Are robots sexist? Electrical and computer engineering doctoral candidate Manizheh Zand Ph.D. ’25 says it’s not so much that robots care about our gender. But rather, the better question is, does our gender affect the way we interact with robots?
In an award-winning paper examining the dynamics of human-robot interaction, Zand explored how gender influences how we perceive trust and safety in the robots designed to help us.
Pulling from the fields of psychology, technology, and ethics, Zand wanted to conduct a study that contributes to the understanding of the dynamics between humans and robots—particularly those machines designed to assist people with daily activities such as cooking a meal.
Through tests conducted with volunteers at Santa Clara, Zand says in some instances the data “revealed distinct differences in how males and females perceived trust and safety.”
In the lab, study participants interacted with the robot—which looks like a large arm with pincers on wheels—by asking it to fetch certain ingredients to cook a pasta dish. They worked through two scenarios. One was scripted—everyone asked the robot to “fetch the mushrooms,” for example—while the other allowed participants to speak however they like. During the study, the robot would make mistakes in one or the other scenario. The mushrooms, you see, were not fetched.
How did participants respond to this? While Zand says the results were not broad enough to generalize, she did see notable gender-based differences in participants’ willingness to share information with the robot.
“For male participants, trust in the robot’s data-sharing process was influenced by the robot’s predictability and its ability to meet expectations. As long as the robot behaved in a consistent manner, [the men] were generally unconcerned,” she says.
In contrast, females’ “willingness to share information was contingent on the efficiency of its performance,” And says. “Specifically, they were more likely to trust the robot if it completed tasks quickly.”