I run into this sort of bias all the time -- in the real world, not just in AI. I take my daughter to medical appointments, both for scheduling reasons (my wife's schedule is less flexible) and rapport reasons (I'm not that kind of doctor, but I know the terminology and medical professionals treat me far more as a peer), and I routinely get "oh we expected her mother" or "we always phone the mother to schedule followup appointments".
Is it so hard to understand that men can be parents too?
The scheduler is trained to give higher weight to those sorts of questions apparently. This begs some questions for GPTs, questions like how are they supposed to model something not implied in the training data?
But the fact that I'm bringing my daughter to a medical appointment should be a pretty clear indication that, you know, I bring my daughter to medical appointments.
Presumably he already has told them his number and preferences. Defaults are fine, but you don't want your preference to get reset to default every time, and assuming that only the mother of a child should be contacted in all cases is a terrible default. The person who made the appointment and who is bringing the child to the doctor should be the one contacted by default. There is no reason that the mother of a child should be considered the default guardian. That is an incredibly dangerous assumption to make in many circumstances.
Edit: This reply was written to a response that got completely rewritten in an edit. It may not make as much sense
This. Don’t be so sensitive, just say to call you.
I took my daughter to appointments and as soon as I started asking meaningful questions, doctors immediately switched to assuming I was the one to talk to.
When you act like you know what’s going on, act like you’re on top of it, I’ve never once had a doctor assume I was just babysitting. This was true in the Midwest and California.
> doctors immediately switched to assuming I was the one to talk to.
Exactly! They do that. If a father takes the kid, they will ask for his number, not the mother's, in my experience. If both the mother and father goes with the kid, well, there are cues they pick up on. In my case my father typically was always in the background while my mother was the one doing the talking, meaning they ask for her number, not my dad's. So, all in all, whoever does the most talking, for example. And if my dad wanted to be the one called, my mom would have told them his number, or my dad would have. I do not see an issue here really.
Is it so hard to understand that men can be parents too?