Are AI Agents Contributing to Gender Stereotypes?

"For understandable reasons, much of the alarm being raised about AI technology focuses on a fairly narrow band of adverse effects. AI can hallucinate incorrect answers, which could lead to errors both trivial and damaging. There's also the phenomenon of AI chatbots encouraging their users to engage in harmful or even fatal behavior. But there's another side to this as well: are AI agents reinforcing harmful gender stereotypes?"

""These choices have real-world consequences, normalising gendered subordination and risking abuse," Vijeyarasa writes, citing a 2025 study revealing that "up to 50% of human-machine exchanges were verbally abusive." The authors of that particular work, published in Journal of Development Policy and Practice in August 2025, covered a lot of territory, from the effects of AI voices on care work to how this could lead to "further reproduction of notions of non-consensual sexual activity.""

Many widely used AI assistants default to feminine voices and personas, including popular systems like Alexa and Siri, while media representations often depict them as women. Default feminine options and deferential behaviors can normalize gendered subordination and create environments that tolerate abuse. A 2025 study found that up to 50% of human–machine exchanges were verbally abusive, linking AI voices to effects on care work and possible reinforcement of non-consensual sexual norms. Design features such as female voices, deferential responses, and playful deflections can permit gendered aggression. Repeated abusive interaction with feminine AI personas may increase the likelihood of similar aggression toward people with similar characteristics.

Read at InsideHook