The voices of women in tech are still being erased – MIT Technology Review

And it is still the case that when we hear a womans voice as part of a tech product, we might not know who she is, whether she is even real, and if so, whether she consented to have her voice used in that way. Many TikTok users assumed that the text-to-speech voice they heard on the app wasnt a real person. But it was: it belonged to a Canadian voice actor named Bev Standing, and Standing had never given ByteDance, the company that owns TikTok, permission to use it.

Standing sued the company in May, alleging that the ways her voice was being usedparticularly the way users could make it say anything, including profanitywere injuring her brand and her ability to make a living. Her voice becoming known as "that voice on TikTok" that you could make say whatever you liked brought recognition without remuneration and, she alleged, hurt her ability to get voice work.

Then, when TikTok abruptly removed her voice, Standing found out the same way the rest of us didby hearing the change and seeing the reporting on it. (TikTok has not commented to the press about the voice change.)

Those familiar with the story of Apples Siri may be feeling a bit of dj vu: Susan Bennett, the woman who voiced the original Siri, also didnt know that her voice was being used for that product until it came out. Bennett was eventually replaced as the US English female voice, and Apple never publicly acknowledged her. Since then, Apple has written secrecy clauses into voice actors contracts and most recently has claimed that its new voice is entirely software generated, removing the need to give anyone credit.

These incidents reflect a troubling and common pattern in the tech industry. The way that peoples accomplishments are valued, recognized, and paid for often mirrors their position in the wider society, not their actual contributions. One reason Bev Standings and Susan Bennetts names are now widely known online is that theyre extreme examples of how womens work gets erased even when its right there for everyone to seeor hear.

The way that people's accomplishments are valued, recognized, and paid for often mirrors their position in the wider society, not their actual contributions.

When women in tech do speak up, theyre often told to quiet downparticularly if they are women of color. Timnit Gebru, who holds a PhD in computer science from Stanford, was recently ousted from Google, where she co-led an AI ethics team, after she spoke up about her concerns regarding the companys large language models. Her co-lead, Margaret Mitchell (who holds a PhD from the University of Aberdeen with a focus on natural-language generation), was also removed from her position after speaking up about Gebrus firing. Elsewhere in the industry, whistleblowers like Sophie Zhang at Facebook, Susan Fowler at Uber, and many other women found themselves silenced and often fired as a direct or indirect result of trying to do their jobs and mitigate the harms they saw in the technology companies where they worked.

Even women who found startups can find themselves erased in real time, and the problem again is worse for women of color. Rumman Chowdhury, who holds a PhD from the University of California, San Diego, and is the founder and former CEO of Parity, a company focused on ethical AI, saw her role in her own companys history minimized by the New York Times.

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The voices of women in tech are still being erased - MIT Technology Review