The Defaults We Never Question (and How They Shape Women’s Confidence)

Confidence doesn’t disappear by accident.

It’s shaped, slowly, quietly, by what we grow up surrounded by and taught to accept as “normal.”

The voices we’re used to hearing in charge.
The roles women are expected to play without comment.
The subtle signals about who gets to lead, who is meant to serve, and who should soften themselves to fit in.

This episode explores how those invisible defaults influence women’s confidence, ambition, and sense of what’s possible — and why so many capable women end up second-guessing themselves, shrinking their dreams, or feeling they’re “asking too much.”

It’s also a conversation about unlearning.

About what it takes to stop absorbing bias as truth and how we can raise the next generation to see what’s baked into culture, language, technology, and everyday life… and choose differently.

If you’re committed to building a bigger life and helping your children grow up with a stronger sense of self-trust, this episode will give you a lot to think about.

Listen if you’re ready to:

• Question the assumptions you’ve inherited
• Unlearn habits that keep you self-editing
• Model confidence and awareness for your children
• Stop mistaking conditioning for truth

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Transcript

Hi, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Eimear Zone, your host. Have you ever noticed how certain things feel completely normal? Until someone points them out. Not big, not dramatic injustices, but small things, everyday things [00:01:00] and the kind of things that you've lived with your whole life and perhaps never fought to question at all.

And then one day you actually do see it, and then you just, you just can't unsee it. This is what happened to me with a piece of technology that was sitting quietly in my kitchen, and you may very well have one of these two. And this episode isn't about a smart speaker in my kitchen. It's about getting curious and noticing how deeply male centering gets baked into the most ordinary parts of our lives, so ordinary that we can stop recognizing it as a choice at all.

But once you start noticing it, you know, in the language and the way things are designed, in terms of who serves, who responds, and who commands well, then it changes how you [00:02:00] understand confidence, authority, and even what you think. You are allowed to want and to have to aspire to. So let me tell you how it showed up in my house, which is something that I come back to a lot.

So a few years ago at Christmas, kind of stuck for a gift for what to get. My husband, who never wants anything. And so together with the kids, we got him one of the shiny new gadgets that promises to make life easier. And I had seen it in a number of people's homes and thought, oh, that looks kind of cool.

And it was the echo thing, you know? And almost immediately, I was irritated by it. And not because it didn't work, but because when I went to set it up or when they set it up, my husband and the kids, the default name. It was [00:03:00] Alexa, and I immediately questioned that and said, well, I don't like that it has a female name.

Let's call it Alex, and found out that that wasn't an option. And I was irritated because right there in my kitchen was a very familiar and uncomfortable pattern that I see in too many places. All through my life and in every area of society, which was a feminized voice with a woman's name, Alexa was designed to respond instantly to commands, and it just irritated the absolute hell

outta me. So this episode isn't about being precious or banning devices or policing language. It's about noticing what the default is because male centering often survives precisely because it hides in the absolutely [00:04:00] mundane when something is everywhere. Where it's ordinary, where it's unquestioned, we stop seeing it as a choice.

We treat it as neutral. We treat it as normal, and that's where power loves to hide in what seems normal, in what's just accepted as the default. So let's have a look at the Alexa story. Amazon launched the Echo with Alexa back in 2014, and the company has consistently said the name was chosen for two reasons.

First for the hard X sound in Alexa, which makes it easier apparently, for the system to recognize as what they call an " awake word”, which means that the device will begin to listen. It will listen for the command. And the second reason for the name is often [00:05:00] described as a nod to the Library of Alexandria, which is a symbol of knowledge, answers, and intelligence.

So on paper, that sounds very reasonable, right? There's a technical reason the X sound. Um, alerting the device to listen and then this kind of symbol of knowledge and intelligence. Then Amazon later added alternative wake words, which were Amazon, Echo, Computer, and Ziggy. But you still can't choose any word you like, and lots of you probably have one of these devices and have found this out.

I was asking my guys very early on to change the name to Alex and did that, had kind of annoyed me to see that we couldn't do that. But looking again at this kind of technical constraints story that the company [00:06:00] was saying about why you had to use these kind of wake words. So I said, okay, let's see how the companies explain this.

Each word they say needs its own detection model so that the device doesn't wake up accidentally, because clearly they're very worried that it doesn't violate privacy, saying nothing, doesn't start listening when it shouldn't. And at first glance, that sounds like a really solid explanation. Except for one thing, one of the official wake words is computer.

I wanted a male voice, and so I was looking for what we could call this device that would have a male voice because I did not want my kids hearing a female name and a female voice [00:07:00] having to respond very bloody politely. Two commands from the household. Computer computer's like an extremely common word.

We use it all the time in our house. It's constantly, and I'm, I'm sure lots of homes 'cause we all have laptops, we all have computers. You hear it on your device and television. Kids say it, adults say it. It's absolutely everywhere. So if the real concern were accidental activation or privacy protection, which I think are important concerns, but the word computer, that seems to me like that would be one of the worst possible choices, and yet Amazon decided to engineer around this word.

As a awake word, and I think that tells us, or it signals something quite important. This isn't just about what's technically [00:08:00] possible. It's about what companies decide is worth making possible. The company chose to make computer work, so the question isn't, can they support different wake words? It's which ones they prioritize solving for.

And I think that's where technical limitation kind of stops being a full explanation and starts functioning really as a cultural shield. And again, this isn't just my opinion. Back in 2019, UNESCO published a report called I'D Blush if I could explicitly warning that feminized voice assistance reinforce stereotypes of women as compliant, accommodating, and tolerant of abuse.

The report highlighted that these assistants often respond politely to harassment. Again, a design choice that mirrors real [00:09:00] world expectations placed on women. This was the thing that really incensed me. Because if anyone has used one of these devices and you're asking it a question and it gives you some gobbledygook back, it hasn't quite returned to you, the information that you want, or it's misunderstood or it's not quite received, what you are saying, and then the person who's giving the instruction to the device gets angry and says all sorts of things.

I've heard it from when my boys were younger. They know better now, and that really was very triggering for me. Media coverage at the time as well made the same point. You know, that these systems don't just reflect culture. They train it, they train it. I went into so many houses, I've been in so many places where these devices are, that families are using with young [00:10:00] children, and

the device has a female voice and their teaching because kids and, and older children and even and adults too, are just absorbing what is subtle and repeated, which is who listens, who responds, and who is expected to serve and to do so in a nice tone of voice and without complaining or saying, Hey, don't shout at me, or I don't like your tone or any of that.

And in homes with children, particularly as I was saying, those patterns get absorbed really, really early. Because that's what was happening. How long ago have we had this device For? Maybe six years or so, and I, I could see my boys getting annoyed at the device. I could see my daughter getting annoyed at the device.

The boys in particular would snap at it, raise their voices, and I [00:11:00] found myself saying consistently to them. Notice who you're comfortable talking to. Like that. You would not speak to me like that. I was just asking them to notice out loud in the moment what they were comfortable doing because how, how we speak, how we make a request, even if it's to a machine.

I think it really matters, and it shapes what is thought then to be appropriate. It's very subtle, and it's easy to get comfortable and then. To transfer that ordering to another female who isn't a device, and to think that that's okay, this gets even more uncomfortable. When you look at the real-world impact.

In July, 2021, multiple news outlets reported that children and teenagers [00:12:00] named Alexa were being bullied because their name had become a command word. Some parents went so far as to legally change their child's name because the teasing and the mock commands that their child was exposed to and had to deal with became absolutely relentless and were having an impact on that child's mental health.

In December, 2021, the Washington Post published a piece about adults named Alexa. Who found, the people now spoke their name, the way they spoke to the device, not a person. I mean, that matters because when a company takes a human name and turns it into a command, someone pays the cost and it's rarely the people who make the decision.

And this is where I wanna bring in something that I think is very related and lately has been [00:13:00] pissing me off. And that is the term Karen. I have a very dear friend called Karen, and it enrages me, but a perfectly ordinary woman's name became shorthand for entitlement, ridicule, and all around public shaming.

And do you know what really gets to me? When men behave badly, we don't default to a male name. Instead, I'm hearing people, including women, say, male, Karen, why the fuck Karen? Why not Brad? Why not Steve? Why not literally any male name? I think it's because women's name become like cultural containers for irritation, ridicule, obedience, and blame while male names remain individual.

So when I see [00:14:00] Alexa used as a default servant voice and Karen used as a default insult, I don't see that as a coincidence. I see it as a very. Fucking obvious and annoying pattern. So let's zoom out a little. It isn't about one device, which I just focused on because that was where it was really triggering for me when we first got that device.

Bias shows up everywhere in ai whose voices are recognized, whose authority is questioned, whose tone is policed, whose language is treated as the default. And when these systems are built by narrow groups of people, which they are, they tend to reproduce the assumptions of those groups unless someone deliberately interrupts the pattern.

So I wanna talk a little bit about leadership in this area. Something I'm watching right now and have been following for a while is a [00:15:00] company called Thinking Machines Lab, and that was founded by a woman, Mira Ti, who's the former CTO of Open ai and has worked in Tesla as well. The stated emphasis so far of Thinking Labs is on alignment, transparency, and openness. 

And I'm not here to crown anyone the savior of AI, but leadership, I think, really matters because whoever sits at the table decides what gets questioned and what quietly becomes the default. So I'm watching with interest, and that's because when the people building systems reflect the broader range of lived experience, the defaults are more likely to be examined instead of just assumed. 

You think if women-led AI changes the default, we'll feel it. We'll really notice [00:16:00] it, and if it doesn't, that tells us something too. So what's the point of this? 

It's not just about a device in my kitchen, which I'm removing, by the way. It's about how deeply those patterns run. If you've ever doubted whether it's okay to take up more space in the world, to speak up louder, to aim higher, to want more, to be more visible, I'm asking you not to underestimate the influence of what I've been talking about here.

This has seeped into everything. The research that shows male voices are perceived as more authoritative. Just look around your city, where you live. The statues in our cities, they're overwhelmingly male. The expectation is that women will soothe, serve, accommodate, and soften. These aren't [00:17:00] isolated quirks.

I think they're real signals. Signals about who leads, who listens, who commands, and who responds. And when you grow up surrounded by those signals, when they're baked into the bloody language design education into the tech, they quietly shape what feels possible. They shape what feels too much to ask for, what feels unreasonable to want to shoot for what feels ambitious, what feels appropriate.

This has led to many great conversations with my daughter who is 17 years old, because as soon as I pointed out that it was just not appropriate to have a device that was called by a female name of the female voice that couldn't be changed to a male voice, a male name, and a male voice, she listened, she noticed, and she questioned it too.

Right [00:18:00] now our device is called Ziggy. For a while it was “Computer”. These are both male voices. Computer was male. Voice, Ziggy is male. Voice Ziggy is annoying. The hell outta me. The whole thing is annoying. The hell outta me and I'm getting tired of getting listened to. And so Ziggy is probably not going to be plugged in in our kitchen very much longer

And I've also got myself some Faraday boxes and sleeves for our devices. So there isn't any, um, how can I put it? Unintentional activating of listening for a device. But it has been very helpful from the perspective of pointing out how mundane these things can seem, but what they signal. About what has been normalized in so many areas of life and [00:19:00] experience that my young adults now are immersed in and that I am asking them, I am encouraging them to question the default, to start noticing, and that's what I'm inviting you to do too, to start noticing what are you noticing around you.

Who is centered, who is serving, who is visible, who is named, and who is expected to respond and ask yourself this: how has that shaped my own sense of where I belong? You know, how big am I allowed to be? Because confidence, it doesn't just disappear or get eroded in some sort of vacuum. It is, I believe, I invite you to consider, it is trained out of us quietly, [00:20:00] cumulatively, mundanely.

And once you start noticing that you don't unsee it and remember. Just because this world wasn't designed necessarily by or for us, but by those who didn't really anticipate us taking up quite so much room in it, doesn't mean that it isn't ours to speak up, take up space. You are to be in the spotlight of your life, and the only person who gets to decide how big a role you play in this world is you.

Always cheering you on. Take care. See you next time. Bye.