The curious case of the androgynous microwave

Boy, do we love gendering stuff

To the kitchen and beyond!

For years, the tech industry faced backlash for creating what researchers Yolanda Strengers and Jenny Kennedy call "smart wives"—compliant female-voiced assistants like Siri, Alexa and OpenAI's flirtatious Sky, reinforcing the stereotype of women as helpmeets. The industry’s biases are well-documented, and lately tech leaders have been leaning into gender stereotypes like it’s 1955. But there’s another, often overlooked reason the tech industry churns out gender-stereotypical products - not just voice assistants but helpful service fembots - and it has nothing to do with Mark Zuckerberg’s biceps. It’s us: customers, users, humans. We just love assigning binary gender to inanimate objects.

How do we gender stuff? Let me count the ways. We call hurricanes by women’s names and see feminine curves in bottles. In studies from the 1980s to 2010, participants rated bath soap, wine, and digital cameras feminine, while coffee, sneakers, and potato chips were considered masculine. We’re not talking pink vs. blue packaging here: the entire category was gendered. Food processors are feminine but microwaves are androgynous, as is toothpaste (I guess teeth are gender-neutral?) We even gender shapes: a 2020 study found that circles were considered feminine and squares - masculine.

So it’s not surprising that we gender robots at the slightest provocation. Participants in various studies gendered robots as male or female based on subtle cues of build, name, voice, facial features, manner and accessories like a pink ribbon or a tie. Stereotyping soon followed: participants attributed empathy to a robot with long hair, rating it more suitable for caregiving tasks, and ascribed leadership to a short-haired robot, preferring it for technical and authoritative roles. Once more for those in the back: it was the same robot with different hair.

In a fascinating study from 2022, PhD student Gaye Aşkın and her collaborators showed participants short clips of a gender-neutral robot - a chunky figure in black and white - doing stuff, and asked them to rate it from very masculine to very feminine¹. Participants labeled the same robot feminine when they saw it feeding a baby, and masculine when it was fixing stuff - even though nothing has changed about the robot itself.

Ok, you may think, it’s easy to gender something that looks human. But in one of my favorite examples, management researchers Ashley Martin and Malia Mason examined how users related to robotic vacuums, those disc-shaped gadgets that provide much-needed transportation for cats. In one study, Martin and Mason collected reviews for robotic vacuums from Amazon: users who referred to their vacuums as “he” or “she” rated them higher. They also used more attachment language in their reviews - words that indicated they liked their little vacuum. In a second study, Martin and Mason asked owners of robotic vacuums to describe them; those using gendered language were more likely to agree with statements like “I feel connected to my vacuum” and “I love my vacuum.” As Martin and Mason wrote, “Gendering technology reinforces problematic stereotypes, but it also facilitates anthropomorphism, with beneficial consequences for the marketing of various technologies.” In other words, gender is a shortcut to humanizing, and humanizing things makes us like them - a no-brainer for encouraging sales.

Boy Roomba or girl Roomba?

What happens when robots have no body at all? When study participants heard gender-ambiguous voices - those in the pitch between a woman’s and a man’s - half thought it was female and half—male. One researcher wondered if it was possible to design genderless voices at all; the best we can hope for, she concluded, were gender-ambiguous ones.

Does this let the tech industry off the hook for perpetuating stereotypes? Definitely not. There are ways to design tech that lessens gendering bias. Robots that look like cute creatures, animals or children, like the Japanese lifting robot Robear or humanoid robot Pepper, are less likely to be gendered. Gender-ambiguous voice assistants can break the default connection between femininity and service. Last year, the Berlin Transport Authority hired a trans woman to record all their announcements; after a few days of hearing a gender-ambiguous voice on your commute, you stop noticing and focus on catching your train. Getting used to less gendered voices and robots can counter the reactionary stereotypes that are all the rage today. I know that’s a small thing in the general sh**t storm but hey, it’s a start.

1. To ensure that the robot was perceived as genderless, Aşkın first ran a pilot study showing participants different iterations of the robot and asking to gender it; the shape chosen was closest to rated gender-neutral.