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Your Stupid Minds! Stupid! Stupid!

Oh, Joy! Apparently Robots Are Subject to Sexism, Too

by Alanna Bennett | 2:00 pm, August 24th, 2012


Sometimes (fine, oftentimes), the world makes it abundantly clear that the issue of sexist thought is so deeply ingrained in the heads of us humans that it might still take another few millenia to sink in. It’s days like these when we want to repeatedly hit our heads against concrete.

By the time this far-off time actually takes place, we’ll surely be under the regime of our robot overlords. But even the robots can’t catch a break: They’re suffering from human sexism, too.

Yes, those pesky gender roles aren’t just getting in the way of real-life women getting hired for jobs or gaining respect; “female” robots are being perceived as capable of different things than those who are visibly seen as “male,” despite the fact that both are just chunks of technology.

From a study published in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology:

Previous research on gender effects in robots has largely ignored the role of facial cues. We fill this gap in the literature by experimentally investigating the effects of facial gender cues on stereotypical trait and application ascriptions to robots. As predicted, the short-haired male robot was perceived as more agentic than was the long-haired female robot, whereas the female robot was perceived as more communal than was the male counterpart. Analogously, stereotypically male tasks were perceived more suitable for the male robot, relative to the female robot, and vice versa. Taken together, our findings demonstrate that gender stereotypes, which typically bias social perceptions of humans, are even applied to robots.

Yeah, you read that right: They’re robots, and they’re still subject to the same sociologically ingrained sexist thought that is usually applied to humans.

More details on the study are still vague to us, as it’s stuck behind a paywall, but it’s an interesting example of how our minds and our socialization are screwing us over. Fun!

(via Geekologie)(Image via Nicktoons)

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  • Brittany C.

    Well at least it’s something that can be solved with a nice serving of deadly neurotoxin…

  • http://zadl.org/ Captain ZADL

    I wonder if people who are more aware of sexism have the same reactions as the general populace, who might not be as conscious of their actions.

  • http://twitter.com/allxthatxpunk Shannon S.

    Appropriate picture is appropriate. 
    I loved watching that show. XJ-9 (sorry, Jenny) was pretty bad-ass for a kids show.

  • http://twitter.com/crlanei C. R. Lanei

    Well, this one is kind of weird any way. The act of putting hair on them sends certain cues out so there’s always the possibility that the test results ended up being more about what people thought that the people behind the idea to put hair on the robots intended for said robots.

    Which is to say, I’m not sure the people being tested were thinking about the robots as much as they were thinking about the intentions of the humans behind their creation.

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Mark-Brown/100003806213451 Mark Brown

    I get that it’s a problem, but it seems to have the same cure as gender stereotyping among us meatbags; knowing it exists means it can be confronted and subverted, until it stops being a recognizeable stereotype.

    We just need more non-stereotypically feminine bots, like XJ-9, Andromeda Ascendant/Rommie, Arcee, Janice Em, and the Tachikomas (who ARE stereotypically feminine, but are asexual, and usually use masculine pronouns).

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Ryan-Quavey-Havers/1593505278 Ryan ‘Quavey’ Havers

    I miss My Life as Tennage Robot now. :(

  • http://twitter.com/WillShetterly Will Shetterly

    Giving robots features associated with traditional gender roles affects how people see them? Quel surprise! If only someone had told Fritz Lang before he made Metropolis…

  • http://twitter.com/Platypoid πPLaTyPoiDπ

    And that is why making fembot characters can only either end up with success or complete and utter failure.

  • http://www.facebook.com/peter.trussell Peter Trussell

    Some of this was covered in Issac Asimov’s short story Feminine Intuition
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminine_Intuition

  • http://www.facebook.com/yenny.coll Yenny Coll

    It’s simple. Don’t give robots gender! They should be made as adrogynous as possible.

  • http://twitter.com/seriouslyyouguy you guys

    It takes a scientific study to determine that people will think of robots that look male as male and robots that look female as female? As much as I love and respect the scientific method… come on, guys.

  • http://twitter.com/jddascencioi Iambic Singularity

    Well, they were created in our image, so it’s natural that we project our roles and models on them.

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