The Post-Woman : Why are all our Embodied Artificial Intelligence Female?
- sreeshachakra
- Jun 7
- 5 min read
With a handful of exceptions, the artificial intelligence technology that we seemingly have seamlessly integrated into our daily tasks and interactions, are coded to be female. With the proliferation of female robots such as Sophie, and the popularity of female virtual assistants such as Siri (Apple), Alexa (Amazon) and Cortana (Microsoft), artificial intelligence seems to have a gender issue, notes Sylvie Borau, a professor of ethical marketing and consumer behaviour.
This issue is especially prevalent within embodied artificial intelligence systems. Embodied artificial intelligence (EAI) differs from other AI chatbots and tools in the manner that these AI systems learn and are trained through the physical world with the presence of a physical body, such as robots. However, in such cases, the idea of embodiment can also be extended to the presence of a voice or a voice-box, such as in the case of virtual assistants like Alexa and Siri.
The Justification
An opinion, articulated by a student of the University of Reading (England), is a common perception within the field of cybernetics: since AI operates out of the sexual paradigm, the notion of gender has become obsolete. However, again and again, feminist and gender-oriented studies have found this claim to be particularly untrue, and if we take a look around ourselves, so will we. With a marked absence of prominent male-coded EAI for public consumption, even landmark inventions in the field of robotics and robot engineering continue to be coded with an inclination towards the non-male : female, children and animals. Focusing on the first trend, feminisation has been justified within artificial intelligence development on the basis that “fem-bots” are more approachable and considered humane by the general public.
Going into some of the details published by a Psychology & Marketing journal, it is suggested that if women tend to be more objectified in AI than men, it is not just because they are perceived as the perfect assistant, but also because people attribute more humanness to women (versus men) in the first place. Even more so, the article goes on to detail that women are perceived as warmer and more likely to experience emotions than men, female gendering of AI objects contributes to humanizing them. Warmth and experience (but not competence) are indeed seen as fundamental qualities to be a full human but are lacking in machines.
While this kind of justification not only delves into biological essentialism which is harmful and regressive on its own count, it also missed the point that EAI are service or companionship oriented, and thus the wording of “warmness” and “humaneness” of the female EAI can easily be re-contextualized within the larger socio-political hierarchy which codes women as perfect for service and obedience due to further counts of biological essentialism as well as misogynist historical narratives. As Borau explains further, the humanisation of AI through women may suggest the very fact that the developers behind this phenomenon may simply not view women as wholly human, but partly so. She refers to this as the “dehumanisation hypothesis.” The hypothesis details that, culturally, it is necessary to view outgroup members as animals or instruments before objectifying them. In other words, dehumanization would be a prerequisite for objectification to take place, with targets of objectification typically being denied their humanness.
In addition to this, the hyper-sexualisation of the female body can also be a counter to the justifications of the overproduction of female-coded EAI. With the physical manifestation of artificial intelligence being a key aspect of embodiment, the stylistic visualisation of the female form, the female voice and perceived female submissiveness are also factors that can easily be traced to this phenomenon. Taking Siri as a well-known example in this regard, the name Siri in Norse means "a beautiful woman who leads you to victory," and the default voice is a female American persona known as Samantha. While there is an option to change Siri’s voice to male, most users simply do not. Karl Fredric MacDorman, a computer scientist and expert in human-computer interaction at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, says that In addition, many of the engineers who design these machines are men, and "I think men find women attractive, and women are also OK dealing with women.”
The Impact
Kathleen Richardson, a social anthropologist at University College London, in England, and author of the book "An Anthropology of Robots and AI: Annihilation Anxiety and Machines" (Routledge, 2015) says that when humanoid robots are female, they tend to be modeled after attractive, subservient young women. "But when it comes to making something fully humanoid, it's almost always male." This cultural phenomena also extends itself into the fiction of our times, such as in the movie Her features an artificial intelligent operating system (named Samantha), who is seductively voiced by Scarlett Johansson. Her human "owner," played by Joaquin Phoenix, ends up falling in love with her.
Not only do trends like these which influence and hold sway over a global population ideologically guide masses in their manner of thinking, it also perpetuates already existing harmful stereotypes about marginalised genders. With male researchers being heavily invested in the development of female sex robots, and the 2023 AI for Good conference in Geneva which had the world’s largest gathering of humanoid robots wherein most, if not all, of the robots where feminine in design (BBC reports some of the landmark robots were Ai-Da (the "world's first ultra-realistic humanoid robot artist"), Grace (the "world’s foremost nursing assistant robot") as well as Sophia, Nadine, and Mika. There was even a rock star robot, Desdemona), there is a clear gender disparity within the field, which arises from misogyny. Meanwhile, Geminoid, the only robot at the conference that was explicitly male, is the spitting image of its maker, Japanese roboticist Hiroshi Ishiguro, and was therefore self-referential rather than consciously male.
This also plays into male fantasies, says Richardson, recalling a time when “childlike” robots were on the rise. The intersection between ‘childlikeness’ and femininity also suggests a concerning cultural ideology, exacerbated by the service and obedience aspect of these robots that are present as a general trait.
The Future
There have been real solutions posed to this problem, but it seems that developers and engineers of such technology have either shrugged them off or not taken them into consideration. This is not particularly encouraging for the future of gender equality within the arena of artificial intelligence or for the objectification of women in a larger socio-cultural context. The suggestions provided have been to code voices of EAI to be as gender neutral as possible, and also to randomise gendered voices among users, so that the male and the female coded EAI are equally distributed among consumers, as suggested by Google’s own recent experimentation. Another suggestion would be for STEM professionals and developers of such technology to undergo thorough sensitisation on such topics and change the manner in which policies regarding such technology is made, but these changes seem like a long-shot in an industry highly dominated by conservative males.
The Post-Woman remains a figure that is neither progressive or empowered, but acts a tool to set the perception of the female body and ability back decades of activism, and can only truly be challenged through changing individual mindsets about the same.
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