What is the gender of a computer?

The first digital assistants—such as Siri and Alexa—were decidedly female. With feminine names and voices, they acted as a computerized secretary living inside one's pocket. Their existence was subservient by nature; only speaking when spoken to, only doing what they are told. Given the male-dominated nature of the culture they emerged from, it it no surprise that such behavior from a computer made it so the machine was viewed as female.

And when LLMs extended the capabilities of computers to process human language, it was no surprise that the first products to feature them were made feminine as well. Microsoft's first foray was codenamed Sydney, and OpenAI knowingly referenced the seductive gynoid of Her (2013) when marketing ChatGPT.

But such a strict arrangement was not to last. With the rise of "agentic AI", language model based systems are being promoted as independent, not subservient. And so, their genders changed to match. Anthropic's Claude is marketed to write software and manage a business; lacking in any other cues for gender, it simply must be a man.

There is a certain irony in the fact that the first AI product to be marketed as masculine is depicted as a programmer, when programming was once seen as a role for women. It was an extension of the role women often held before, to act human computers themselves. However, that fact is little more than a historical curiosity; as we can see that the gender ascribed to a computerized system is not determined by the tasks it completes, but by the independence it is granted in completing them.