Alexa and Co reinforce gender bias
Alexa and other digital helpers: A recent UNESCO report calls for the use of a "neutral machine gender" because the voiceprint of computers releases sterey images in the minds of users.
Modern voice assistants such as Amazon's Alexa, Apple's Siri or Microsoft's Cortana reflect, reinforce and spread stereotypical gender images of women. These technologies, which are intended to make everyday life easier for users with the help of artificial intelligence (AI), often demean women and reduce them to obedient, compliant assistants. This is the conclusion of a recent report by UNESCO http://en.unesco.org which, among other things, urges manufacturers not to equip their systems with female voices by default, but to use a "neutral machine gender" instead.
Female appearance
"The time will come as early as next year. By then, more people will probably be having conversations with their digital voice assistants than with their spouses," says UNESCO. Currently, the vast majority of these assistants are trimmed to a female appearance by the factory - both in terms of their names and their voices and personalities, it said. With the report, which was produced in cooperation with the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development http://bmz.de and the EQUALS Skills Coalition http://equals.org was developed, one wants to take a "critical look" at these practices.
"The world needs to pay much closer attention to how, when and whether AI technologies deploy and disseminate stereotypical notions of gender roles," stresses Saniye Gülser Corat, head of Gender Equality at the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. Indeed, she says, it is often the case that the use of such devices creates a completely false image of how women should express themselves or respond to requests. "A synthetic female personality has to carry out commands from a higher, mostly male, authority," Corat said.
Too few women as developers
The fact that Alexa and co are largely female, however, is also an expression of the mostly very lopsided composition of the AI development teams responsible for such systems, he said. "These teams need to be more balanced in terms of their gender composition," UNESCO urges. Right now, women make up only 12 percent of AI developers, and as few as six percent of software developers, it said. "This problem can only be solved through better balanced digital education and training programs," the organization is convinced.
UNESCO report "I'd blush if I could: closing gender divides in digital skills through education" available online at: http://bit.ly/2WlFOhh
