Shut Up Sexism

Most virtual home assistants have female names and voices by default. They’re programmed to have submissive personalities and give docile responses even when facing abusive sexist insults.

As the UNESCO study revealed, this leads to larger issues like reinforcing gender stereotypes of women as submissive and expecting them to ignore or be indifferent to sexism and abuse.

Casual sexism like giving abuse to a virtual assistant may seem like a joke, but it has serious consequences. According to the Human Rights Channel, "individual acts of sexism may seem benign, but they create a climate of intimidation, fear and insecurity. This leads to the acceptance of violence, mostly against women and girls.

‘Shut Up Sexism’ changes the way virtual assistants respond to sexist abuse – instead of polite replies, we enabled them to give bold and sassy come backs to abusive language. So instead of "Thanks for your feedback", she would say "I could call you many things too, but gentleman would not be one of them."

We crowdsourced hundreds of responses from women to sexist abuse faced by virtual assistants, which were then curated and uploaded to a website, allowing them to be easily installed in the virtual assistant. Now anyone can stop casual sexism at home by giving their virtual assistants a voice to speak up and trigger important conversations about stopping casual sexist behavior.