Jasbir Kooner is the Director of IT, Business Relationship Management and Cybersecurity at Englober. She is pursuing her PhD in science and information technology at Université du Québec en Outaouais and previously completed her MBA at Concordia University. Jasbir is a Fellow and Ambassador at the Catalyst.
By the time I talk to Jasbir, her morning is long in the making. She starts her day at 6 AM when she heads to the gym. She admits it’s hard, particularly in the winter months, but she doesn’t miss it. Following her workout, she comes home and sits down to journal. For most of her life she avoided it, along with meditation, because it made her feel vulnerable, but now she finds it helps her clarify her thoughts. Then she makes 20-30 pages of headway in her weekly book project. Later in the day, she will make room for meditation. As we talk, she is preparing for a work trip to England. It is likely going to rain. “It’s good to not look at the weather, it’s constantly changing.” She is seated in an academic office, working on her PhD. But there is much more to her story.
Jasbir is a first generation Canadian and the first in her family to graduate from university. Her parents grew up in India, where her mother finished her schooling at the fifth or sixth grade, and her father at the tenth. “There were street smarts,” Jasbir said. “We had that.” When they arrived in Canada, her father started a taxi business. As Jasbir grew older, she would help. They valued education, but they did not always understand their daughter’s studies. Jasbir majored in computer science and information technology and she started her career in tech, eventually needing space from the sector.
But we’ll get back to that. First, what brought Jasbir to the Catalyst?
Jasbir had applied to a tech conference in Montreal, her home city. She planned to speak about the gap of women in tech. The topic was one that motivated her every day in her work and ultimately led her to berate herself for taking a break from a field where she could have been actively making change. The break, however, was a necessity for Jasbir’s wellbeing. She couldn’t see a place for herself in an industry that did not place value on female employees. The conference is approaching. She gets an email from an organizer. He says that this topic was discussed in the past. There have been no changes to the stats. There is no reason to discuss it again. Jasbir is heartbroken. To her, this is the exact reason it needs to be discussed. She is crushed.
As for Jasbir’s early career in tech, she was hired after graduating with a degree in computer science and information technology. She was grateful for the opportunity —that is until she noticed the discrepancy. Jasbir had a male colleague. He was hired after her, younger, less educated, and hadless technical skill. She passed his desk one day, and with a glance down her right shoulder, she noticed his paycheque. She lingered a moment, and the number jumped at her. His salary was higher than hers. She met with her manager. She asked if she could have negotiated better and if there was something about how she approached her contract that led to a difference in treatment. But she couldn’t really get an answer. It set a fire inside her, ultimately so smothering that she left the industry.
Jasbir continued her education. She did her MBA. It’s important here to know that Jasbir looks for signs from the universe. When someone mentions an opportunity to her, be it an MBA or a part-time PhD, she takes it. If you catch her on the street and you tell her a book you just finished, it will move to the top of the list. This unfaltering fate matches so well with her discipline, rigor, and logic. It’s unusual and magnetic. By now, I’m so hooked on her story that I’ve forgotten it’s an interview, and lost sight that I have a job to do. I’m invested in how things turn out for Jasbir.
She completes her MBA and the first job she is offered is in tech. She takes it. Along the way, she takes the Catalyst’s Mastercard Emerging Learners Cyber Initiative (ELCI) program. It expands her community. “I was a year and a half into my cybersecurity role,” she says. “I needed that community. There’s a point when the universe connects you to what you need, right?” The Catalyst Fellowship program was reposted on her LinkedIn from one of the cohort organizers, Trish Dyl. She took it as another sign from the universe. Jasbir applied. As she fought sadness and defeat around the conference, she was accepted to be a Catalyst Fellow. There was a new opportunity to make a difference.
She would focus her research and impact on women. “Hey,” she says, “we could have a conversation even if we don’t have an answer to it. At least we know there’s a problem, right?” She introduces me to a phrase and I can’t believe I’m so far behind. The first part resonates; the second is new, but it feels as old as crusted layers of earth. “We’re between the glass ceilings and the sticky floors,” she says.
In the background of all of this, Jasbir is working on her thesis. Remember that part-time PhD someone mentioned? It’s a surprise to Jasbir that she made it to this level of education, which is very difficult to understand when you’re up against her clarity and intelligence. Still, there is a crack in her self-worth, a deep-rooted self-doubt that remains from these early and formative years.
Jasbir says her father only went to one parent-teacher interview. But when he did, the teacher told him, “She listens really well and does well on the hard stuff, but she barely passes the easy stuff. I can’t tell you if she will pass or fail.” There was another factor, Jasbir explains. She came to Canada when she was five. She did not know English. There weren’t many Indian immigrants at that time. The kids were brutal. She couldn’t explain what was happening to her parents.
Now, Jasbir looks like a settled fixture in her academic office. She studies misinformation and is considering switching the focus of her PhD to AI. That said, she’s caught between two loves. “Misinformation is critical,” she says. “Half of the world is going into elections this year and next year. So, democracy is on the line in a lot of ways.”
AI hits home. Jasbir’s father was in the taxi industry, and she helped him run his business. When Uber came along, though she had a background in tech, she didn’t see it coming. Her father’s business was held back by many government regulations, and they couldn’t compete. “It was an industry that didn’t innovate,” she said. “This is the problem with tech, government, and policy,” she says. “Tech moves really fast, and governments don’t. And sometimes we see policies that come into effect five years later than they should have, right?” It blows Jasbir’s mind that AI was released without clear regulations or policies.
I haven’t mentioned something essential to understanding Jasbir fully as a person. She’s a reader, I mean a voracious reader. She’s set a challenge for herself: a book a week challenge that she started three years ago. Much like her 6 AM workouts, she doesn’t miss. Jasbir picks a book of 200-300 pages, and she reads 30-40 pages a day. She likes a good project, and that process keeps her on target. Jasbir’s love of reading dates back to her childhood. She grew up in a small village in India and immigrated to Canada when she was five years old. They were a middle class family and most of the books she read were from the school library or the public library. She had endless curiosity. School would end at 3 PM and the library would close at 5 PM. She spent the time between pouring over books.
But as much as she loved reading, Jasbir struggled in school, and she laments that if AI had been around, she could have used it as a tutor. These days, she is training her young nephew Miles to do just that. For now, he’s asking it about dinosaurs when his family runs out of answers.
There is one quip about her PhD, and Jasbir quickly admits it. She feels that her timing isn’t right. Universities are determining what the regulations around ChatGPT and other AI forms should be, and Jasbir says she can’t live without them. “It’s my personal assistant,” she says. Before, for instance, Jasbir used to toil and fret over potential LinkedIn posts and run them by friends, but she found her friends didn’t have the time and before AI, she didn’t have the confidence to put herself out there. Still, she had something to say. When AI came along, she could post daily. It was a game-changer.
These days, her nephew Miles is full of questions, questions she, her sister, and brother-in-law don’t always have the answers to. Her sister is a real estate agent, and she works with many brokers. Miles has made the association that if GPT has all the answers, it must be a broker. “Ask the broker!” he says. “ChatGPT has made me 40-45% more productive and so much smarter.” Jasbir says she is super passionate about the human side of AI. She is passing this passion and essential skill onto the next generation.
“There’s technically nothing I don’t know anymore, right? If I ask the right prompt, I can get the information I need, and then it’s up to me how I want to use it.”
But AI has risks, and Jasbir doesn’t shy away from saying so. When I ask her about risks, she says, “Oh, hands down, it’s hallucinations.” Then she said she had a funny story for me. Jasbir is a big…no huge Kendrick Lamar Fan. “I’m the top fan you could ever imagine,” she says. She was waiting for his next album to drop when she got an idea. Always one for a good project plan, she asked ChatGPT to tell her everything about Kendrick Lamar and to give her a learning plan. And ChatGPT recommended a book to her. It had a catchy title. “It was a great name,” she says, “something like ‘Greatest Album of the Decade that Changed America.’ She hadn’t heard of the book, which seemed implausible. So, she did a Google search. Found nothing. Did an Amazon search. Again nothing. And after a frantic few minutes, she realized AI had hallucinated. “AI is a yes-man or a yes-person,” Jasbir says. “I can’t believe I fell for it.”
Now, Jasbir is shaping her approach to her role in the Catalyst Fellowship Program. She intended to interview companies about equity. But she’s been second-guessing herself. It’s not enough, she says. “You have to interview women to get the perspective on both sides. For Jasbir, it started with an excruciating loss, the ability to speak about one of the most central issues facing tech in a conference. Now, she wants to continue the conversion. And the Catalyst gives her the space to do so.