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Tech Firms Have An Obsession With 'Female' Digital Servants (zdnet.com)
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
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
Alternate hypothesis: users respond better to female digital voices. Most GPS units and previous IVR systems feature female voices.
"Go to CNN [for a] spell-checked, fact-checked summary" -- CmdrTaco
All of these services are basically trying to copy the experience of the Star Trek computer, except replace "Computer" with "Ok Google" or "Alexa" or some other distinct and easy to recognize 3-4 syllable phrase.
The computer in the Star Trek series has a female voice, so to those who dream of making a reality out of science fiction, that would be a natural choice.
Actually most automated voices are female because a female voice is easier to hear against background noise
Yup. There's even research supporting that (If I wasn't lazy, I could dig a few refs).
Although lots of culture consider deep male voice to be signs of authority, it happens that our ears are better tuned to hear our mothers (whose voice in turn has also evolved to be better heard).
So in a way, evolution has been clearly matriarchal for that specific characteristic of vocal communication.
Head monkey's voice sounds cool but is basically understood as "Yadda-yadda". It's mom's voice you should be listening at.
SJW could maybe stop over-reacting and ponder a bit the implication of these point of views.
(Also, think about all the GPS giving orders in imperative form using by default a female (higher pitched) voice pack.
- That's as far as possible from the "servile" position that is criticised in the summary
- Don't you think these firms have done the necessary litterature review and determined that it's the best voice for noisy environment)
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I was around at the dawn of desktop computing. I learned our office had an Apple 2E. It had sat on a shelf for a year before I got there (first job), because nobody wanted to bother with it. I figured out one of the two disks it needed to load was damaged. I got another one. I figured out how to run Appleworks, integrated word processor, spreadsheet and data base programs. On my lunch hour, I went to bulletin boards to learn how we could take advantage of all that bookkeeping, mailout, and information tracking power.
For my trouble, I was condescended to and ridiculed by the female office staff as a silly little boy playing with his silly little toy. Then our little non-profit organization started to punch 'way over its weight. Guess why.
Somewhere along the way, I noticed that virtually all the helpful responses I got on the bulletin boards came from guys. So I wondered whether this was universal. At that time, it was no big deal to get the membership of a BB. So I did...for 15 local ones. And I assigned all the names that were obviously male to one column, all that were female to another the results were so utterly one-sided I compensated. Who knows...maybe some women were afraid to identify themselves, though at the time there was no compelling reason not to. So I assigned all names like "Kim" and a lot of "foreign" names (where I couldn't be sure what sex the person was), to the female side.
I came out with more than 90% male bulletin board membership. So just about everybody trying to figure out how to use this new office tool effectively was male, at least in the Toronto area.
There was no coercion, sexism or even fooling around. Back then, communication via BB was just too slow and disjointed to bother with that kind of thing. People needed advice, and those who could give it were quite generous.
So now it's a new world, and women are complaining that people about my age, who have made their way up the corporate ladder in computing, are mostly male. If my experience is anything to go by, the reason has a lot less to do with sexism than with the fact that quite a lot of us back then were "silly little boys playing with our silly little toys". Now those toys are running the world, and the girls who couldn't be bothered to give up lunch in order to figure them out aren't well represented at the top.
I'm aware that my evidence is anecdotal, but my numbers with respect to those dawn-of-time bulletin boards is 100% accurate.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
I already know why. Because any man working in a kindergarten is automatically suspected of molesting children. Never mind that women are just as capable of molesting children, and such cases do exist. Just the thought of having an adult penis in the same room as a bunch of children...
In some places, a man working in a kindergarten is not even allowed to do his work without at least one woman present to make sure that he doesn't molest children.
No wonder that men avoid such jobs.
No. That is what I spent seven years taking math classes instead of anthropology classes. I'm not saying it's not an interesting question, rather it's one that I'm not interested in.
Last I checked my phone does not have a 15" subwoofer. I can more easily hear the higher pitched voices simply because my phone is better at producing them.
Does the name Pavlov ring a bell?
For those of us that destroyed their hearing on their youth with loud music and working around loud machinery i can assure you a higher pitched voice is much more intelligible in a typical outdoor urban environment. It's just easier to perceive the differing timbres and transients present in speech in a higher register, bassy voices just sound muddled.
There are next to no men working in Kindergartens, aren't you interested to know why?
Indeed I am. Research suggests it is mostly due to negative stereotypes and only somewhat unfounded fears of being suspected of paedophilia.
There are next to no women in construction industry, aren't you interested to know why?
Indeed I am. I haven't had much time to look into this one though so I'll refrain from speculating.
There is monstrous wage disparity between genders in modelling industry, aren't you interested to know why?
Indeed I am. I'd say this one is less about employment and more about the portrayal of women in fashion and advertising, and the way much of it tries to make women feel inadequate as a way to get them to buy things.
Because, it seems that you have decided on "why" long ago, namely that it is because one gender is suppressing another in some way is the only explanation you have for such disparities
Incorrect. It's more of an institutional problem. There isn't some giant conspiracy where men actively seek to keep women down (MRAs and neomasculine devotees don't have that kind of power or popularity), it's just a legacy of millennia of history. There are individual people who have problematic behaviour, but they rarely operate in a vacuum and it's more important to look at the reasons why.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
We already know why, women experience stereotype threat and they're more sensitive to the social stigma society attaches to nerdy pursuits.
It's not a problem for most of us, so we don't care, and we shouldn't have to. Only women can fix themselves.
Then why all of the whining about "wage gaps"? If women are majoring in genuinely useful things, then there should be no "wage gap". If there is such a thing, perhaps it points to some attempt by SJWs to over value certain professions despite clear market forces that indicate otherwise.
Women are majoring in genuinely useful things but when men primarily optimizes for money while women optimizes for things like happiness, family time, helping others, and group cohesion then there will always be a wage gap. My kids are a perfect example. They share the same box of legos and watch all the same movies but my daughter has a small village of doctors and nurses taking care of animals while my son has spaceships and weapons. My son also wants to build legos in a room by himself with no interaction with other people while my daughter wants it to be a social event where everyone builds something together. My daughter is more geeky than my son and loves programming, fishing, and chess but there is still a very social aspect to all her activities that is missing from my son. We are dealing with thousands of years of evolution where men were competing with each other and women were working together for the common good.