When women are over-represented in the workforce, it tends be in industries of assistance – cleaning, nursing, secretarial work and, now, the world of virtual assistants. Research by Unesco has shown that using default female voices in AI – as Microsoft has done with Cortana, Amazon with Alexa, Google with Google Assistant and Apple with Siri – is furthering the belief that women exist merely to help men to get on with more important things.
Shave for the Brave 2019 is a family-friendly event and free to attend. Bringing family and friends to help cheer on participants is highly encouraged. The event is on Friday before St. Patrick’s Day– expect to see creativity with costumes and team t-shirts. The opening ceremony will kick off with river dancers and a bagpipe performance.
There is no real reason for AI technologies to be gendered at all, but we are at the mercy of tech companies “staffed by overwhelmingly male engineering teams”, fixated on living out a Captain Kirk fantasy and delegating to the subservient, silky-voiced computers of Star Trek. These systems are unapologetically built by men, for men. They can even struggle to understand the “breathy” voices of women as software is often developed with male voice samples.
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Digital assistants like Siri and Alexa entrench gender biases, says UN
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When we think of robots – leading uprisings, carrying out efficient murders, accompanying human companions on coming-of-age adventures – they are almost always coded as male. Think Terminator, Star Wars, RoboCop, Avengers: Age of Ultron, Big Hero 6 and most sci-fi films of the 1980s. Their rarely portrayed feminised counterparts are love interests (Her), victims (Ex Machina) or sexualised to the point of lunacy (the “fembots” in Austin Powers, who shoot bullets from their nipples).
Voices with power tend to be male: take the murderous Hal 9000 computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey, or Auto, a spaceship’s autopilot and main antagonist in Wall-E. Robots aren’t leading us on intergalactic sieges in real life, so it’s no surprise that it’s a woman’s voice politely requesting patience on the automated menu at the bank. It is telling, too, that while society has no problem with a disembodied female voice doing our bidding, many people struggle with one telling them what to do. In 2015, Tesco replaced the “bossy” woman’s voice at self-service checkouts, with a “friendlier, more helpful” male one.
The new research also highlights how virtual assistants are programmed to respond to harassment with the deflecting, tight-grinned replies last heard from a Mad Men receptionist. If you call Siri a slut, she will respond: “I’d blush if I could.” Amazon’s Alexa will say: “Thanks for the feedback.” Ask Siri: “Will you talk dirty to me?” and she will tease: “The carpet needs vacuuming”. A writer for Microsoft’s Cortana software recently said that “a good chunk of the volume of early-on inquiries” were about Cortana’s sex life, proving you don’t even have to have a body for men to find a way to comment on it. The robot uprising we are preempting may be a gynoid-led #MeToo.
For years, we have looked forward to a future in which our lives are made easier by technology, but in it women (or rather, robots anthropomorphised as women) are still not free from the gender binary. And that is because real women aren’t either. It seems we envisage sexism even in society at its most advanced and progressive. We imagine our eventual overlords as male, but our helpers as aproned females – like the Jetsons’ maid, Rosie. A true technological utopia for women would be one where the future of AI isn’t female, but genderless, as all work should be.
In the wind-swept wilds of southern Mexico, a Beast is stirring.
Migrants heading north are once again taking their chances on the freight train known as La Bestia – so named for the way it maims unlucky riders who fall beneath its wheels as it grinds across the isthmus of Tehuantepec.
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Not so long ago, migrants were increasingly seeking safety in numbers, joining mass caravans to travel through Mexico. For a while they encountered an unusually warm welcome, but in recent weeks, the reception has cooled dramatically: police roadblocks have sprung up across the south of the country, and immigration officials have raided migrant camps and broken up caravans.
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Evelio Isidro, 23, left Honduras on foot to escape extortionists, and originally planned to walk the length of Mexico after hearing that the government was offering transit visas for Central Americans.
But when the group he was travelling with was targeted by immigration officials – forcing him to run through the hills to escape arrest – he opted instead for the risky train journey.
“President [Andrés] Manuel López Obrador said they weren’t going to detain any migrants so I decided to come,” Isidro said. “But police and immigration officials are detaining and deporting us.”
When he took power in January, López Obrador promised to overhaul immigration policy in Mexico – long feared by Central American migrants as a danger zone of extortion, kidnap and sexual assaults.
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The president, known as Amlo, said that Mexico would no longer do America’s “dirty work”, instead offering humanitarian visas allowing migrants to spend one year in the country.
But Donald Trump has derailed those aspirations. The US president has repeatedly accused Mexico of failing to stop migrants and illegal drugs from reaching the US, and is now threatening to slap tariffs on Mexican exports until the issue is resolved.
During his visit to London on Tuesday, Trump reprised the theme, claiming that “millions of people” were being allowed to pass through Mexico, and warning that tariffs could be imposed as soon as next week.
Mexico’s foreign ministry retorted by boasting robust detention and deportation figures: 80,537 people have been repatriated, mostly to Central America, since Amlo took office. López Obrador also wrote to Trump, reminding his US counterpart, “The Statue of Liberty is not an empty symbol.”
But Amlo has acceded to Trump’s “remain in Mexico” policy, forcing nearly 9,000 asylum seekers to stay in Mexico as their cases are heard in US courts. Meanwhile, Mexican immigration officials are taking longer to issue travel documents and caravans are quickly corralled.
“The government is reacting in an extremely hostile way and with [migration] policies which are far from its rhetoric,” said Salva Lacruz, coordinator with the Fray Matías de Córdova Human Rights Centre in Tapachula, near the border with Guatemala.
Mexico has started issuing “regional visas” which allow migrants to freely visit several southern states – far from the US border. But migrants have shown little interest in the poverty-ridden region where wages are little higher than in Central America.
“It’s a tactic to contain Trump’s anger,” Lacruz said of the regional visas. “The Mexican government is under enormous pressure from the United States.”
Even amid the crackdown, migrants keep coming: on Tuesday about 400 people crossed the Suchiate River from Guatemala.
Tensions have boiled over in the nearby city of Tapachula, where migrants have staged mass outbreaks from the XXI Century detention centre.
Tuesday’s group was mostly composed of Hondurans, but others passing through the city hail from Cuba, Haiti and African countries.
Many camp out in Tapachula as they wait, living in cockroach-infested flop hotels or sleeping on sheets of cardboard along roadsides.
“My kids have a cold and a cough,” said Kesner Bazin, a Haitian migrant who on a recent afternoon was waiting in the rain outside the migrant center for a transit visa which would give him 20 days to cross Mexico.
He was hoping to reach Tijuana with his family after eight years living in Brazil, but had no idea when the document would be granted. “You have to be patient,” he shrugged.
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When the first large-scale caravans passed through the region in late 2018, residents welcomed migrants with open arms, offering weary travellers water, food and clothing.
That help has evaporated and some locals have turned hostile. A group of nuns was handing out food to migrants in Tapachula’s central square, when a passing motorist screamed: “Don’t feed them! Put those lazy fucks to work!”
The nuns feed about 2,500 migrants once a day – rice, beans, eggs and bread – though donations are scarce and local traders often try to gouge prices, said Sister Bertha López, the mother superior.
“There’s a climate of apathy when it comes to helping,” she said.
Officials have turned hostile, too. In Huixtla, up the road from Tapachula, patrol cars have circulated through town, warning over a loudspeaker: “A dangerous caravan is coming.”
“I have to defend my people,” said Huixtla’s mayor, José Luis Laparra, banging his fist on the table before boasting that his police force was “busting the heads” of bad people.
Unsubstantiated stories of migrants committing crimes circulate on social media and create scandalous headlines. “The state [government] and prosecutor’s office doesn’t have any statistics showing crime has increased,” said Sandybell Reyes, migration coordinator with Voces Mesoamericanas, a human rights organisation.
“There’s a stigmatisation of the caravans and all the people coming with them.”
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Migration experts say caravans formed so migrants could move openly and avoid the risks of the road through Mexico. Now they warn that, as in previous crackdowns, migrants will be forced to take longer, more risky routes – such as the Beast - to avoid immigration checkpoints.
“They’re more exposed to being robbed, being raped, attacks by organised crime,” said Guadalupe Ramírez, a volunteer at the Brothers on the Road shelter in Ixtepec. “They’re like the perfect target.”