Gynoid
robot resembling a woman
A gynoid, robotess, or fembot is a feminine humanoid robot. The depiction of gynoids in science fiction films and artwork is a noted cultural phenomenon, with questions being posed about sexualization and use as sex objects. As the design of more realistic humanoid robots becomes technologically possible, gynoids are also emerging in real-life robotic applications.
Name
The adjective gynoid means "resembling or pertaining to the female human form". Though the term android has been used to refer to robotic humanoids regardless of apparent gender, the Greek prefix "andr-" refers to man in the masculine sense.
The term gynoid was first used by Isaac Asimov in a 1979 editorial, as a theoretical female equivalent of the word android.
Other possible names for feminine robots exist. The portmanteau "fembot" (feminine or female robot) was used as far back as 1959, in Fritz Leiber's The Silver Eggheads, applying specifically to non-sentient female sexbots. It was popularized by the television series The Bionic Woman in the episode "Kill Oscar" (1976) and later used in the Austin Powers films, among others. "Robotess" is the oldest female-specific term, originating in 1921 from Rossum's Universal Robots, the same source as the term "robot".
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Gynoid” is robot resembling a woman. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Gynoid, robot and resembling, not as a finished interpretation.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 3, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q730863. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1979, 1959, 1976 and 1921.
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This entry incorporates text from “Gynoid” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.