From Nass, Reeves "The Media Equation" (Online summary:

Gender stereotyping applies to computer voices: Female voices are perceived as less effective evaluators and more nurturing than are male-voiced systems. Female voiced computers are perceived as better teachers of love and relationships and worse teachers of technical subjects than are male-voiced teaching systems

Can we subvert the gender system while leaving it intact? It seems like as gender and sex become increasingly disconnectable, gender can be more of a choice. (A male can script an interaction that ultimately gets mediated by a female computer voice, and rapper Katastrophe (whose work is described in a PopMatters column) has undergone sex reassignment after living as a man for his post-adolescent life.)

However, this can be a copout. Few people have access to the technology or the invasive medical miracles that makes such slippage possible in its extremes. And say male and female gender become complete social constructions. Then the question becomes whether categorization is even avoidable. Categories and the stereotypes that go with them seem like the heuristics that make the world processable on an immediate, moment-to-moment basis. These stereotypes, in light of the Maturana we've been reading in Winograd's class, are not approximations of rational implications for quick application, but instead just reactionas we have because of the structure-determined nature of our minds. It's not that stereotypes approximate reality, then, that we have them, but because our experiences are like creedlets that have, in a sense, eroded certain structures and patterns of structural reaction (only afterwards, or in the proper conditions, abstracted into a rational justification) that we act in ways that are also explainable as stereotypes. (What changes in the equation when stereotypes become a form of shared cultural knowledge?)

Much to tease out...maybe a 378 paper?? :)