However, upon finer examination, a person's decision whether to choose such a logical approach is probably based on her feelings about the importance of logic in that situation. Emotions are steadily at work within us, biasing goals and motivations, and ultimately what we think and do. If we did not have emotional signals working in these cases, we would probably fail to arrive at final decisions. We would spend lots of time wandering around acting rather irrationally. Rotwang's creation was smart and sexy.
People attribute gender to their bikes, cars, software agents, and just about anything.
It's been shown that if you give a computer a female voice, people will make typical female assumptions about it that are usually less favorable than the male assumptions. Of course, any individual man or woman could lie anywhere along this axis. If the distribution of computers were chosen to follow that of people, then we could expect to find a similar bias among groups of gendered computers. But, this is up to their designers. I spent most of my professional career being one of the only women in a room of mostly men, so I am so used to ignoring gender differences that, consequently, I really don't know much about them.