It turns out this was a problem with ruby gems as a whole, not just rspec. And there's an emacs package that fixes the problem: rvm, as outlined here.

So, a step by step solution:

M-x package-install rvm M-x rvm-use-default 

You can also add (rvm-use-default) to your init file to enable the package from startup.

It turns out this was a problem with ruby gems as a whole, not just rspec. And there's an emacs package that fixes the problem: rvm, as outlined here.

So, a step by step solution:

M-x package-install rvm M-x rvm-use-default 

You can also add (rvm-use-default) to your init file to enable the package from startup.