The Smart Wife: Why Siri, Alexa, and Other Smart Home Devices Need a Feminist Reboot

by Yolande Strengers, Jenny Kennedy

Overview

The life and times of the Smart Wife—feminized digital assistants who are friendly and sometimes flirty, occasionally glitchy but perpetually available.

Meet the Smart Wife—at your service, an eclectic collection of feminized AI, robotic, and smart devices. This digital assistant is friendly and sometimes flirty, docile and efficient, occasionally glitchy but perpetually available. She might go by Siri, or Alexa, or inhabit Google Home. She can keep us company, order groceries, vacuum the floor, turn out the lights. A Japanese digital voice assistant—a virtual anime hologram named Hikari Azuma—sends her “master” helpful messages during the day; an American sexbot named Roxxxy takes on other kinds of household chores. In The Smart Wife, Yolande Strengers and Jenny Kennedy examine the emergence of digital devices that carry out “wifework”—domestic responsibilities that have traditionally fallen to (human) wives. They show that the principal prototype for these virtual helpers—designed in male-dominated industries—is the 1950s housewife: white, middle class, heteronormative, and nurturing, with a spick-and-span home. It's time, they say, to give the Smart Wife a reboot.

What's wrong with preferring domestic assistants with feminine personalities? We like our assistants to conform to gender stereotypes—so what? For one thing, Strengers and Kennedy remind us, the design of gendered devices re-inscribes those outdated and unfounded stereotypes. Advanced technology is taking us backwards on gender equity. Strengers and Kennedy offer a Smart Wife “manifesta,” proposing a rebooted Smart Wife that would promote a revaluing of femininity in society in all her glorious diversity.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780262044370
Publisher:	MIT Press
Publication date:	09/01/2020
Pages:	312
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 8.70(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Yolande Strengers is Associate Professor of Digital Technology and Society in the Emerging Technologies Research Lab at Monash University, Melbourne.

Jenny Kennedy is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University, Melbourne.

Read an Excerpt

So who wants a smart wife? Potentially everyone. In 2016, the research firm Gartner predicted people would soon be having more conversations with bots than their spouses. Over a quarter of the adult population in the United States now owns at least one smart speaker like Alexa; that’s more than sixty-six million people.
When Apple’s Siri assistant made her debut in 2011 as “a sassy young woman who deflected insults and liked to flirt and serve users with playful obedience,” her “coming-out party” reached nearly 150 million iPhones in her first year. This single technology—developed behind closed doors by one company in one corner of the world with little input from women—shaped global expectations for smart wives and AI assistants more broadly in a little over twelve months.
Other smart wife markets, like those for care or sex robots, have reached fewer households. Indeed, despite the media hype, until recently sexbots were more an idea than a commercial reality, and despite predictions for expansion, the market is currently extremely niche.
In terms of gendered interest and uptake, industry sales figures show that consumers of smart home devices are more likely to be male, and “smart home obsessives” are invariably men. Men are also more often the instigators for bringing smart home technologies into the home and managing their operation.
As we have established, however, women (and the significant percentage of the world’s population that is not heterosexual men) need (smart) wives too. Millennial women in the United States, ages eighteen to thirty-five, are particularly excited about smart home technology, and the occasional report finds that women are actually more interested in some devices than men are, such as voice assistants and some smart appliances.
Narrowing down to specific markets reveals other gender differences in interest, uptake, and benefits. The vast majority of people currently interested in or buying sex robots (and dolls) are men. Women are understandably less enthusiastic about the penetration-oriented characteristics of most current offerings. By contrast, in the present social robot market, women stand to benefit most given that they live longer than men and therefore are more likely to suffer from debilitating conditions like dementia—which is one of the emerging applications for care robots.
When it comes to the creation of smart wives, men are clearly in the lead. Men vastly outnumber women in computer programming jobs, making up over 75 percent of the total pool of programmers in the United States in 2017. In the field of robotics and AI, men outnumber women as well. Men comprise between 77 and 83 percent of the technical positions at Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Google, and General Electric, and just over 63 percent at Amazon. Men make up 85 percent of the AI research staff at Facebook and 90 percent at Google. Likewise in academic environments, more than 80 percent of AI professors are men, and only 12 percent of leading AI researchers are women.
Indeed, computer science has gone backward on gender diversity in the last thirty to forty years, with female participation in computer science degrees in the United States dropping from 37 percent in the early 1980s to 18 percent in 2016, despite a number of active campaigns and initiatives to try to turn this around. Computer science remains a discipline with low numbers of tertiary-qualified women within the thirty-six member countries of Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). In the United Kingdom, the proportion of women in programming and software development jobs in the information and communication technologies sector dropped from 15 to 12 percent over the last decade. As a United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) report on closing gender divides in digital skills depressingly puts it, “The digital space is becoming more male-dominated, not less so.”

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments vii 
1 MEET THE SMART WIFE 1 
2 ROSIE 23 
3 PEPPER 49 
4 ALEXA 79 
5 HARMONY 109 
6 BITCHES WITH GLITCHES 145 
7 BOYS AND THEIR TOYS 175 
8 THE SMART WIFE REBOOT 205 
A Note on Methodology 229 
Notes 233 
Index 291

Editorial Reviews

"Provocative and engaging! The Smart Wife is a timely and wideranging examination of smart home technology and the Internet of Things that is sure to draw you in."
– Genevieve Bell, Distinguished Professor and 3A Institute Director, Australian National University; Senior Fellow, Intel Corporation

"Many readers may have wondered why their virtual assistants speak in female voices. Strengers and Kennedy document the many ways in which the same old gender stereotypes and inequalities have shaped wouldbe futuristic technologies — and ask whether a better smart home could be built to address our crises of care."
– Moira Weigel, Founding Editor of Logic magazine

"I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It's full of insight with some jaw-dropping moments and really thoughtful research. The pace of technology really does require smart humans to keep an eye on it all and that is exactly what the authors have done."  
– Annabel Crabb, writer and presenter, ABC (Australian Broadcasting Commission)

"This fascinating exploration of AI asks what the assignment of gender of its devices says about the societies they are meant to help."
– Shelf Awareness

"Alternating humor with cogent analysis, this book presents a thoughtful reflection on virtual assistants and their increasingly pervasive role in society... [The Smart Wife] provides an illuminating exploration of past technologies and a useful road map for the future."
– Choice

From the Publisher