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Tech Firms Have An Obsession With 'Female' Digital Servants (zdnet.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the female-personas dept.

An anonymous reader writes: Alexa, Tay, Siri, Cortana, Xiaoice, and Google Now. These technologies all have one thing in common -- they are digital servants aimed at a mass-market audience that feature a "female" voice or persona. And it's not just the voice or persona of the digital persona we interact with that is biased. The results of those interactions also demonstrate male favoritism. It took Apple more than four years to fix Siri's responses to questions about abortion services, and yet the company didn't seem to have any problem programming Siri to search for prostitutes and Viagra. Here's the gender breakdown for the tech workforce of each company:
Microsoft: 83.0% male, 16.9% female
Google: 82.0% male, 18.0% female
Apple: 79.0% male, 22.0% female
Amazon: 61.0% male, 39.0% female

3 of 571 comments (clear)

  1. Social justice clickbait by Jiro · · Score: 5, Insightful

    See subject.

  2. This, it's marketing basics by s.petry · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Women have better voices for marketing, plain and simple. The majority of commercials have female voices for the same reason these "robots" (sorry, I don't consider them robots) do.

    Certain female voices are hard on the ears, but the range of woman's voices considered pleasant dwarfs male's.

    TFA misses that basic information and jumps right to the typical rants about discrimination, which have been verified false over and over and over. Social engineering does not like or want facts, they want to manipulate. So far, they are doing just that because the populous does not fact check anything. Even those that claim to be scientific use bias at least as often than facts.

    --

    -The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.

  3. Re:*TRIGGERED* by zeveroare · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Because they are all taking gender studies instead of STEM-field studies. So they can point out the fact that more women need to be employed in STEM without actually doing anything about it themselves. Obviously. And what Rockoon said. The worldwide trend is: The gender gap at universities: where are all the men? The other narrative is ofcourse far more popular.