Originally Posted by Grim Portent
Droids are kind of clunky tech at times, I wouldn't be surprised if they do have to be designated as masculine or feminine when their brain is first being built….
Can’t imagine why this should be the case. My lawnmower is clunky tech, but it doesn’t need a deep-seated sense of maleness to spin up and mow through grass and leaves. The machinery works as it’s designed to do, without involving any biological frame of reference.

People may conflate aspects of a machine with their perceptions of masculinity, but that’s nothing inherent to the machine or its function. It’s also kind of embarrassing.

(This was an actual song, if you haven’t heard it before.)

Originally Posted by Grim Portent
…so the idea that droids would be gender coded by role to fit the biases of humans isn't all that strange.
Which doesn’t by itself require any deep biological analogue in the programming. Apart from vocal pitch and tone, there’s really not much there, so it’s just a question of modulating the synthetic voice. Different voices give humans the social illusions they need, but that’s barely a subroutine, and there’s no reason anything else in the droid’s processors would be affected.

Originally Posted by Grim Portent
…or the gender of a droid is an unpredictable product of their manufacturing that becomes more commonly masculine/feminine rather than neuter as the sophistication of the droid brain goes up.
Again, there’s no reason to provide a mechanism to allow for this in the first place. There’s no reason to add this, and plenty of reasons to prevent this kind of random variability, so design and manufacturing should work to exclude the likelihood to improve product reliability. There’s no practical rationale to do otherwise.