I was trying to do my job when I encountered a technical issue. I suspected that it may be a problem in the tool I’m using, but I needed some indication that I was right before moving on. I tried using Google, but I couldn’t frame the question in a way that would return the results I needed. I decided to ask ChatGPT.

I started the conversation with a polite opener, but there was no response! ChatGPT was down! How was I to do my job? (I’m not that serious here … but as programmers increasingly rely on AI; in the future, it will get more difficult to program if it’s not available).

People in the office started to discuss AI and the potential weaknesses of the business becoming more reliant on it. The company’s AI officer was around and is going to take this up with the board.

The conversation then moved onto other AI devices, particularly smart speakers.

I said that that I was usually polite with my Alexa, using the full English  pre- and postambles to conversation:

Hi Alexa, would you mind setting a fifteen minute timer please?

Timer set for fifteen minutes

Thank you darling

I do think of Alexa as female. She has a female sounding voice. Sometimes, when the WiFi is a bit glitchy, the alarm will go off and Alexa won’t respond when I ask her to cancel the alarm, so I shout at her in tones one night use for a naughty child.

Alexa’s voice is obviously female. But why do I refer to Mrs Google? That’s just a text search (ok, there’s a voice side to her as well). I feel more comfortable talking to female things it seems. Bizarre.

Why is my car female? All my cars have been females. All my mother’s cars were female. My dad’s cars had no personality. Although mum and dad called their satnav “George” and referred to it as him. In this I am in more common territory: many people refer to their cars as she. Ships are always she.

Countries can be he or she. Motherland or fatherland.

But why do we gender inanimate objects or even abstract concepts? Many languages (German, French, Latin) have gendered nouns. Masculine, feminine, and neuter.

The Romans embodied their abstract ideas as goddesses – Virtue, Hope, Fortune, an almost endless list of female aspirations.

This is all very interesting, but what does it tell us about, well, human gender?

Firstly, at least in Western civilization, we are obsessed with gender. So much so that even objects and abstract ideas get a gender. We are just starting to see how ridiculous and arbitrary and capricious gendering objects and ideas is – often we see the joke and apply gender light-heartedly. But we are so concerned with it that any attempt to fiddle with human gender creates deep feelings of discomfort.

“but ’tis nature” it is exclaimed, “you can’t change your gender – it’s in your DNA”. But as with gendered objects and ideals, human genders are also social constructs.

A “social construct” is an idea or concept that has been created and accepted by the people in a society. It doesn’t have an inherent existence in the natural world but is given meaning through social agreements and interactions. The Roman goddesses were also very clearly social constructs, just as the abstract concepts they embodied were.

For example, there is an objective role in reproduction of “father”, being the entity that provides the spermatozoa. However, there are socially constructed gender roles of “father” which differ from society to society – from epoch to epoch.

When I consider myself and the personality that I belive I have, some I think of as male and others as female:

• I would more happily be the dependent (female).
• I’m emotionally vulnerable (female).
• I prefer the social aspects of games (female).
• I’m not very assertive (female).
• I don’t like being the initiator in sex (female).
• I prefer a submissive sexual role (female).
• Excitable and prone to outbursts of emotion and gabbling (female).

I wonder if any of my assignations of “female” to my various personality traits irritated anybody? Really saying that one type of characteristic is “female” or “male” is just sexist because there is an implied value in the various character traits, for example saying that emotion is less valuable than logic.