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Gendering Human-Robot Interaction

In this project, we investigate how a person's gender impacts their attitudes towards and interaction with robots. Due to limited gender-related knowledge in Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), we explore our problem with a broad multi-faceted approach.

To help map out the broad area and develop a theoretical grounding for gender studies in HRI, we reviewed foundational gender studies related with technology development and adoption. To get an overall glimpse at how men and women perceive robots, we conducted an on-line survey to get general attitudes toward robots in different usage scenarios from various aspects (e.g., perceived usefulness, robot physical design, etc.).

Currently, we are running a laboratory study with a concrete human-robot interaction instance, aiming to explore would people apply gender stereotypes to a robot based on a subtle gendered cue, and how men and women interact with robots. More information will be updated gradually.

Project Publications

Face to Face with a Sexist Robot: Investigating how women react to sexist robot behaviors

Garcha, D., Geiskkovitch, D., Thiessen, R. et al. Face to Face with a Sexist Robot: Investigating How Women React to Sexist Robot Behaviors. Int J of Soc Robotics (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12369-023-01001-4

Check Your Stereotypes at the Door

Daniel J. Rea, Yan Wang and James E. Young (2015) Check Your Stereotypes at the Door: an Analysis of Gender Typecasts in Social Human-Robot Interaction, International Conference on Social Robotics (ICSR). Springer.

Women and Men Collaborating with Robots on Assembly Lines

Stela H. Seo, Jihyang Gu, Seongmi Jeong, Keelin Griffin, James E. Young, Andrea Bunt, and Susan Prentice. 2015. Women and men collaborating with robots on assembly lines: designing a novel evaluation scenario for collocated human-robot teamwork. In Proceedings of the third international conference on Human-agent interaction (HAI '15). ACM, Daegu, Kyungpook, Republic of Korea. DOI=10.1145/2814940.2814948 http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2814940.2814948

Gendering Human-Robot Interaction

Yan Wang. Gendering Human-Robot Interaction: exploring how a person's gender impacts attitudes toward and interaction with robots. M.Sc. Thesis (2014). University of Manitoba, Canada.

Beyond “Pink” and “Blue”: Gendered Attitudes Towards Robots in Society

Yan Wang and James E. Young (2014) Beyond "Pink" and "Blue": Gendered Attitudes Towards Robots in Society. Proceedings of Gender and IT Appropriation (GenderIT'14), Pages 49 -59