Why are women always telling us what to do?

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She’s all over the place, telling us what to do. There’s a good reason that guiding voice is usually a female. Clifford Nass, author of “The Man Who Lied to His Laptop,” says it’s much easier to find a female voice that everyone likes than a male voice that everyone likes. He says this phenomenon starts in the womb. Fetuses react favorably to the sound of their mother’s voice – but not to other voices.

Female navigation has been around for a long time. In World War II, women’s voices were used in airplane cockpits because they stood out among the male pilots. Telephone operators have traditionally been female and we’ve become accustomed to getting feminine assistance.

Almost all GPS systems on the market have a female as the default voice. There was one notable exception. In Germany, BMW was forced to recall a female-voiced navigation system on the 5 series in the late 1990s - after being flooded with calls from German men saying they refused to take directions from a woman.