Visual, behavioral and verbal cues for gender are often used in designing virtual agents to take advantage of their stereotypical effects on the users. However, recent studies point towards a more gender-balanced view of stereotypical traits and roles in our society. This paper is intended as an effort towards a progressive and inclusive approach for gender representations in virtual agents. Our contributions are twofold. First, in an iterative design process, we created representative male, female and androgynous agents with few differences in their visual attributes. Second, we used these agents to evaluate the stereotypical assumptions of gendered traits and roles in virtual agents. Our results showed that, indeed, gender stereotypes are not as effective as previously assumed, and androgynous agents could represent a middle-ground between gendered stereotypes. We present our findings in the hope to foster discussions in virtual agent research and the frequent stereotypical use of gender representations. CCS CONCEPTS • Human-centered computing → User studies; • Computing methodologies → Intelligent agents; • Social and professional topics → Gender.

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