On the topic of sexy robots, even if men do identify a problem that affects us all, that doesn’t mean that without female input they will come up with the right solution. When, in ‘retaliation’ for women denying him the sex to which he believed he was entitled, Alek Minassian mowed down and killed ten people in Toronto with a rented van, the New York Times published a column headlined ‘The Redistribution of Sex’, which argued that sex robots could be the answer to the plight of men who can’t convince women to sleep with them. Feminists might argue that the solution is, instead, to challenge male sexual entitlement.
When it comes to the tech that ends up in our pockets (I’m ever hopeful), it all comes down to who is making the decisions. And like the world of venture capitalists, the tech industry is dominated by men. Margaret Mitchell calls this the ‘sea of dudes’ problem.35 Over the past five years she’s worked with around ten women and ‘hundreds’ of men. Across ‘professional computing’ as a whole in the US, 26% of jobs are held by women compared to the 57% of jobs women hold across the entire US workforce.36 In the UK, women make up 14% of the STEM workforce.37
As well as a rash of sexy robots, the sea of dudes leads to products like the ‘enormous robot research prototype called PR2’ that computer scientist and co-founder of a robotics company Tessa Lau encountered when she worked for robotics research lab Willow Garage. It weighed ‘hundreds of pounds – it’s much larger than a smaller woman – and it has two big arms. It looks really scary. I didn’t even want one of those things near me if it wasn’t being controlled properly.’ When I interviewed her a couple of years ago, roboticist Angelica Lim told me a similar story about the robot she encountered at a conference in Slovenia, which would come and shake your hand if you waved at it. When she waved at this 5’8’ robot on wheels (the average American woman is 5’4’) the robot slowly turned towards her, put out its hand, and then came ‘barrelling towards me, fast’, making her jump backwards and shriek.
Contrast these examples to the virtual-reality headset trialled by tech journalist Adi Robertson.38 The headset was meant to track her eyes, but it didn’t work for her – until an employee asked if she was wearing mascara. ‘When it got recalibrated perfectly a few minutes later, I was surprised – not by the fact that it worked, but by the fact that anyone had thought to troubleshoot make-up. Incidentally,’ she writes, ‘this was one of the only VR start-ups I’ve ever covered with a female founder.’
Most VR companies aren’t founded by women, however, and so the VR experience often comes with an in-built male bias. Like much of the online world, VR gaming seems to have a sexual harassment problem – and this problem is something VR’s mainly male developers are routinely forgetting to account for.39
When author and gamer Jordan Belamire tried the VR game QuiVr in multiplayer mode, she was sexually assaulted by another user called BigBro4 42.40 ‘Virtual’ makes it sound like it isn’t real – but it felt real to Belamire. And no wonder. VR is meant to feel real, and it can be so successful at tricking your brain that it is being explored as a treatment for PTSD, phobias, even phantom-limb syndrome.41
To be fair to the male designers of QuiVr, they had an excellent and proactive response to Belamire’s blog.42 They immediately redesigned their ‘Personal Bubble’ setting (in which other player’s hands disappear if they come close to your face) to cover the entire body and so make such groping impossible. But as they themselves noted, while they had thought ‘of the possibility of some silly person trying to block your view with their hands and ruining the game’, they hadn’t thought of extending the fading function to the rest of the body. How, they asked, ‘could we have overlooked something so obvious?’
Fairly simply, to be honest. Henry Jackson and Jonathan Schenker are clearly well-meaning men who don’t intend to shut women out. But it’s Sergey Brin and the pregnancy parking all over again: even the best of men can’t know what it’s like to go through the world as a person with a body which some other people treat as an access-all-areas amusement arcade. This just isn’t something that Jackson and Schenker have to face on a regular basis, and therefore it really isn’t all that surprising that they missed ‘something so obvious’.
Male violence is far from the only issue keeping women out of VR. From the oversized headsets, to research showing that VR causes motion sickness in women to a far larger degree than it does in men,43 to the fact that narrow computer displays favour men in tasks that require spatial awareness,44 you’re left with another platform that just doesn’t work well for women – and that is therefore likely to have fewer women on it.
We don’t know exactly why women are more likely to experience motion sickness while using VR, but Microsoft researcher danah boyd conducted a study that suggests a possible explanation.45 Human eyes use two basic cues to determine depth: ‘motion parallax’ and ‘shape-from-shading’. Motion parallax refers to how an object seems bigger or smaller depending on how close you are to it, while shape-from-shading refers to the way the shading of a point changes as you move. And while 3D VR is pretty good at rendering
