Sexism complaints even among robots?

Science fiction movies and novels like to give us a taste of what our future will look like in 20, 50, 100 years. Images of flying cars, computer-generated food, and robotic companions have always enticed us, but what science fiction has also always done well is force us to take a look at the flaws in our own current society. Think Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale and Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Some of those flaws like gender discrimination might follow us into the future if we don't pay heed to the warning signs now. MOTHERBOARD has recently reported on a disturbing trend of robots being assigned either feminine or masculine qualities and then judged accordingly by the stereotypes of that gender.

A quirky thing about us humans is that we like to anthropomorphize everything from wild animals to our hot rods, to yes, even our electronics. Not only do we attribute human traits to them, but gender-specific ones as well. Did you see the episode of The Big Bang Theory where Koothrappali crushes on Siri?

So, is it so far-fetched to think that we would make robots in our image as well? While there is nothing necessarily wrong with this, recent studies looking at how well robots function among us have uncovered some lingering gender discrimination in our society.

According to MOTHERBOARD, Toshiba announced a new prototype robot just last month that will be capable of sign language. Can you guess its gender? Yes, that's right. It's a girl. Given the name Aiko, this robot has long hair, rosy lips and even is dressed in a pretty blouse. Toshiba is not alone though. Aldebaran Robotics describes its popular robot Nao as a "him" and Boston Dynamics' Atlas robot also has distinctive male features.

Apparently though, not only do we assign gender to these non-sentient machines, we treat them differently based on their assigned gender.

In a study last year, participants were asked to work with a robot security guard doing typical security tasks. Some of the participants worked with a male robot named "John" and the others a female one named "Joan." Both of these robots looked identical, but they did have typically male and female sounding voices. When asked to rate how the robots performed the tasks and how they fit in with the rest of the group, the study participants gave higher scores to "John."

In another study at Germany's Bielefeld University,a professor of social psychology Friederike Eyseel and her co-author Frank Hegel explored how even just facial gender cues could influence how we treat robots.

A Flobi robot head designed at the university allows you to change the face, giving it more female or male physical attributes depending on the preference. Participants were asked to assign traits to each of the faces and to indicate what type of work they think the robot capable of. Not surprisingly perhaps, the male version was given attributes of assertiveness and dominance and was assigned jobs like repairing things and guard duties, while the female one was assigned more "feminine" duties that included taking care of children and tutoring, and was considered to be friendlier and more affectionate.

Eyssel told Motherboard, "As a function of robot appearance, people attribute more gender stereotypical personality traits but also more suitability to gender stereotypical tasks to the respective robots."

When asked about the implications of her study, she said, "To me, I took it as an indication of the fact that really these gender stereotypes are quite deeply ingrained in us."

These stereotypes are also seen in completely human studies. A 2012 Yale University study found that when science professors were asked to judge student applications for a lab manager position (a typically male position), they rated the female applicants less hire worthy than their male counterpoints despite the fact that the same application materials were used with just a simple change of name on the front. And surprisingly both male and female professors rated the same way.

So what does this all mean for human and android-kind alike? Well, while a robot is not likely going to complain about sexist treatment, these studies do show us that we humans might not be as far along in gender equality as we'd like to think we are.

[MOTHERBOARD]