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And until now, when we hear a woman’s voice as part of a technological product, we may not know who she is, whether she is real at all, and if so, whether she agreed to have her voice used in this way. Many TikTok users assumed that the text-to-speech voice they heard in the app was not a real person. But it was like that: It was owned by a Canadian voice actress named Bev Standing, and Standing never gave ByteDance, the company that owns TikTok, permission to use it.

Standing sued the company in May, arguing that the way its voice was used – especially how users could get it to say anything, including profanity – were damaging its brand and its ability to make a living. Her voice became known as “that voice on TikTok,” which could be said to anyone, brought recognition without reward and, she claimed, damaged her voice skills.

Then, when TikTok abruptly dropped her voice, Standing recognized as much as the rest of us did – hearing the change and seeing the reportage about it. (TikTok has not yet commented on the voice change to the press.)

Those familiar with Apple’s Siri story may experience some déjà vu: Susan Bennett, the woman who voiced the original Siri, was also unaware that her voice was used for this product until it came out. Bennett was eventually replaced by the “female English voice in the US,” and Apple never publicly recognized her. Since then, Apple has included secrecy clauses in its voice acting contracts and most recently said its new voice was “entirely software generated,” eliminating the need to give credit to anyone.

These incidents reflect a troubling and common picture in the tech industry. How people’s achievements are evaluated, recognized and paid for often reflects their position in society, rather than their actual contribution. One of the reasons the names Bev Standing and Susan Bennett are now widely known on the Internet is because they are shining examples of how women’s work gets erased, even when right here, for everyone to see or hear.

When women technologists do speak, they are often asked to shut up, especially if they are colored. Timnit Gebru, who has a PhD in computer science from Stanford, was recently fired from Google, where she was one of the leaders of the AI ​​ethics group, after raising concerns about the company’s large language models. Its co-leader, Margaret Mitchell (who has a doctorate from the University of Aberdeen with an emphasis on natural language generation), was also removed from her position after talking about Gebru’s firing. Elsewhere in the industry, informers such as Facebook’s Sophie Zhang, Uber’s Susan Fowler, and many other women were silenced and often fired as a direct or indirect result of trying to get their jobs done and mitigating the harm they saw in the tech companies where they worked. …

Even women who founded startups can find themselves being washed in real time, and the problem with women of color gets worse again. Rumman Chowdhury, Ph.D. at the University of California, San Diego, founder and former CEO of Parity, an ethical artificial intelligence company, noted that her role in her own company’s history has been minimized by the New York Times.