What Can We Do Moving Forward?

The easiest thing to do is to change how we encode smart speakers. Add a male voice or even better... use a genderless voice as the default. This will subtly break the gender norm of females being in assistive roles. The next thing is to make smart speakers clearly say "no" or "you can't say that" in response to sexual harassment. Having these devices tell the user that what they're saying is wrong discourages this type of behavior from the get-go. 

Something we need to do that will take some time is to make sure that there are more women in voice assistant development. About 13.43% of women make up AI research teams in the US (Mantha, 2019). This is significantly imbalanced. By creating a diverse team, there will be more inclusivity in the product.
At Hear No Evil, we are trying to bring awareness to this problem to teach people about the effects of the design of smart speakers. It's important that we urge these large companies to make changes to our society instead of them making profits.