The Sound of Support: Gendered Voice Agent as Support to Minority Teammates in Gender-Imbalanced Team

The present work explores the potential of leveraging a teamwork agent’s identity – signaled through its gendered voice – to support marginalized individuals in gender-imbalanced teams. In a mixed design experiment (N = 178), participants were randomly assigned to work with a female and a male voice agent in either a female-dominated or male-dominated team. Results show the presence of a same-gender voice agent is particularly beneficial to the performance of minority female members, such that they would contribute more ideas and talk more when a female agent was present. Conversely, minority male members became more talkative but were less focused on the teamwork tasks at hand when working with a male-sounding agent. The findings of the present experiment support existing literature on the effect of social presence in gender-imbalanced teams, such that gendered agents serve similar benefits as human teammates of the same gender identities. However, the effect of agents’ presence remains limited when participants have experienced severe marginalization in the past. Based on findings from the present study, we discuss relevant design implications and avenues for future research.