Virtual Servants: Stereotyping Female Front‐Office Employees on the Internet

Abstract

This article focuses on the service providers of the future: virtual assistants on the Internet. Recent technological developments, supported by intensive research on artificial intelligence, have enabled corporations to construct 'virtual employees' who can interact with their online customers. The number of virtual assistants on the Internet continues to grow and most of these new service providers are human-like and female. In this article I profile virtual employees on the Internet -who they are, what they do and how they present themselves. I demonstrate that the Internet suffers from the same gender stereotyping characteristic of customer services in general and that the unreflective choice of female images is, at the minimum, a symbolic reinforcement of the real circumstances of gender divisions in customer service.

Boundary Creatures? Employed, Breastfeeding Mothers and ‘Abjection as Practice’

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Policy and the Pregnant Body at Work: Strategies of Secrecy, Silence and Supra-performance

“…Due to its relative newness as a method, there are debates about how netnographic research compares with more traditional qualitative research techniques such as interviewing. Gustavsson (2005, p. 404) observes how ‘the internet is often seen as an arena separate from the “real world”… the social actions of real life [being] firmly anchored in bodies’. Gatrell and Elliott (2008), Parr (2002) and Gustavsson (2005) all acknowledge how the sense of separation between online and off‐line reality could be seen to pose a methodological dilemma.…”

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