamut of, you know, real enthusiasts to people who are very nervous about it for a lot of good reasons, because a lot of the kind of Silicon Valley, you know, you know, move fast, break things bros have no guardrails around any of this stuff. So, it sort of feels like, oh my God, so it’s going to be women who have to clean up this mess.

Stephanie Georges:

No kidding.

Melinda Wittstock:

So many startups from women who are like, we’re the safety layer for AI in healthcare, we’re the safety layer for AI in education, or like, we’re the— like, I don’t know, like, it just seems like it’s become women’s work to kind of clean this up. So how are you seeing that play out as someone who’s actually, you know, pioneering in AI, you know, with your own company?

Stephanie Georges:

Well, one of the things that’s really important, and one of the things I’m most excited about for AI is that we as women have the ability to form it the way we want. And I really want to leave your listeners with that because I think if you’re out there and you haven’t engaged with AI; I think it’s important to just know it and really understand it. Doesn’t mean owned by it, but really understand it. So that’s number one. But what we’ve done, and it’s been very important to us, is we see the opportunity to create, you know, there are all these big, large language models, ChatGPT and Claude, and they’re all, you know, they have their own pluses and minuses. What we’re doing and what’s beautiful about what’s happening with AI now is that we’re creating a small language model that sits on top of this large language model. And this small language model is being trained for women. So, it is clearly defined by what women, you know, informed by women with content and resources defined by women for women.

Stephanie Georges:

So, when we talk about heart attacks and symptoms of heart attacks, they’re not generic symptoms of heart attacks. They’re heart attack symptoms for women. When we talk about workplace challenges, they’re not generic workplace challenges. They’re challenges for women. And to your point, when we think about what is the tone and what are the— what’s the safety requirements around our platform, we think about it in terms of what is going to make women feel safe, seen, and supported, and not kind of be the Wild West. So, what I love about where we are now, and as you know, it could go a million different directions, but what we’re seeing is the opportunity to create a curated and defined language model that really serves women so we can create an example of what dignity looks like on AI.

Melinda Wittstock:

Right. So, it’s like really just making sure, because part of the issue also with AI, because it’s all historic information, is essentially it is, it’s like, you know, learning from the past. So The past has a lot of biases in it.

Stephanie Georges:

Exactly. Well, one of my big— here’s one of my favorite anecdotes, which is true. I was talking to an HR leader, and she was talking to me about how she got trapped in the AI web, to your point, for lack of a better word. And what happened was, She was hiring a leader, a C-suite leader for her company. And it turned out that she was down to 2 candidates. And she was coming back with a salary range for this woman. So, she put it in her AI-based model. And guess what? It created an offer letter for this woman at 80 cents on the dollar.

Stephanie Georges:

Because you know what? The whole benchmark group for women in that role was 80 cents on the dollar. To your point, it was basically leveraging historical data and perpetuating the wage gap. And she didn’t even, you know, It wasn’t even intentional on her part as the HR leader. It was really just kind of leveraging the toolkit that she had been given. And because it was trained with bias, she was essentially, had she not caught it, would have been perpetuating the wage gap. So that’s a perfect example of what we need to do is start to train AI. We as women need to do is start to really play a role in training AI to be incorporating a different view, incorporating women’s perspectives with, like I said, whether it’s health, finance, career, relationships. And that’s going to take a lot of effort, a lot of time, but I think it’s worth it.

Stephanie Georges:

100%.

Melinda Wittstock:

Tell me a little bit about the business model and how it works. 

Stephanie Georges:

Yeah, so we are, we are, we have a B2B and a B2C type model and then we have an insights business. The way the model works is women can come on and subscribe. We’re still in pilot and pre-pilot, so you really can’t pay right now, but you can come to our website, and I’ll give you some ways to do that later. But you can come and, and test it and play with it and keep coming back because it’s evolving. But the idea is women can come in and subscribe. Monthly subscription or a membership, and they will have access to the platform, to the resources, and to the community. And that’s, you know, and it’s a safe, secure environment. Again, evidence-based, women-informed resources, community, and that will continue to grow.

Stephanie Georges:

Um, we have also already have several B2B customers who are who are on our pilot and helping us really operate with groups of women. These are women’s organizations or organizations that have women membership. And what they’re doing is they’re bringing their entire organization onto our platform. So, 100 women, 200 women, 300 women who are, getting more and more access to resources and insight, as I was saying, whole health resources and insight. And what happens there is that the organization pays for the subscribers in a B2B model. The members have access to the community and to the resources as well, and to Sophie, the AI agent. And the organization gets aggregated insights and knowledge about their membership base. Again, not individualized, but aggregate, so that they can develop programming and, and, and serve their membership base in a way that’s much more informed.

Stephanie Georges:

So that’s the insights business. We, we then are able to monetize those insights with those individual organizations so that they have a better sense of how to serve their membership. And that could be a healthcare organization, a doctor’s office that that serves women, a financial services provider, a brokerage office, and an alumni association. These are the types of B2B organizations that are really excited about being able to give their membership access to tools, to an AI platform, to customized resources, while at the same time they’re able to understand better and serve their constituents in ways that they hadn’t been able to.

Melinda Wittstock:

Right.

Stephanie Georges:

Amazing.

Melinda Wittstock:

So, what’s the best way for people to find you and interact with you and become customers of Meraki, whether on the data insight side or whether as an individual woman who, you know, wants to take advantage of all the resources that you’re providing?

Stephanie Georges:

We want to co-create this. The best way is to sort of be patient with us, but also come on to our website, www.moroccidignity.com. And on the website, on right the first page, there’s a link to our platform. And as I said, you can kind of go on to it, play with it, completely anonymous, completely safe. We don’t even ask for an email address at this point, so you can just kind of Test drive it and then give us your feedback. There’s a form right in the platform that allows us to learn more about what you like, what you don’t like, what resources work, what resources you would love us to include so you can help us co-create, which is back to where this conversation started about how do we get women sort of rowing in the, in the same direction. So that’s one way, and then just keep coming back. You know, we’ll be growing and evolving.

Stephanie Georges:

We’re building out a feature set. So, by mid-June, we will have a complete rich feature set that will look really different, entirely different from where we are now. So that’s one way. The other way you can just support us and help us and really stay in touch with us and learn about us is— and that’s for B2B and B2C customers. So that’s one way. The second way is to just follow us. You know, we have a Substack and that’s giving you a good sense of where we are. So, if you go to Substack and go to Meraki Dignity, subscribe, it’s free.

Stephanie Georges:

We’ll keep you up to date, we’ll give you iterations, we’ll share resources. There’s a little community that we’re creating so you can start to really engage with the Meraki Dignity project team and the community that we’re building even before the platform is fully built.

Melinda Wittstock:

Okay, that’s amazing. Wow, Stephanie, thank you so much for putting on your wings and flying with us today.

Stephanie Georges:

Thank you. It’s been a great pleasure.

[INTERVIEW ENDS]

Melinda Wittstock:

Stephanie Georges is the co-founder of the Meraki Dignity Project.

Melinda Wittstock:

Please take a moment to give us a five-star rating and review the podcast on Apple and Spotify—it helps more entrepreneurs like you find the secret sauce to support and grow their businesses.

Melinda Wittstock:

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