LoCascio is one of the leaders of an effort called the Equal AI initiative. LoCascio is troubled that each of the major virtual assistants — Alexa, Microsoft's Cortana, Apple's Siri, and the Google Assistant started with a female voice and most of them have female names. He's got a two-year-old daughter and that got him thinking. "If you talk derogatory to an Alexa, children pick this up," he says. "They go back to school and they think this is the way you talk to someone and this is maybe the way you talk to women."

"We would need more ... women to reach places in power to actually make this difference," she says. "Because then they don't depend on someone else for their power and they won't tolerate it."