I've heard anecdotally that the reason computer voices and avatars tend to be women is that people tend to respond better and believe the data more. The story

I've heard anecdotally that the reason computer voices and avatars tend to be women is that people tend to respond better and believe the data more. The story that was told to me (don't know if it's true, couldn't find a link) was that they did testing on astronauts and they found that the male astronauts tended to disagree more with a male voice. Whereas "the voice of mother" was more likely to be found credible. Again, I don't know if it's true, but it seemed to make sense to me at the time.