it's extremely telling however the shift in marketing

And your hypothesis doesn't fall apart now why, exactly? AI assistants are more secretary-like than they've ever been. "Write me an email." "Proofread my work." Beyond that, people are using LLMs as substitutes for significant others.

And yet now, Microsoft migrated "Cortana" to "Copilot", Siri is more gender-neutral than ever, Alexa still exists off massive brand recognition, and other major AI services are called e.g. "ChatGPT", "Claude", "DeepSeek", and "Grok". Collectively, that's gender-neutral.

At most, the hypothesis used to be true but isn't anymore, because you can literally make an LLM act like a tradwife now if you're so debased inclined, yet the names are broadly neutral. The MIT Press has a good, lengthy article about the history of gender in speech synthesis, as an aside.