The title of this publication borrows its name from the response given by Siri, a female-gendered voice assistant used by hundreds of millions of people, when a human user would tell 'her', 'Hey Siri, you're a bi***.' Although the AI software that powers Siri has, as of April 2019, been updated to reply to the insult more flatly ('I don't know how to respond to that'), the assistant's submissiveness in the face of gender abuse remains unchanged since the technology's wide release in 2011. Siri's 'female' obsequiousness - and the servility expressed by so many other digital assistants projected
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The title of this publication borrows its name from the response given by Siri, a female-gendered voice assistant used by hundreds of millions of people, when a human user would tell 'her', 'Hey Siri, you're a bi***.' Although the AI software that powers Siri has, as of April 2019, been updated to reply to the insult more flatly ('I don't know how to respond to that'), the assistant's submissiveness in the face of gender abuse remains unchanged since the technology's wide release in 2011. Siri's 'female' obsequiousness - and the servility expressed by so many other digital assistants projected as young women - provides a powerful illustration of gender biases coded into technology products, pervasive in the technology sector and apparent in digital skills education. This publication seeks to expose some of these biases and put forward ideas to begin closing a digital skills gender gap that is, in most parts of the world, wide and growing. Today, women and girls are 25 per cent less likely than men to know how to leverage digital technology for basic purposes, 4 times less likely to know how to programme computers and 13 times less likely to file for a technology patent. At a moment when every sector is becoming a technology sector, these gaps should make policy-makers, educators and everyday citizens 'blush' in alarm. The publication explains the role gender-responsive education can play to help reset gendered views of technology and ensure equality for women and girls.
Broken into a policy paper and two think pieces, this work aims to: put forward rationales and recommendations for implementing gender-equal digital skills education; share evidence of the ICT gender equality paradox, UNESCO's finding that countries with the highest levels of gender equality such as those in Europe also have lowest proportions of women pursuing advanced degrees needed to work in the technology sector; and call critical attention to the proliferation of female-gendered AI digital assistants and the stereotypes they reflect on a global scale.
Published abstract.
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