This is a very interesting small video made by Hannah Rozenberg, a recently graduate Architectural Designer of the Royal College of Art. While writing her thesis, she had realised how gender is built into the technology we use every day.
Indeed, in the video, she shows how Google translate can reveal the gender biases present in technology. If you translated, for example, “she is a leader” from English to Estonian and back to English, the program will automatically swap the pronouns, to read “he is a leader.”
She also shows how when googling images, certain words would be mainly associated to men or women. For example, googling the word “assistant” will mainly result in feminine characters, while googling the words “politicians” will show mainly men pictures… Base on this constatation, Rozenberd as imagined a website to calculate the Gender Unit related to elements used in architecture (read more).
We wanted to test is ourselves : try to google “architect” is google image search and see the result !