About Us
Our Mission is to help women engage AI with curiosity, confidence, and conscience; not because they’re afraid of being replaced, but because they deserve a hand in shaping what comes next.
Jessica L. Parker, Ed.D.
I’m an educator, researcher, and founder who has spent my career at the messy intersection of higher education, technology, and change. My work explores how intelligence is taught, shared, and shaped — especially as generative AI reshapes what it means to learn, mentor, and build expertise.
In 2017, I founded Dissertation by Design, not yet aware of how much of academia operates like a for-profit industry or how predatory recruitment practices harm the very students it claims to serve. That early naiveté became a strength; it kept me focused on the people in front of me — scholars trying to finish something that mattered. In 2024, I acquired The Dissertation Coach, and now lead both organizations while continuing to supervise doctoral students and conduct research at the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences.
In 2022, I co-founded Moxie, an AI edtech startup, with Kimberly. We built it to democratize research support. What we learned was sobering: edtech often rewards efficiency over care and growth over integrity. We waited too long to raise, couldn’t perform the blind optimism the startup world demands, and realized we couldn’t — and didn’t want to — compete with “free.” So we closed it… not in defeat, but in clarity.
Today, through Women talkin’ ’bout AI, we’re exploring how women can engage AI with curiosity, conscience, and care — not to keep up, but to help shape what comes next.
Research at the intersection of technology and education
Kimberly Pace Becker, Ph.D.
I’ve spent my life trying to understand how meaning gets made… not the rules from English class, but the patterns that appear when you listen closely to how people actually use language. I was the kid who talked too much and the teenager stringing ethernet across our house in rural Mississippi just to get online. That curiosity eventually became two decades of teaching and research.
I taught academic communication for ten years at a community college, then another ten at Iowa State, where I earned my PhD in Applied Linguistics and Technology. My research used corpus analysis to study how meaning, stance, and power take shape in writing. I thought I was studying language; in hindsight, I was studying the logic that now underpins large language models.
When ChatGPT arrived, I recognized the patterns immediately. Jessica and I believed we could influence how AI was used in education, but edtech moved at a speed that confused hype with progress.
After leaving both academia and edtech, I joined a nonprofit continuing care retirement community, where my work blends communication, relationship-building, and data insight to help people make one of the most meaningful decisions of their lives.
My throughline has never changed: I study how language shapes belonging and understanding — and what shifts when machines mediate that process. Now, through Women Talkin’ ’Bout AI, I’m asking what feels most urgent: How do we want to communicate? How do we want to decide? And what parts of human intelligence are worth protecting as we build what comes next?
What We Believe
Women belong at the center of the AI conversation — not as consumers or critics, but as authors of its evolution.
Technology designed from the patriarchal vantage points of speed, scale, and efficiency is incomplete.
As women, we bring another blueprint: one grounded in care, equity, and creativity.
When women engage AI, they make it wiser.
When women design with AI, they make it fairer.
When women lead with AI, they make it human.
We don’t just want smarter systems.
We want wiser ones. And women will help write them.
