I fed Gemini, Google's AI tool, my old resume, my current info, case studies, and the kinds of roles I wanted, and asked it to write me a new resume. Simple. Except it wasn’t. The first thing I noticed was the softening.

The clearest example, and the one that still makes me want to toss my laptop across the room: it took the project I'm most proud of in my entire career and filed it under "community service."

In 2013, the Executive Director of Ronald McDonald House Charities and I brainstormed a way to solve a major problem they faced. Families with sick kids flew into Edmonton for life-saving surgeries and cancer treatments from all over the world, at any hour of the day or night.

We came up with an app that would walk families through a tour of the House at their own pace, in their own language. As they moved through each room, pop-ups would tell them about the amenities and support offered to them.

I translated the vision into a flow. I built the storyboard, the tech specs, and the risk-and-reward analysis. Then I met with agencies until I found a team that could build it. We got a 50k grant and made it happen. After launch, it was requested by RMHC homes internationally.

On the resume Gemini wrote, all of this became a limp little one-liner on how I assisted with a new system for communicating directly with families. The project I'm proudest of, flattened into a footnote. It turned me into a helper who pitched in a little. Not the architect.

I've spent over 20 years building demand-generation and go-to-market campaigns for companies by identifying leaks in their sales funnels and fixing them. My analysis and fixes are regularly met with defensiveness and pushback, mostly from men.

So I adapted. I'd lay my ideas and my data on the table and wait for one of the guys in the room to pick them up, repeat them as his own, and take the credit, because that was the surefire way to make sure the work got done.

This ended the day I decided I was done making myself smaller so someone else could feel bigger. So I did what any data nerd does when something feels off. I ran a test. I took the exact same information and asked Gemini to write a resume for Jeff, not Jennifer.

When I put the two side by side, the difference wasn't in the facts. It was in the framing. Jennifer’s volunteer work was "community service." Jeff's was "leadership". Jennifer "assisted with" and "collaborated on." Jeff "engineered" and "architected."