Erica Anderson Rooney
Founder of HER Collective
A room full of accomplished women once asked AI to picture them. Founders. Executives. Women at the top of their fields. It returned the same image, over and over: a middle-aged white man in glasses. Not one of their faces.
That was not a glitch. It was a mirror.
That moment is exactly why Erica Anderson Rooney does what she does. Because the gaps women have always faced, in pay, in confidence, in leadership, in who gets a seat at the table, are not going away in the age of AI.
They are getting faster. AI does not create inequality. It scales whatever the system was already built to produce. And right now, women are not in enough of the rooms where the future is being decided.
Erica knows these gaps intimately. She spent over 15 years in human resources, rising all the way to Chief People Officer, while raising two kids and confronting every one of these obstacles head on. She has lived the glass ceilings and the sticky floors. She wrote the book on them, literally, and then she wrote the next one about what comes after.
She is not here to tell you to have it all, do it all, and be it all. She is here to show you how to break through the barriers, rise above the limiting beliefs and self-imposed ceilings, and dismantle the systemic biases that hold women back.
And she is here to make sure you do not get left behind by the biggest shift of our working lives.
That is why she founded HER Collective: a community for ambitious women who are done waiting for permission. A place to rise into the rooms where decisions get made, and to stay there.
When she is not building HER Collective, Erica is the author of Glass Ceilings and Sticky Floors and The AI Gap: Women, AI, and the Next Great Leap Forward. She hosts the Glass Ceilings and Sticky Floors podcast, co-hosts AI Voice or Victim, and serves as the North Carolina Regional State Lead for Women Applying AI. She has been recognized as CHRO of the Year, an ICON Top Chief People Officer, and a 2024 Inclusive Leader Award winner. Her work has taken her to stages like SXSW and CHIEF, and has been featured in Forbes, SUCCESS Magazine, and CBS.
But the titles are not the point. The mission is. Erica is on a fierce, unapologetic mission to empower, uplift, and amplify women everywhere, and to answer the question driving everything she builds: how do we unleash the full potential of women, get them into positions of power and influence, and keep them there?