Robots are, of course, another kind of living doll. One of the first cinematic depictions was the seductress ‘Maria’ in the 1927 film Metropolis. For as long as we have been imagining intelligent humanoid machines, we have been imagining them as sexualised females. From Apple’s iPhone assistant Siri to the mechanised attendants at Japan’s first robot-staffed hotel, a disproportionate percentage of artificial intelligence (AI) systems have female personas. These AIs tend to perform jobs that are traditionally associated with women: they are maids, personal assistants, museum guides and so on.