Voice Recognition
Voice recognition has also been suggested as a solution to smartphone-associated RSI,19 but this actually isn’t much of a solution for women, because voice-recognition software is often hopelessly male-biased. In 2016, Rachael Tatman, a research fellow in linguistics at the University of Washington, found that Google’s speech-recognition software was 70% more likely to accurately recognise male speech than female speech – and it’s currently the best on the market.
Clearly, it is unfair for women to pay the same price as men for products that deliver an inferior service to them. But there can also be serious safety implications. Voice-recognition software in cars, for example, is meant to decrease distractions and make driving safer. But they can have the opposite effect if they don’t work – and often, they don’t work, at least for women.
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Syed Ali, the lead author of one of the medical dictation studies, observed that his study’s ‘immediate impact’ was that women ‘may have to work somewhat harder’ than men ‘to make the [voice recognition] system successful’. Rachael Tatman agrees: ‘The fact that men enjoy better performance than women with these technologies means that it’s harder for women to do their jobs. Even if it only takes a second to correct an error, those seconds add up over the days and weeks to a major time sink, time your male colleagues aren’t wasting messing with technology.’
Thankfully for frustrated women around the world, Tom Schalk, the vice president of voice technology at car navigation system supplier ATX, has come up with a novel solution to fix the ‘many issues with women’s voices’. What women need, he said, was ‘lengthy training’ – if only women ‘were willing’ to submit to it. Which, sighs Schalk, they just aren’t. Just like the wilful women buying the wrong stoves in Bangladesh, women buying cars are unreasonably expecting voice-recognition software developers to design a product that works for them when it’s obvious that the problem needing fixing is the women themselves. Why can’t a woman be more like a man?
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Of course, the problem isn’t women’s voices. It’s our old friend, the gender data gap.