Even the UN thinks Alexa and Siri are bad for women

Have you ever considered why Alexa, Siri, Cortana, and Google Home are all women? If not, then you are in the majority, according to the UN report, I’d blush if I could: closing gender divides in digital skills through education, released today. The cheeky title refers to one of Siri’s responses when told that she is a slut. More than half of the 1,000 people surveyed by New York software company LivePerson take for granted that AI voice assistants are women, but according to the international body, it is resulting in the reinforcement of gender stereotypes and the normalisation of abusive language towards women.

“What emerges is an illusion that Siri – an unfeeling, unknowing, and non-human string of computer code – is a heterosexual female, tolerant and occasionally inviting of male sexual advances and even harassment,” the report says. “It projects a digitally encrypted ‘boys will be boys’ attitude.”

The tech field can often feel like a boys club, because there aren’t many women in the industry, and even fewer in leadership positions (less than 20 percent of leaders in the mobile industry are female). While the gender split among computer science enrolment at the university level is almost equal, the UN study found that female employees made up only 25-30 per cent of the human-computer interaction workforce and that they were more likely than men to cite gender bias, discrimination and harassment as their reason for leaving the field. Although the AI assistants are only a voice, it feels like a bit of a Weird Science (1985) situation to have a bunch of men designing the perfect feminine assistant, especially when you consider that Microsoft’s Cortana is named after the scantily-clad, young female character from the Halo video game series and that Siri literally means, “beautiful young woman who leads you to victory” in Norse.

While companies like Amazon justify their decision by citing studies that say customers find female voices more “sympathetic” and “pleasant,” the move also follows along the lines of pop culture narratives where women more often support male characters and play the majority of aids and administrative support characters.

“Constantly representing digital assistants as female gradually ‘hard-codes’ a connection between a woman’s voice and subservience,” the report states. According to Calvin Lai, a Harvard University researcher who studies unconscious bias, “the gender associations people adopt are contingent on the number of times people are exposed to them. As female digital assistants spread, the frequency and volume of associations between ‘woman’ and ‘assistant’ increase dramatically.”

The UN report recommends that companies give their AI assistants more agency when dealing with sexual and aggressive demands – which some have already done since the 2017 Quartz piece that exposed the problem – but the main fix that needs to be made is to stop offering AI assistant that are women by default, adding male or genderless options.

“Operating systems and apps routinely ask users to specify preferences during initialisation processes, and this practice should be standard for voice assistants. When AI assistants use gendered voices or project gendered personalities, users should be prompted to select between male and female options at a minimum,” the authors recommend.

Read the full report on UNESCO’s site.