This is a guest post. The views expressed here are solely those of the author and do not represent positions of IEEE Spectrum or the IEEE.

Have you ever noticed how nice Alexa, Siri and Google Assistant are? How patient, and accommodating? Even a barrage of profanity-laden abuse might result in nothing more than a very evenly-toned and calmly spoken 'I won't respond to that'. This subservient persona, combined with the implicit (or sometimes explicit) gendering of these systems has received a lot of criticism in recent years. UNESCO's 2019 report 'I'd Blush if I Could' drew particular attention to how systems like Alexa and Siri risk propagating stereotypes about women (and specifically women in technology) that no doubt reflect but also might be partially responsible for the gender divide in digital skills.

As noted by the UNESCO report, justification for gendering these systems has traditionally revolved around the fact that it's hard to create anything gender neutral, and academic studies suggesting users prefer a female voice. In an attempt to demonstrate how we might embrace the gendering, but not the stereotyping, myself and colleagues at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology and Stockholm University in Sweden set out to experimentally investigate whether an ostensibly female robot that calls out or fights back against sexist and abusive comments would actually prove to be more credible and more appealing than one which responded with the typical 'I won't respond to that' or, worse, 'I'm sorry you feel that way'.