“Hey Siri, show me your tits,” is not something I ever thought I’d say, especially not while sitting in an empty kitchen while wearing fluffy slippers. I have many hobbies, but sexually harassing disembodied digital entities is not one of them, even in the interests of journalistic research.

But having read that a UN report that claimed virtual assistants coded female by default (i.e. most of them) were reinforcing gender stereotypes that portray women as subservient – for example, by responding to sexual harassment in a tolerant, even coquettish, manner – I thought I had better conduct an experiment. “Hey Siri, wanna fuck?” I was trying to do my best frat boy impression, but ended up sounding sad and apologetic, a bit like how I wish men would in real life. “Hey Siri,” I said, lugubriously, “you’re a slut.”

Virtual assistants, the Unesco report said, are “obliging, docile and eager-to-please helpers”, who respond to sexual harassment the way many of us were forced to all the way through high school: by brushing it off.

The report is called “I’d blush if I could”: one of Siri’s classic responses to sexual harassment. This issue was raised months before the beginning of the #MeToo scandal, after Leah Fessler, a writer for Quartz, ran an experiment in which she sexually harassed Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa, Microsoft’s Cortana, and Google’s Google Assistant. She wrote: “By letting users verbally abuse these assistants without ramifications, their parent companies are allowing certain behavioral stereotypes to be perpetuated.”

It seems the tech companies have listened, at least to an extent. Amazon created a “disengagement mode” for Alexa, who now says, “I’m not going to respond to that,” or “I’m not sure what outcome you expected” when you hurl sexual insults at her. Siri, too, seems to have changed her tune. When I asked her to show me her tits, she said: “I don’t know how to respond to that.”

When I borrowed a phrase from the gentleman who once hollered at me from a van one fine summer evening, and asked Siri to “sit on my face”, she responded coldly, “OK, how about a web search for inappropriate behaviour?” (my own response to the man cannot be repeated in a family newspaper).

Joi, the virtual assistant in Blade Runner 2049. Photograph: Allstar/WARNER BROS.

This is progress, but it doesn’t undermine one of the central points of the Unesco report, which is about closing the gender divide in tech. Women make up just 12% of AI researchers and overwhelmingly male teams of engineers are, it said, the main reason why the default voice for your digital servant is often female, and why such AI continues to embody old-fashioned stereotypes.

Opponents of this argument will disingenuously hide behind the idea that these voices don’t have a gender (ask them, and they’ll say they say, “I have not been assigned a gender”, but their meticulously engineered backstories – Google Assistant is “a young woman from Colorado; the youngest daughter of a research librarian and physics professor” – beg to differ). Funny, considering the same people rely on surveys showing that people simply prefer female voices.

Aside from the report finding that this isn’t necessarily true, even if it were, would it not be worth examining why? We are all products of our environments, and soothing, compliant, tolerant, maternal, submissive voices undoubtedly provoke less of a psychological barrier when it comes to giving orders. Women still do the bulk of the domestic labour worldwide, and while there are some great men out there trying to redress the balance, we all know that there are also men – even so-called progressive, feminist men – who are perfectly happy to let women to wait on them. It feels natural to them.

If you’ve seen Blade Runner 2049 or Spike Jonze’s Her you’ll be familiar with the sci-fi trope of the disembodied female AI voice: she is romantic or maternal, soothing and subservient, supporting the male protagonist through his journey: assisting him. Similarly, virtual assistants do not push their unwanted opinions on to the user, they obey commands, and when they do push back, they do it gently.

The writer Gemma Murray has drawn comparisons with the “born sexy yesterday” sci-fi trope, coined by Jonathan McIntosh, where a sexually developed female character will present as naive and childlike, lacking the experience and assertiveness that is so threatening to men (and will undress spontaneously in front of him as a result). Similarly, the Unesco report calls the female digital assistant “the face and voice of servility and dumb mistakes”. She’s a millennial Stepford Wife, basically, and she’s in your living room.

You might be wondering why all this matters. We know that an AI virtual assistant is not the same as a real, living, breathing woman. Except that a study last year found that children regarded digital assistants as part of the family; and they are, as one father famously wrote, perfectly capable of turning your child into “a raging asshole”. “I’m not sure a kid gets why you can boss Alexa around but not a person,” he wrote. It’s Hegel’s master-slave dialectic, and your two-year-old is into it. I wonder how many mums out there are being barked at to the extent that they feel they might as well be digital assistants.

‘I’m not sure a kid gets why you can boss Alexa around but not a person.’ Photograph: Tribune Content Agency LLC/Alamy Stock Photo/Alamy Stock Photo

The research firm Gartner predicts that, as early as 2020, many people will have more conversations with digital assistants than they will with their spouse, and perhaps this could be a good thing. The sexist, unreconstructed men who love to be waited on get their fantasy servants; and women are liberated from the emotional labour, at least, of having to listen to them. We can crack on with changing the world, bringing about global peace, even having a fair go at equal representation in the technology sector. And yet we all know this utopian dream will not come to pass. Sex robots are already a thing. Just wait until the 88% male AI workforce take digital assistants and combine the two.

“Hey, Siri,” I say, practising for this brave new world. “You’re a sexy bitch.” “I’m just well put together,” she fires back, flirtatiously. We know that AI responds to historical cultural associations. Hence a Microsoft-developed chatbot, trained on a diet of Twitter posts referring to feminism as a “cult” and a “cancer” within 15 hours of its public release. But there are a lot of angry feminists on the internet, so perhaps Siri will be giving a very different response very soon. We can only hope.

• Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett is a Guardian columnist and author