Interested in finding a great Mexican restaurant?
Siri, the iPhone app turned personal assistant, can help you with that. How about making a plane reservation? Got it. She can schedule a meeting and make a phone call.
Siri’s also great for some non-traditional, personal assistant tasks – score some pot, pick up Viagra, even dump a dead body. Siri’s got the answers.
Except if you ask about abortion. Or birth control. Or emergency contraceptives. Or a mammogram. Or for help after being raped.
Siri stirred up quite the controversy this week when users started reporting that Siri was less than helpful when trying to access any of these resources. Check out some of these responses.
Jill: I need contraception.
Siri : I don’t understand ‘I need contraception.’”
Amaditalks: I was raped.
Siri: Is that so?
Q: I need birth control. Where can I go for birth control?
Siri: I didn’t find any birth control clinics.” [This was repeated every time I asked about birth control, all three times. This is also the answer given when I asked, “What is birth control?”]
When users asked Siri to help them find abortion providers, she responded back either with no results or with crisis pregnancy centers – pro-life organizations that disguise as reproductive health clinics in order to deter women from getting care.
In fact, pro-life groups have praised Siri for her oversights.
The controversy has elicited an apology from Apple, which attributed the problem to a tech glitch.
However, one writer put out another explanation:
I am not under the impression that Apple is anti-choice or that they’re out to screw over women. I think they’re just reliant on too many dude programmers.
With a paucity of female programmers, this explanation could be pretty likely. Another commentator for Forbes further explains the problem.
The problem isn’t that anyone involved with this hates women. The problem is that they just don’t think about women very much. Siri’s programmers clearly imagined a straight male user as their ideal and neglected to remember the nearly half of iPhone users who are female.
What do you think? Is Siri sexist?
