When women are over-represented in the workforce, it tends be in industries of assistance – cleaning, nursing, secretarial work and, now, the world of virtual assistants. Research by Unesco has shown that using default female voices in AI – as Microsoft has done with Cortana, Amazon with Alexa, Google with Google Assistant and Apple with Siri – is furthering the belief that women exist merely to help men to get on with more important things.
There is no real reason for AI technologies to be gendered at all, but we are at the mercy of tech companies “staffed by overwhelmingly male engineering teams”, fixated on living out a Captain Kirk fantasy and delegating to the subservient, silky-voiced computers of Star Trek. These systems are unapologetically built by men, for men. They can even struggle to understand the “breathy” voices of women as software is often developed with male voice samples.
When we think of robots – leading uprisings, carrying out efficient murders, accompanying human companions on coming-of-age adventures – they are almost always coded as male. Think Terminator, Star Wars, RoboCop, Avengers: Age of Ultron, Big Hero 6 and most sci-fi films of the 1980s. Their rarely portrayed feminised counterparts are love interests (Her), victims (Ex Machina) or sexualised to the point of lunacy (the “fembots” in Austin Powers, who shoot bullets from their nipples).
Voices with power tend to be male: take the murderous Hal 9000 computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey, or Auto, a spaceship’s autopilot and main antagonist in Wall-E. Robots aren’t leading us on intergalactic sieges in real life, so it’s no surprise that it’s a woman’s voice politely requesting patience on the automated menu at the bank. It is telling, too, that while society has no problem with a disembodied female voice doing our bidding, many people struggle with one telling them what to do. In 2015, Tesco replaced the “bossy” woman’s voice at self-service checkouts, with a “friendlier, more helpful” male one.
The new research also highlights how virtual assistants are programmed to respond to harassment with the deflecting, tight-grinned replies last heard from a Mad Men receptionist. If you call Siri a slut, she will respond: “I’d blush if I could.” Amazon’s Alexa will say: “Thanks for the feedback.” Ask Siri: “Will you talk dirty to me?” and she will tease: “The carpet needs vacuuming”. A writer for Microsoft’s Cortana software recently said that “a good chunk of the volume of early-on inquiries” were about Cortana’s sex life, proving you don’t even have to have a body for men to find a way to comment on it. The robot uprising we are preempting may be a gynoid-led #MeToo.
For years, we have looked forward to a future in which our lives are made easier by technology, but in it women (or rather, robots anthropomorphised as women) are still not free from the gender binary. And that is because real women aren’t either. It seems we envisage sexism even in society at its most advanced and progressive. We imagine our eventual overlords as male, but our helpers as aproned females – like the Jetsons’ maid, Rosie. A true technological utopia for women would be one where the future of AI isn’t female, but genderless, as all work should be.
