#GAReads | We're Used to Thinking of Digital Assistants as Female. The Good Place and Big Mouth Show Why That’s a Mistake.
photo credit: Status Quack, via Unsplash
It speaks to the teeming ubiquity of misogyny that men feel empowered to talk down to women even when there are no actual women around.
Shortly after the rollouts of virtual assistants like Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa, and Microsoft’s Cortana, technologists cautioned that coding these AI programs as female would reinforce women’s role as helpful, subordinate, and eager to please. News reports soon followed of male users falling into “men’s roles” around their digital assistants — insulting, sexualizing, or barking commands at their digital devices. A UNESCO report from earlier this year warned that these interactions could affect real-life relations between men and women: “The more that culture teaches people to equate women with assistants, the more real women will be seen as assistants — and penalized for not being assistant-like.”