When the makers of Apple’s Siri unveiled Viv at TechCrunch Disrupt NYC last month, the crowd—and press—swooned. Pitched as “the intelligent interface for everything,” Viv is a personal digital assistant armed with a nearly transcendent level of sophistication. She is designed to move seamlessly across services, and be able to fulfill complex tasks such as “Find me a place to take my peanut-free uncle if it rains tomorrow in Cleveland.” Viv is also just the latest virtual helpmeet with a feminine voice and female name. In addition to Siri (Norse for “beautiful woman who leads you to victory”), her sorority sisters include Amazon’s Alexa and Microsoft’s Cortana (named after a voluptuous character in the video game “Halo,” who wears a “holographic body stocking”).

Why are digital assistants overwhelmingly female? Some say that people prefer women’s voices, while others note that in our culture, secretaries and administrative assistants are still usually women. Regardless, this much is certain: Consistently representing digital assistants as female matters a lot in real life: it hard-codes a connection between a woman’s voice and subservience.

As social scientists explore the question of why women lag so far behind men in workplace leadership, there’s increasing evidence that unconscious bias plays an important role. According to Erika Hall, a professor at Emory University’s Goizueta Business School, unconscious bias has its origins in the “cultural knowledge” we absorb from the world around us. This knowledge can come from movies and television, from teachers and family members; we acquire it almost osmotically by living in our society. Unconscious bias happens when we then engage in discriminatory behaviors because we unwittingly use this knowledge to guide our actions.

And this knowledge is everywhere: Our society largely depicts women as supporters and assistants rather than leaders and protagonists. A recent study found that women accounted for only 22 percent of protagonists in the top-grossing films of 2015 (and only 13 percent of protagonists in films directed by men). A comprehensive review of video game studies found that female characters are predominately supporting characters, often “assistants to the leading male character.” And a study of prime-time television found that women comprise the majority of aides and administrative support characters. These create “descriptive stereotypes” about what women are like—that women are somehow innately more “supporter-like” than “leader-like.”

Because Viv and her fellow digital assistants are female, their usage adds to the store of cultural knowledge about who women are and what women do. Every time you say, “Viv, order me a turkey club” or “Viv, get me an Uber,” the association between “woman” and “assistant” is strengthened. According to Calvin Lai, a Harvard University post-doc who studies unconscious bias, the associations we harbor depend on the number of times we are exposed to them. As these A.I. assistants improve and become more popular, the number of times we’re exposed to the association between “woman” and “assistant” increases.