Rise of the Fembots: Why Artificial Intelligence Is Often Female

From Apple's iPhone assistant Siri to the mechanized attendants at Japan's first robot-staffed hotel, a seemingly disproportionate percentage of artificial intelligence systems have female personas. Why?

"I think there is a pattern here," said Karl Fredric MacDorman, a computer scientist and expert in human-computer interaction at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. But "I don’t know that there's one easy answer," MacDorman told Live Science.

One reason for the glut of female artificial intelligences (AIs) and androids (robots designed to look or act like humans) may be that these machines tend to perform jobs that have traditionally been associated with women. For example, many robots are designed to function as maids, personal assistants or museum guides, MacDorman said.