For about six months last year, Nina Nørgaard met weekly for an hour with seven people to talk about sexism and violent language used to target women in social media. Nørgaard, a PhD candidate at IT University of Copenhagen, and her discussion group were taking part in an unusual effort to better identify misogyny online. Researchers paid the seven to examine thousands of Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter posts and decide whether they evidenced sexism, stereotypes, or harassment. Once a week, the researchers brought the group together, with Nørgaard as a mediator, to discuss the tough calls where they disagreed. Misogyny is a scourge that shapes how women are represented online.

Boot up the options for your digital voice assistant of choice and you're likely to find two options for the gender you prefer interacting with: male or female. The problem is, that binary choice isn't an accurate representation of the complexities of gender. Some folks don't identify as either male or female, and they may want their voice assistant to mirror that identity. But a group of linguists, technologists, and sound designers--led by Copenhagen Pride and Vice's creative agency Virtue--are on a quest to change that with a new, genderless digital voice, made from real voices, called Q. Q isn't going to show up in your smartphone tomorrow, but the idea is to pressure the tech industry into acknowledging that gender isn't necessarily binary, a matter of man or woman, masculine or feminine. The project is confronting a new digital universe fraught with problems.