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

Comments

*TRIGGERED*

[Sigvatr]

*TRIGGERED*

Re:*TRIGGERED*

[gl4ss]

bullshit article for bullshit times.

why? because if it were all male voices then the same fucking story would be posted but with a twist that women are stupid so you can't use the voice for an assistant.

besides than that, you can change the voice - and the company men/women ratios seem pretty healthy considering that the tech university I went to had like 10 women per 100 men in the relevant to google/apple/ms fields.

oh and the irony that if they hire women assistants even if they have nothing for them to do then the numbers look "better"..

Re:*TRIGGERED*

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually most automated voices are female because a female voice is easier to hear against background noise. Outside of the traditional tech area from this article I can think of two more I hear on a daily basis. The parking ticket machines where I park my car and the next station announcement on the public train that I catch. Male, deeper, voices would be much harder to hear against the background rumble of the city. This applies to any technology where a use case is mobile.

Re: *TRIGGERED*

[sonamchauhan]

Its the use-case that matters. All these assistants are 'speak' close to your ears. Your ears also receive predominantly 'bassy' background noise, as you mentioned. A higher pitched sound is different enough to be more easily isolated from the background buzz.

Re:*TRIGGERED*

[Rockoon]

I know you mean well but your post illustrates why this is still an issue.

No it doesn't. You are just leaping to that conclusion, for obvious sjw reasons.

If the ratio of women to men at your university is so low, aren't you interested to know why?

Sigh.. the ratio of men to women at his university is the opposite of what you think. There are surely far more women than men overall enrolled as students, they just didnt enroll in the classes that he is talking about. Now because you are a simpleton sjw alarmist you took what he said to mean the worst possible and most inclusive thing, rather than the best possible and least inclusive thing.

See, now you predent to care about knowledge.. after all, you ask "arent you interested to know why?" yet it is you that repeatedly demonstrates the least knowledge on these sjw subjects. Didn't you know that women enroll in colleges are far higher rates than men? You've been told before... so I guess your version of knowledge is highly selective, just like its supposed to be in a simpleton sjw alarmist..you are a tool of people that arent interested in knowledge.

Re:*TRIGGERED*

[zeveroare]

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.

Re: *TRIGGERED*

[johnsmithperson123]

There are more women than men at most universities but they seldom study anything useful (no offense). It's college for college's sake. If you want to get more women in 'STEM' you could start by killing Gender Studies.

Re:*TRIGGERED*

[Kartu]

If the ratio of women to men at your university is so low, aren't you interested to know why?

Literally interested or "don't you feel urge to try to have 50/50 ratio"?

There are next to no men working in Kindergartens, aren't you interested to know why?
There are next to no women in construction industry, aren't you interested to know why?
There is monstrous wage disparity between genders in modelling industry, aren't you interested to know why?

The problem is, recalling your earlier comments, I think you are interested neither in items that I've listed, nor even in your own example.
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
What makes things worse worse, you only care about certain gender, but not the other - which is actually quite inconsistent with the idea of equality.

Re: *TRIGGERED*

[stealth_finger]

There are more women than men at most universities but they seldom study anything useful (no offense). It's college for college's sake. If you want to get more women in 'STEM' you could start by killing Gender Studies.

No one seems to mind Gender Studies is mostly filled with women though.

Re:*TRIGGERED*

[thinkwaitfast]

aren't you interested to know why?

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.

Re: *TRIGGERED*

[Wycliffe]

There are more women than men at most universities but they seldom study anything useful (no offense). It's college for college's sake. If you want to get more women in 'STEM' you could start by killing Gender Studies.

If by "nothing useful" you mean elementary education, early childhood development, nursing, and medicine then I would agree with you but otherwise you're full of it. I've never met anyone who majored in gender studies but I do know a ton of women that go into feel good majors that are vital to society and help people but unfortunately don't pay well.

Re: *TRIGGERED*

[whimmel]

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.

Re: *TRIGGERED*

[jsh1972]

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.

Re:*TRIGGERED*

[AmiMoJo]

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.

Re:*TRIGGERED*

[NotDrWho]

because if it were all male voices then the same fucking story would be posted but with a twist that women are stupid so you can't use the voice for an assistant.

When dealing with SJW's, the only winning move is not to play.

Re:*TRIGGERED*

[RedK]

So you know better than gl4ss

Man, the simple mindness continues.

To make it 100% clear, gl4ss said :

"In this particular field, I see 10 women for 100 men"

Amimojo said :

"The overall ratio of men and women at your university".

This is how things like the Wage Gap myth get started. Someone makes an observation about a niche or specific field, Internet Slacktivists blow it up into a "Applies to everyone, all the time" scenario.

In STEM, the ratio of women to men advantages MEN. In University in GENERAL, there are more women enrolled than there are men. There are more women graduating than men do.

It can be BOTH. And to answer Amimojo : No, we don't particularly care to know why women don't enroll in STEM, we assume it's because they aren't interested. The ones that are interested enroll and that's good enough for us.

Re:*TRIGGERED*

[0xdeadbeef]

If the ratio of women to men at your university is so low, aren't you interested to know why?

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.

Re:*TRIGGERED*

[RedK]

People call you a SJW not because they disagree with you, but because you're an Internet Slacktivists who uses Social Justice to do Virtue Signaling, while constantly responding in an attempt at damage control in all these Gender/Race baiting article comment sections.

SJW is a pejorative for a bunch of blowhards who talk a lot of smack online, but don't do much IRL about Social Justice. And the posturing they do online is more sexist and racist (Color blindness, learn it, stop asking for seggration of "minorities" in "Safe spaces") than the "bigots" they are attacking.

Make a reasoned argument, not just concern trolling, and people will stop calling you a SJW. BTW : you'll have to accept meritocracy and human agency, so you'll have to accept that not everything needs to respect population quotas. STEM having 90% male is not wrong, as long as it's a choice made by all involved parties.

Re: *TRIGGERED*

[Wycliffe]

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.

Re:*TRIGGERED*

[lgw]

Of all of Slashdots user base (UIDs are up to, what, 3 million now?) you are one of about 3 who I'd call an SJW. There's a reason people keep calling you that - you in particular.

Re:*TRIGGERED*

[Rockoon]

Mea culpa, I should have said the ratio of men to women in CS, not in university in general.

Finally stand tall?

The rest of my point stands.

No, it doesn't. Your point devolves into cherry picking the smaller disparity in spite of the larger one. Don't you want to know why so many more women are in college? Why do you only care about a rather small subset of this where you can call foul on the opposite disparity?

(see my sig for what I think of that)

You've already proven the value of your thought processes. The next sjw story you will again be there waving your hands, making the exact same mistakes. Today isnt the first time you've made these. Hell its not even the second time.

Re:*TRIGGERED*

[RedK]

but there is actually a lot of evidence to the contrary.

Citation Needed.

I'm trying to make a reasoned argument, but you make absolute statements

False, I made a reasoned argument. You are the one making absolute statements. You made the statement it was because one gender is being institutionally repressed, and that it is due to systemic problems and social pressure. And we are supposed to accept that as FACT from you.

There is no reasoning with you, you are the same way on all these discussions. You literally bring the rageposts everywhere you go.

I don't know where the rage comes from exactly.

Look in the mirror. It comes from your polarizing language and you constant demeaning and assault on the current crop of IT/CS engineers, calling them "a problem" (aka, Brogrammer culture idiocy). Stop calling everyone who disagrees there even is a problem "part of the problem", and maybe you'll get more open mindedness.

Re: *TRIGGERED*

[Shortguy881]

I'm all for studying the other gender. The homework is great.

HAL

[Edis Krad]

Make it HAL's voice and I'll switch it right away. Specially if after searching for something it didn't find it, it said. I'm sorry (Your Name), I'm afraid I can't do that .

Female voices are easier to understand

[Anonymous Coward]

Female voices are easier to understand. This has been known for decades. It has nothing to do with exploitation. As if you could even exploit a computer program in the first place.

Jarvis

[jxander]

Make it happen.

Alternate hypothesis

[stoborrobots]

Alternate hypothesis: users respond better to female digital voices. Most GPS units and previous IVR systems feature female voices.

Re:Alternate hypothesis

[Anubis IV]

Another hypothesis: this is an imaginary problem, since Siri debuted with a male voice in other regions (e.g. UK and France) and is capable of being changed to either male or female voices in all or almost all major regions. I haven't checked, but I'd assume the same is true for Google Now and that Microsoft and Amazon are likely working on the same thing too. At best, there may be an argument that this is an American cultural issue, but suggesting it's a general tech industry problem would require that we ignore the obvious evidence to the contrary, namely, that these products aren't female by default for all users.

Social justice clickbait

[Jiro]

See subject.

Why do they need to politicize ***EVERYTHING***??

[Taco Cowboy]

What the fuck is wrong with having robots with female voice?

Please tell me the rationale of politicizing *everything*, including digital servants having female voices?

We in the tech field are focus on inventing, we really don;t give a fuck on whether those SJW like what we do or not

If they don't fucking like what we do, go invent their own digital servants and STOP BOTHERING US

I am fucking fed-up with those assholes!!!

I mean, we are not talking about some 'sex toy' or some 'porno-gadget', we are talking about digital assistances with female voice

Re:Slashdot

[ArmoredDragon]

I think the dumbest part of this is that the preferred gender of the voice tends to go by cultural norms rather than the company that made the damn thing. Middle eastern cultures, which are by far more male dominant than even the most male dominant tech company in the US, will either get offended or pissed off (or both) if a female voice gives them directions.

In western cultures, women are just more culturally inclined to take caretaker (as in medicine, grade school teacher, babysitter) or assistant type jobs (for an anecdote, my uncle's family is really into computers, and all three of his boys are going into tech related jobs, but his daughter wants to be a dentist even though she's had the same tech exposure that they had.)

Re:Slashdot

[BeauHD]

... and whiny users commenting about other whiny users -- it's a paradox. Welcome to the internet.

This, it's marketing basics

[s.petry]

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.

Re:This, it's marketing basics

[khasim]

Siri also has a male voice option. I have a friend and that's the option she chose.

Re:This, it's marketing basics

[ArylAkamov]

Nice of the summary to skip over that and go straight to SEXISM

Re:This, it's marketing basics

[Anonymous Coward]

The only thing dumber than that particular breed of leftist who constantly searches for things to get offended over, is the new type of radical rightwinger who paints every effect he doesn't like as a result of leftism. You people are both boring.

There is a reason the "Bitching Betty" is not the "Angry Alan" and that is that pilots are mostly male. Males respond more to a higher pitched voice such as a woman's than a man's and when it's time for Betty to speak, you typically really NEED to hear that message. It has nothing to do with niceness and it has just as little to do with any galloping leftism in online culture.

The whole world is not against you just because some morons on twitter and tumblr get their tits in a twist about imagined slights.

Re:Amazon

[Njorthbiatr]

It's nowhere near close to gender population of qualified coders.

What we have here is discrimination against men.

Re:Amazon

[phizi0n]

Amazon's actual numbers here: https://images-na.ssl-images-a...

"PROFESSIONALS" = 74.5% male
"TECHNICIANS" = 88.8% male

"LABORERS & HELPERS" = 54.6% male

More stats!

[kuzb]

Here's the breakdown of my level of care over tech workplace gender equality:

0%

Women who want to work in tech are not prevented from doing so, which is evidenced by the fact that they do happen to work in tech. Progress past the mythical problem already - it doesn't actually exist.

Re:Amazon

[Aighearach]

They are clearly higher women who are less qualified.

I think clearly you're even higher than they are.

99.9%, 101%

[Anonymous Coward]

Am I the only one that's bothered by the fact that Microsoft's breakdown adds up to not-quite-100% and Apple's breakdown actually adds up to more than 100%? Who's doing this math anyway?

Re:lies, damn lies and statistics.

[serviscope_minor]

Hey you can't do that, you're comparing apples to ora.. uh googles.

I thought the same

[MrKaos]

To alleviate the issue, I recorded the phrases for my wife's car navigator but I changed the 'left' and 'right' audio with the much more helpful 'it's coming up' and 'you just missed it'. I re-recorded the 5, with a 3 and the hundred with 'just there, fuck it's right in front of you' - That way I no longer have to assist her in person - the machine does that for me and it's like I'm in the car actually being helpful.

Higher pitch voice *are* easier to hear

[DrYak]

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)

Quite Opposite

[DrYak]

Thats exactly why hunter-gatherer languages are full of high pitched tongue clicks: prey cant hear the hunters talk because the sound stops at the first tree.

So high pitch is the frequency range we have evolved to communicate with.
- both the ability to express (clicks, consonnants and hisses)
- and the ability to hear (our ear do cover the necessary range)

Explain me again how this is an argument, against using female (higher-pitched) voices ?
How your explanation of physics contradicts the parent poster that higher-pitched voices are better heard ?

Ever walk past a nightclub ? Notice how you can usually hear the bass drum through the walls but not the rest of the music ?

(BTW, your explanation is incomplete. The dominance of basses isn't only due to the diffusion being proportional to 1/f . It's also due to the way how different material conducts different frequency ranges. Few night club are completely in the open).

So you've (more or less) successfully demonstrated that most noise that get the farthest and dominates the most is low-frequency.
Given all this low-frequency noise, please explain me again why you think that the parent is wrong in proposing that a high pitch voice (say a soprano - high range female) would be better heard against such low-freq noise than a low pitch voice (bass - low range male) ?

If you are going to attribute something to the laws of physics you should probably know what they are first.

If you're going throw around science in your reply, maybe you should pay attention of this peculiar field called Psychoacoustics.
It's science, it works and it's what nearly every modern audio compression algorithm runs on.

GPS imperative

[DrYak]

because if it were all male voices then the same fucking story would be posted but with a twist that women are stupid so you can't use the voice for an assistant.

Also note that most GPS speak by default using a female (higher pitch) voicepack, and are clearly giving order using imperative forms to the driver.

That's not exactly what I would call subservient.

Re:GPS imperative

[Mr D from 63]

Why would the author of this article call a female voice that helps people a 'servant'. That seems kind of sexist and demeaning to me. Is is OK now to refer to people, including women, who work on help lines 'servants'?

Let's review...

[hyades1]

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.