Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: The incorporation of technology, and more recently AI [Artificial Intelligence], into our everyday lives has been progressing at an unprecedented pace. Siri, Alexa, Cortana and various other digital assistants and chatbots populate our everyday interactions for most service-related matters. Acknowledging that technology, work, and social relations are deeply entangled with each other, this paper combines a literature review of anthropomorphisation of AI and emerging technology with a focus on gender and work, and empirical examples drawn from real-world applications and chatbots in the service industry in India, to critically analyse the gendering of technology. We unpack the tendency to ascribe a feminine identity to assistive technology and argue that gendering of emergent assistive technology is performative and relational. It materialises through particularistic manifestations drawing from the sociocultural context. Furthermore, this gendering of technology is co-constituted by the sexual division of labour and gendered norms of work.
Authors: Ashwin Varghese, Aishwarya Rajeev
Institutions: University of Cambridge, Liverpool John Moores University
Language: English
Subfield: Safety Research
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $3,550
OpenAlex ID: W4415947444