Women hold some of the most consequential jobs in tech, but they're still not cult figures. Mira Murati was trying to speak. Giant piles of carved meat rested like sleeping babies on banquet tables draped in linens as red as a handmaid's robe. Bartenders served up a cocktail named Zero to One, a nod to the philosophy of Peter Thiel. It was a recent Saturday night in a converted church in San Francisco, and the Foundation for American Innovation, a center-right think tank, was hosting a black-tie affair to hype the new religion of AI. Murati, the founder and CEO of Thinking Machines Lab, was talking about the history of revolutions to a crowd of more than 350 people. The Albanian-born executive had for several years kept a relatively low profile as a VP and then CTO of OpenAI before participating in an unsuccessful coup against Sam Altman and then launching her own $12 billion AI startup. Now, with chatter bouncing off the church walls, Murati's efforts to get her points across were about as successful as that coup: No one seemed to be listening. The woman interviewing Murati asked more than once for people to stop talking or take their conversations outside. I whispered to the friend sitting next to me that this was the second time in a week that I'd seen a woman getting drowned out. Both of us were there to actually hear what Murati had to say. I tried to restrain myself from what I said next, but I sensed my friend was holding back too. "Her hair is amazing, though," I hissed. "Oh my God, I know," she replied immediately. Soon after, President Donald Trump's top science adviser, Michael Kratsios, took the stage.

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We decide on our careers long before we ever step foot in our workplace. We take cues from our family and dramatized media depictions of professionals who often look and act nothing like their real-life counterparts. Therefore, to solve the gender inequality in technical roles, we need to kickstart our efforts in college or even high school – when students are open-minded, and there is still time to make real change. Because later in life, for every dollar men earn – women earn 81 cents. One woman trailblazing change is Professor Daniela Rus, the first woman director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Computer Science Artificial Intelligence Lab, or MIT CSAIL for short.