You Were Never Not Technical.

I spent more than twenty years inside the biggest banks in Australia and New Zealand. Running innovation. Running design. Eventually as a Chief Design Officer.

And in those rooms, full of intelligent, formidable women, I watched, over and over, a magic trick I couldn't explain.

Women who had built the workflow everyone in the room depended on would preface their contribution with the same four words.

"I'm not technical, but, "

I heard it from women explaining, fluently, the exact system architecture they were claiming not to understand. Some days, if I'm honest, I heard it in my own head. The sentence was everywhere, like carpet.

And the strangest part: the men saying confident things about technology frequently knew less than the women apologising about it.

It's Not a Self-Assessment. It's a Recording.

It took me years, and, eventually, the arrival of artificial intelligence, to understand what I was actually hearing. That sentence isn't a self-assessment. It's a recording. Something installed, long ago, by someone else, playing on loop.

Where it came from, who installed it, and why it landed on women in particular is a genuine detective story, it has dates, culprits, marketing budgets and at least one moth. But the short version is this: the idea that technology belongs to a certain type of person (male, young, hoodie-wearing, socially awkward) was not inevitable. It was manufactured. Deliberately. In the 1980s. By people who had something to sell.

Before that, women were the computers. Literally. "Computer" was a job title, and women held it. The first programmers of ENIAC, the world's first general-purpose electronic computer, were six women. The first published computer program was written by a woman in 1843. The programming language that made modern computing possible was designed by a woman. The field was built by women.

And then, over the course of about a decade, the story changed. Not because women left. Because the story was rewritten.

The School That Forgot to Tell Us We Couldn't

I went to Germaine Greer's school. Star of the Sea College, Brighton, Melbourne, a Catholic girls' school with a motto that could double as a startup's: Facta Non Verba. Deeds, not words.

In Year 7, a teacher named Mr Jugovic taught me to write HTML. I built a website. I remember the feeling more precisely than the markup: illumination. Type strange incantations into a grey box, and something you thought of, something that had not existed at morning recess, was suddenly there, on the screen, real, visitable.

Nobody in that room told us computers weren't for girls. It wouldn't have occurred to them. The same school that taught us scripture taught us to code, to design, to create. The nuns' logic was beautifully uncomplicated: here is the world, here are its tools, you are going to need all of them.

Almost thirty years later, my daughter Sienna started Year 7 at the same school. And there, on her timetable: Mr Jugovic. Teaching her Introduction to Technology. The same man. The same subject, a generation on.

Technical confidence isn't a talent. It's an inheritance. Somebody hands it to you. And then it's yours to hand on.

The Machines Learned English

Here is what changed. For most of history, there was a toll-booth between a woman's vision and the finished thing: code, capital, credentials, permission. You could see exactly what your community needed, exactly how the service should work, exactly what the app should do, and unless you could pay the toll, the vision died in you politely.

Then, quietly, in our lifetime, the machines learned English.

The gap between imagining a thing and making a thing has collapsed to the width of a sentence. Describe it, and it begins to exist. Which means the entire remaining barrier, the only toll-booth still standing, is the recording. The four words. The story about yourself that somebody else installed.

You were never not technical. You were just told a story about yourself that wasn't true. And now the tools have changed so completely that the story can't even pretend to hold.

What to Do With This

Next time you catch yourself saying "I'm not technical, but, ", pause. Notice the recording. You don't have to believe it just because it's playing.

The question isn't whether you're technical enough to use AI. The question is: what do you want to make? Because if you can describe it, you can begin.

The women who built the foundations of computing didn't wait for permission. They didn't preface their contributions with apologies. They saw the machine. They interrogated it. They wrote the programs.

You're next in that line. The keys are already in your hands.