Alex Shams: (based on picture and analysis by Emre Şarbak)

Turkish is a gender neutral language. There is no “he” or “she” – everything is just “o”, and you can only tell gender from the context.

When you translate Turkish sentences into English with Google Translate, something remarkable happens: The sentences get gendered.

Not only do they get gendered – Google Translate turns non-gendered Turkish sentences into seemingly sexist sentences in English (as in these examples).

Why? Google Translate uses an algorithm that bases its translations on observed frequency of usage. So if in the database there are 1,000 uses of the word “engineer” and most of them are male, it translates engineer as male. Same goes for “nurse” for female.

Google Translate magnifies biases that exist in our culture – like unequal access to employment for women in all fields, or culturally constructed notions that women are unhappy, lazy, hopeless romantics always looking for husbands – and transforms them into translations.

It has been argued that technology overcomes the biases of human beings, and because it is neutral the increasing automation of the world offers a way out of inequality.

But as this small example shows, technology is far from neutral.

Technology, like anything else, is what you make of it – and the way we are using technology is currently reinforcing the inequalities and biases of the world around us.

Technology is making these biases more solid and more rigid as algorithms come to determine ever more parts of our lives.

We are surrendering ourselves to technology because we have been promised that it offers a way out of our current dilemmas.

But don’t forget: technology is shaped by its makers.

And the high tech industry is an overwhelmingly young white, wealthy male industry defined by rampant sexism, racism, classism and many other forms of social inequality.

These are the people we are allowing to run our lives. And these are the results.