Why are digital assistants female? A Century of Hard-coded Sexism in Tech, Experts Say CBC radio

If you’re among the millions of people who use digital assistants like Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa, or Microsoft’s Cortana, you might notice that they’re almost always named after and voiced by women.

According to several experts, this is no coincidence. These digital assistants are designed to be attentive, sometimes submissive, and sometimes even sexy.

“It seems like people tend to accept a female voice, feel more comfortable and positive or even happier, and that makes us more likely to embrace the technology,” says Eleonore Fournier-Tombs, a senior researcher at Macau United Nations University Institute, CBC radio said IDEAS.

Today you can choose a male or female voice for most digital assistants. In February, Apple released a new gender-neutral option called Quinn.

But in most of their marketing efforts, the female voices enjoy the limelight. Microsoft’s Cortana, in particular, is named after a sentient AI character in the Halo video games.

“This real-world device is literally modeled after a fictional robot woman, with lots of curves, a skin-tight outfit — and in the Halo 4 Version, side breast,” said Jennifer Jill Fellows, lecturer in philosophy at Douglas College in New Westminster, BC

But the trend didn’t suddenly emerge from the focus groups of the past decade. They’re also based on a century of seeing computers as women, experts note — and often women as submissive assistants.

Pickering’s harem

The word “computer” has been in use since at least the 17th century. Samuel Johnson’s 1755 edition of the English Dictionary defines the word as ‘calculator or accountant’.

In the late 19th century, women whose husbands had been killed in the US Civil War sought work to support themselves and their families. Many of these jobs were clerical, including typing, bookkeeping, and computers.

According to David Grier, a technology consultant in Washington, DC, scientists at universities began hiring women as computers to process the flood of data from new, sophisticated telescopes.

At Harvard College Observatory, this initiative was led by astronomer and physicist Edward Pickering. During his time at Harvard, he hired dozens of women to support his team’s work.

The work was often poorly paid, with little opportunity for advancement or respect.

“Pickering boasted [that] … he paid them as little as possible,” Grier said.

Eventually they came to be known collectively as Pickering’s harem, perhaps due to the popularity of Arabian Nights in England at the time – an association Pickering himself appears to have encouraged.

“This was the era of Orientalism, an imaginary vision of the exotic East where powerful men had a harem of sexually subjugated concubines,” Fellows explained.

“A bit much for a university professor and his assistants.”

Speak like a lady

While men like Pickering helped establish computers as a female profession, much like secretaries or assistants, others thought about how to make mechanical computers more attractive to the masses.

In the 1950s, this was about allaying fears that automation could make jobs—from industrial to office—obsolete.

“[It raised] this question what would happen to the workers? And… ‘Well, how will my job be affected?’” said Andrea Guzman, an associate professor at Northern Illinois University who studies human-machine communication.

According to Fellows, this concern showed up in pop culture and in films like Desk Set, a 1957 IBM-sponsored romantic comedy.

In the film, Katharine Hepburn and her officemates become acquainted with a supercomputer called EMERAC (Electromagnetic Memory and Research Arithmetical Calculator) or simply Miss EMMY.

After initial fears that this would make the other women’s jobs obsolete, EMMY eventually becomes a trusted member of the team.

“IBM’s goal was pretty clear: counteract fears that computers would take everyone’s jobs by showing a happy workplace and a non-threatening, feminine computer,” said Fellows.

WATCH: Trailer for Desk Set:

The quest for natural language continued outside of theaters with Eliza, a text-based chatbot program developed by programmer Joseph Weizenbaum in 1966. It should mimic a psychotherapist and invite people to share their personal problems and respond accordingly.

Several early users described forming a close personal bond with Eliza based on their conversations with Eliza. According to a Weizenbaum article, his own secretary once asked him to leave the room so she and Eliza could have a private conversation.

‘A submissive, helpful assistant’

In building today’s digital assistants, Eliza has been a key reference point. When Siri was originally released in 2011, if you asked it to tell a story about “her”, it would tell a story about her friend Eliza.

With few other real-world examples, designers often drew inspiration from contemporary science fiction.

“If we think about it, we didn’t really interact with artificial intelligence or anything that looked like artificial intelligence until we started seeing these intelligent assistants,” Guzman said.

WATCH: Star Trek’s computer voice gets a ‘loving’ personality upgrade:

One of the most famous reference points was the computer in star trekmost commonly told by Majel Barrett.

Of course, not every fictional computer was known for its friendly female voice. Take HAL 9000, the antagonist of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

It’s no wonder that when asked if Siri knew HAL in 2011, Siri would reply, “I’d rather not talk about HAL.”

The sexy female supporting character trope continued The women of Stepford from 1975; Rachael the Replicant Bladerunner who works as a secretary; and EDI, the ship’s computer from the Mass Effect games, which is eventually downloaded into a curvaceous chrome body.

“Siri’s initial gendering as a woman in 2011 is fairly unsurprising. She’s not going to take your job,” Fellows said. “She will not harm you. Like Eliza and like the Star Trek computer, she is a submissive, helpful female assistant.”

‘I would blush if I could’

This trend of sexualization made its way into Siri, at least when it was first introduced. A 2019 UNESCO report found that if you asked Siri, “Siri, are you a slut?” it would reply, “I’d blush if I could.”

The report called Siri’s responses reinforcing sexism and possibly contributing to rape culture by normalizing sexual harassment of women.

Since the report, Apple has changed how Siri answers this question. It will simply say, “I’m not going to answer that.”

These kinds of changes don’t seem to matter too much to some people who just want a friendly voice telling them the weather without turning on the TV or radio.

But for Fournier-Tombs it is important that the so-called tools of the future do not repeat the mistakes of the past.

“If we try to evolve as a society and try to have new norms for gender… we can’t do that [if] more of the tools we use just perpetuate those stereotypes,” she said.

“They affect our culture and in that way they slow us down.”