How can we tackle gender imbalance in the personalities of AI learning tools?

The Gendering of AI

The expected growth in use of artificial intelligence (AI) in learning applications is raising concerns about both the potential gendering of these tools and the risk that they will display the inherent biases of their developers. Why the concern? Well, to make it easier for us to integrate AI tools and chatbots into our lives, designers often give them human attributes. For example, applications and robots are often given a personality and gender. Unfortunately, in many cases, gender stereotypes are being perpetuated. The type of roles robots are designed to perform usually reflect gendered over generalizations of feminine or masculine attributes.

Feminine personalities in AI tools such as chatbots and consumer devices like Amazon’s Alexa are often designed to have sympathetic features and perform tasks related to care giving, assistantship, or service. Many of these applications have been created to work as personal assistants, in customer service or teaching. Examples include Emma the floor cleaning robot and Apple’s Siri your personal iPhone assistant. Conversely, male robots are usually designed as strong, intelligent and able to perform “dirty jobs”. They typically work in analytical roles, logistics, and security. Examples include Ross the legal researcher, Stan the robotic parking valet and Leo the airport luggage porter.

Gendering of technology is problematic because it perpetuates stereotypes and struggles present in society today. It can also help reinforce the inequality of opportunities between genders. These stereotypes aren´t beneficial for either males or females as they can limit a person´s possibilities and polarize personalities with artificial boundaries.

Response Strategies

Siri.  Alexa. Cortana. These familiar names are the modern-day Girl Fridays making everyone’s life easier.  These virtual assistants powered by artificial intelligence (AI) bring to life the digital tools of the information age.  One of the subtle strategies designers use to make it easier for us to integrate AI into our lives is “anthropomorphism” -  the attribution of human-like traits to non-human objects.  However, the rise of AI with distinct personalities, voices, and physical forms is not as benign as it might seem. As futurists who are interested in the impacts of technology on society, we wonder what role human-like technologies play in achieving human-centred futures. 

For example, do anthropomorphized machines enable a future wherein humanity can thrive?  Or, do human-like AIs foreshadow a darker prognosis, particularly in relation to gender roles and work?  This article looks at a continuum of human-like personas that give a face to AI technology.  We ask: what does it mean for our collective future that technology is increasingly human-like and gendered?  And, what does it tell us about our capacity to create a very human future?

The Women of AI

One of the most important observations we want to convey is that the typical consumer-facing AI persona is highly feminine and feminized.  There are several robots and AI that take a female form.  The examples below show the sheer breadth of applications where a feminine persona and voice are deliberately used to help us feel comfortable with increasingly invasive technology:

• Emma:  Brain Corp’s autonomous floor cleaner Emma (Enabling Mobile Machine Automation) is no chatty fembot.  She is designed to clean large spaces like schools and hospitals. Currently, Emma is being piloted at various Wal-Mart locations, where the human cleaning crew is being asked to embrace a robot-supporting role – even though it may ultimately replace some of them.  Emma washes floors independently using AI, the lidar light based remote sensing method, and smart sensors.
• Alexa:  Amazon’s Alexa is the disembodied feminine AI that lives inside a smart device.  As a personal assistant, Alexa does it all.  There are versions of Alexa for hotels, some that act as your DJ, and those that provide medical advice.  There is another side to Alexa, however; one that secretly records your private conversations.  This is a great example of how companion AIs embody the surveillance of Big Brother with the compassion of Big Mother rolled into one.
• Siri:  Like Alexa, Apple’s Siri is an AI-powered woman’s voice.  The iPhone assistant is helpful and direct.  You can find information, get where you need to go, and organize your schedule.  Lately, Siri is attempting to learn jokes and develop more of a natural rapport with users.  Can brushing up on social skills help virtual assistant AIs shed their reputation for being both nosy and dull?
• Cara:  In the legal industry Casetext’s Cara (Case Analysis Research Assistant) is an algorithmic legal assistant that uses machine-learning to conduct research.  Cara is widely available to attorneys and judges, a great example of AI replacing professional jobs with a powerfully smart feminine figure.  With Cara, we have to wonder if there are too many outdated assumptions about gender involved—why is Cara a legal assistant, and not an attorney like Ross, the world’s first robot lawyer?
• Kate:  This specialized travel robot from SITA, is an AI mobile passenger check-in kiosk.  Kate uses big data related to airport passenger flow to move autonomously about the airport, going where she is most needed to reduce lines and wait times.  Kate, like many AI programs, uses big data predictively, perhaps displaying something similar to women’s intuition.
• Sophia:  This humanoid robot from Hanson robotics gained notoriety as the first robot to claim a form of citizenship.  Debuted in 2017, Sophia is a recognized citizen of the nation of Saudi Arabia, and the first robot with legal personhood.  Sophia can carry on conversations and answer interesting questions.  But with her quirky personality and exaggerated female features, we would categorize Sophia as a great example of AI as hype over substance.
• Ava:  As one of the newest female AIs, Autodesk’s Ava seems to take extreme feminization a step further.  A “digital human”, Ava is a beautiful and helpful AI chatbot avatar that can read people’s body language.  Ava is programmed to be emotionally expressive.  Her customer service job is to support engineering and architectural software product users in real time.  Being able to detect emotions puts Ava in an entirely new league of female virtual assistants. So do her looks:  Ava’s appearance is literally based on a stunning actress from New Zealand.

by Tracey Follows, Founder/Director of the Female Futures Bureau

Jennifer Gidley is a former President of the World Futures Studies Federation (2009–2017), a UNESCO and UN partner and global peak body for futures studies scholarship, she led a network of hundreds of world leading futures scholars and researchers from around the globe. An adjunct Professor at the Institute for Sustainable Futures, UTS in Sydney, futurist, author, psychologist and educator, Jennifer is a prolific author of dozens of academic papers, serves on several academic boards, and most recently authored Postformal Education: A Philosophy for Complex Futures (Springer, 2016) & The Future: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2017). 

Tracey: I spoke to Jennifer about her perspective on Female Futures.

One of the issues we discuss a lot at The Female Futures Bureau is why more female futurists don’t have a higher profile.  And Jennifer agrees that it’s not because they aren’t around:

“I actually believe there are a large number of female futurists globally, and probably always have been. I would suggest that there are as many women involved in futures studies and foresight work as there are men…”

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