Trigger warning
The following piece contains references to suicide. If you need help, this website lists mental health resources across the world.
We have a new home-cleaning robot. It speaks in a woman's voice. "Connecting to the network." "Start sweeping." "Returning to the dock for charging," it chimes in the cheery-efficient "You got it boss" tone that you use to get into a new manager's good books.
Our 6-year-old is fascinated with the machine. He has grown up listening to Google Maps and Google Assistant's humanoid talkback via our phones. But the robot seems to possess an actual physical vocal cord in its shiny, black, UFO-like body. I can see that to him, it feels a lot more real.
The use of feminine voices as the default in assistive technologies is an excellent reason why it's called tech bro culture and not tech sis culture. In Cosmopolitan, Emily Gulla asks you to think of the tasks your digital aide does for you: writing your shopping list, remembering dates on your calendar – domestic and ‘assistant’-type tasks that reflect data that the gender split in real-world workplace assistant roles is 94% female to 6% male.
Sure, apps now give you the choice to change the voice to a man's. But how many users bother? I haven't.
As a man, I was only theoretically aware of the implications of gendered tech until we unboxed the robot and it spoke for the first time, eliciting a leap and a shriek from our son. "She can talk!" he said, clapping his hands. "What's her name? What can I call her?"
It took me a minute to see the problem. "It," I said. "It's not a 'she'. Call it 'it'."
"But why", he sounded baffled.
"Because it's not a human being. It's a machine."
"So what? Why can't a machine be a woman?"
"Umm, why should a machine that cleans up the house be a woman?" I said, dismayed by my inability to explain sexist algorithms to a kid. "I am a man. You are a boy. We both clean up, don't we?"
I was bracing for his riposte – "but so does my mother". Thankfully, he was too excited to tail the robot as it glided from room to room to continue the enquiry.
He has since lapsed into 'she' a few more times. "It, it, it," I've been correcting him, marvelling at how an otherwise super absorbent child is taking so long to adopt this simple pronoun switch.
Tanmoy Goswami
