Women are using AI about 25% less than men. Lauren Ingram is on a mission to close that gap before it sets.

We sit down with the founder of AI Girl Gang to talk about the skills gap no one has named yet, and why mothers have the most to gain and the most to lose. Lauren tells us how she built her whole career from her phone on maternity leave, newborn under one arm, talking to tech leaders at 2am between feeds. She shares the early pregnancy loss that sparked a strange creative renaissance, and the name AI Girl Gang itself. And she makes the case for trading the fear of being left behind for curiosity, play, and opting in.

Honest, warm, and a proper nudge to stop watching from the sidelines.

Find Lauren

AI Girl Gang: aigirlgang.tech

Substack: aigirlgang.substack.com

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/ingramlauren

Instagram: @laurennextbigthing

Your brain didn't break when you became a mother. It got an upgrade.

Clinical psychologist Dr Rosanna M joins us on compassion-focused therapy and the three systems that run how we feel: threat, drive and soothe. Motherhood sharpens two of them. You hear the cry before anyone else does. You hold a hundred things in your head at once. The one that quietly slips is soothe, the rest and the steadiness that hold it all together.

So we get practical about getting it back. A grounding exercise you can do mid-feed. The five percent shift. And why a treat is never just a treat.

Warm, clever and genuinely useful. Find Rosanna on Instagram at @DrRosannaM.

• Guided breathing exercise (diaphragmatic breathing with Sophie, Nuffield Health): https://247.nuffieldhealth.com/videos/diaphragmatic-breathing-with-sophie
• Values vs goals, getting a sense of what matters to us again (video): https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-sMFszAaa7C9poytIAmBvA
• The Happiness Trap Bull's Eye worksheet (PDF): https://thehappinesstrap.com/upimages/Long_Bull's_Eye_Worksheet.pdf
• More from Rosanna, Becoming Mum resources: https://becomingmum.co.uk/resources/

This episode is about the body. We spend a lot of time on this show on the neurological side of matrescence, but the physical transformation gets far less honest airtime. This week we change that.

Rose brings her research and coaching background, drawing out the link between movement, the nervous system, and identity. Bianca joins three weeks postpartum, asking the questions she is living through right now. And our first ever guest, Gemma Folkard, brings over a decade of teaching and a down to earth way of talking about the postpartum body.

Gemma is a Pilates and strength trainer, a mother of three, and the founder of Shape Pilates. We talk about why she does not see ambition the way she was taught to, how she built a business around her family rather than the other way round, and why she is wary of the phrase bounce back. She makes the case that softness is not weakness, that most postpartum healing happens where you cannot see it, and that breathing, not the gym, is where new mums should start.

For this episode's term to retire, we get into baby brain and bounce back, and why both deserve to go.

Whether you are in the newborn fog right now or further along and still making sense of it, there is something here for you.

Where to find Gemma

Instagram: @shape_pilates

App: Shape Pilates London (Apple App Store and Google Play)

Website: shape-pilates.com

Sensitivity note: this episode discusses birth trauma, emergency caesarean, and the emotional aftermath of a birth that didn't go to plan. If you're currently pregnant or in early postpartum, please listen with care.

You write a birth plan before you know what birth actually does. Bianca's didn't hold.

Episode eleven is about what happens after. Two weeks on from her son arriving, Bianca sits down with Rose to talk honestly about her emergency caesarean and the shame that followed it. Why she felt she'd failed at something her body was supposed to just do. Why that feeling landed so hard.

This one isn't Rose explaining the science. It's Rose listening, asking, trying to understand it alongside Bianca, using some data along the way. One study found 65% of women reported feelings of failure after birth, and they pointed all of it at themselves.

Then they get into the words. Why "natural birth" carries so much, what it quietly says about every other kind, and why they want it gone.

This is for anyone who has grieved the birth they planned for while loving the baby they got.

Bianca recorded this episode two weeks after giving birth. On the same day, as it happens, that the UK appointed its first ever National Maternity Advisor.

It is a meaningful step. Michelle Welsh MP will work with families, the NHS, and ministers to push for safer, more compassionate care. It happened because women like Louise Thompson and Theo Clarke refused to stop pushing.

But the announcement said nothing about what happens after the hospital door closes. The identity shift of matrescence did not feature. The neurological rewiring did not feature. The return to a workplace with no framework for what just happened to you did not feature.

Bianca is living all of it in real time. And the research backs her up: the brain changes of matrescence are not temporary. They are lasting adaptations. The support infrastructure for them does not exist.

This episode is for anyone who has felt the drop-off. From the moment the hospital door closed behind them to the moment they were expected to function as if nothing fundamental had changed.

This is the episode about what happens when the greatest love of your life arrives in the same 72-hour window as the biggest hormonal crash your body can survive.

Day three: she started crying and didn't stop. Sobbing on the sofa at midnight, leaking milk, howling into a pillow so she wouldn't wake the baby. By day four it shifted into anxiety. Day five, the crying came back. She describes feeling like a stranger to herself at the exact moment she needed to be most capable.

Rose brings the science. Your placenta has been acting as a second endocrine organ for nine months. When it leaves, your hormonal system crashes to baseline in 48 hours. No wind down. Just gone.

Eight in ten women go through this. The midwife calls it "being a bit teary." This episode calls it what it is.

If you're in it, about to be in it, or love someone who is: you are not losing your mind. This is the beginning of the fourth trimester. You deserve more than "it'll pass."

Last episode we laid out the career penalty. The stats, the systemic failures, the cost of becoming a mother in a workplace that wasn't built for you. This episode we flip it.

What if being pushed out of the linear path isn't the end of the story? What if it's the beginning of a bigger one? We get into the science behind why motherhood is actually a leadership accelerator, the power of portfolio careers, and why monetising your own expertise might be the smartest move you make.

We talk practical steps. Consulting, fractional work, buying a business, building income streams alongside your job. Plus how to network in a way that actually works when you're exhausted, pregnant, or juggling a thousand things at once.

This isn't a consolation prize. It's a capability shift. And the women who are getting creative right now aren't opting out. They're building something harder to dismantle.

Bianca spent 15 years engineering her career around the possibility of becoming a mother. Getting to CMO level before she could even think about it. Checking her AMH results. Sitting in an egg freezing clinic surrounded by career women in their late 30s. Doing the maths on when, where, and whether it was safe.

Women working full time earn 83p for every pound men earn. Men's wages rise by 8 to 14% when they become fathers. Same life event. Opposite career outcome. Five years after a first child, a mother's earnings drop by an average of 42%. And fewer than one in five mothers return to full-time work in the first three years.

This is the career penalty. And you feel it in every decision you make before a baby even exists.

Rose is mid-research and what she's finding is specific: the patterns around redundancy and settlement agreements, and the moment women realise they've been managed out rather than supported through. She's mapping when it happens, how it's framed, and who it's happening to.

If you've ever sat at your desk pregnant, working harder than you've ever worked, knowing exactly why, this one is for you. Part two is coming soon and it's a power story.

You’ve planned everything. The hires, the handover, the keeping-in-touch days. And still, somehow, nothing feels settled.

This episode goes inside the pre-leave period - the weeks when you're still delivering, still performing, still in it - while quietly carrying the weight of everything that's about to change.

Bianca shares what it feels like to prepare to step away from the only version of yourself you've ever known. The surrender that feels entirely unnatural. The grief of watching your partner's career accelerate while yours pauses.

Rose brings the research: why the brain's heightened threat response during this period isn't anxiety, it's neurology. What the data shows about the coping strategies women use to protect their professional image - and what they say about it years later. And why the line manager, not HR, is the single biggest factor in whether this experience breaks you or holds you.

If you've ever stood on the edge of the biggest transition of your life and thought, I have no idea who I'm going to be on the other side, this one’s for you.

Content note: this episode touches on birth anxiety and navigating pregnancy without a close support system nearby.

It takes a village to raise a child. Everyone says it. But nobody really tells you that the village doesn't just appear. You have to build it yourself, often while pregnant, while working, and often far from the people who know you best.

Episode five is about what that building actually looks like. The patchwork of support that most women are quietly stitching together on their own. And what happens when pieces of it fall through.

Bianca shares what she's been doing in her third trimester. Working with a doula who insisted on meeting her partner before she'd even begin. Sitting in a pregnancy yoga class in a village hall where two minutes of conversation with other pregnant women did more for her than months of scrolling ever could. And the reality that so much of this costs money, and not everyone has it.

Rose brings the research. Over half of new mothers in the UK report feeling lonely after having a child. One in five experience perinatal mental health difficulties during pregnancy or in the first year. And when women do have real community around them, the difference is significant, not just emotionally, but in birth outcomes, confidence, and the return to work.

If you've ever felt like you should be able to do all of this on your own, this episode is a reminder that you shouldn't have to. And that building the village, as messy and imperfect as it feels, is one of the highest leverage things you can do before your baby arrives.