Are Cortana And Siri Sexist?
June 30, 2015 in Daily Bulletin
Back in 2011 Jenny Davis wrote about some of the more troubling aspects of automated mobile assistants such as Apple’s Siri, and Microsoft’s Cortana:
- Both voice assistants, despite being digital, are very clearly set up to be female.
- Since they’ve been personified they’ve also been sexualized. Both systems come with pre-programmed responses to the sexual questions that programmers knew would inevitably be asked of them.
- The systems are designed to play subservient roles. They’re meant to be there when you need them, and to disappear when you don’t, and they’re expected to anticipate and fulfil your desires.
- The sexism and misogyny this implies is concerning.
Read more here.
Source: Cyborgology
Great to see that all real problems in the world have been solved, so that we can now focus on the institutionalized discrimination against a phone software.
Or perhaps it’s just that (higher-pitched) female voices are easier to hear over the hums and rumbles of background noise?
While it may not be the biggest problem in the world, and certainly doesn’t require more attention than the other things the world deals with, it’s certainly worth pausing for a moment to think about, no?
But default Siri in the UK is a male voice. Oh no!
True. The author (Jenny Davis) notes this in the full article – she suggests that that may say something about America’s relationship with gender.