Are 'person' or 'people' gender-neutral concepts? New study finds male
tilt in analysis of billions of words

Date:
April 1, 2022
Source:
New York University
Summary:
The concept of a 'person' or 'people' is, despite its definition,
not gender-neutral when it comes to how we use these terms. In fact,
we tend to prioritize men when referring to people in general, shows
a new study by a team of psychology and linguistics researchers.



FULL STORY ==========================================================================
The concept of a "person" or "people" is, despite its definition,
not gender- neutral when it comes to how we use these terms. In fact,
we tend to prioritize men when referring to people in general, shows a
new study by a team of psychology and linguistics researchers.


==========================================================================
The findings, which are reported in the journal Science Advances, are
based on an analysis of more than 630 billion words drawn from internet
web pages, using artificial intelligence tools to measure what words
mean based on how they are used by millions of individuals.

"Many forms of bias, such as the tendency to associate 'science' with men
more than women, have been studied in the past, but there has been much
less work on how we view a 'person,' " says April Bailey, a postdoctoral researcher in New York University's Department of Psychology and the
lead author of the paper.

"Our findings show that even when using gender-neutral terms, we
prioritize men over women," adds co-author Adina Williams, a research
scientist at Meta AI and a graduate of NYU's doctoral program in
linguistics.

Bias at such a foundational level -- our word choices -- is potentially consequential, the researchers note.

"Conceptions of 'people' form the basis of many societal decisions
and policymaking," observes Andrei Cimpian, a professor in New York University's Department of Psychology and the senior author of the
paper. "Because men and women are each about half of the species,
prioritizing men in our collective idea of a 'person' creates inequity for women in decisions based on this idea." The research team examined words' meanings by considering how they are used by individuals. Specifically,
the team studied how we use words expressing the concept of "person"
and its gender-specific counterparts, "woman" and "man."


==========================================================================
To test whether we're likely to think of men more often than we are of
women when writing about "people," the team used artificial intelligence algorithms that learn the meaning of words based on how they are used,
drawing from a language repository collected by the non-profit Common
Crawl in May 2017. This repository included more than 630 billion mostly English-language words appearing on nearly three billion web pages.

The researchers considered how word meaning is related to word context
and use.

For example, if you hear, "Each morning, Joe boiled water in the balak for tea," you might guess that "balak" means something similar to "kettle,"
even though "balak" is unfamiliar, because the words alongside "balak"
("tea," "boiled," and "water") also frequently co-occur with "kettle."
In the Science Advances paper, the researchers investigated, in three
studies, the meaning of "person" and related words (e.g., "people")
by taking into account adjacent words -- the linguistic context.

In the first study, they compared the similarity in meaning (inferred
via linguistic context) between words for people (e.g., "individual")
and words for men (e.g., "he" and "male") to the similarity in meaning
between words for people and words for women (e.g., "she" and "female").

They found that words for people were used more similarly, and were
thus more similar in their meaning, to words for men than to words for
women -- and by a statistically significant margin. Put another way,
the collective concept "people" overlapped more with the concept "men"
than with the concept "women" in the studied words.



==========================================================================
In the second study, instead of focusing on words for people, the
team examined words denoting features central to this concept --
specifically, words for traits that commonly describe what people are
like. They compared hundreds of trait words identified in past research
as common descriptors of people (e.g., "extroverted," "analytical," and "superstitious") to the same lists of words for women and for men from
the paper's initial study.

They found that the meaning of these descriptor words in the second study
were, overall, more similar to the meaning of words for men than to the
meaning of words for women, with a statistically significant difference
between the two.

That is, common words that describe what people are like (e.g.,
"extroverted") are also used more similarly to words for men than to
words for women.

In a third study, the researchers studied the use of verbs -- a reasonable
area for exploration given the initial findings. Specifically, if the collective concept "people" overlaps more with the concept "men" than
with the concept "women," then words that describe what people do and
what is done to them (e.g., "love," "annoy") may also be more likely
to be similar in their contextual meaning to words denoting men than to
words denoting women.

In this study, they compared the meaning similarities between more than
250 verbs that describe actions that people take (e.g., "facilitate,"
"smile," and "threaten") and words for men vs. words for women.

As with the second study, which focused on common words that describe
what people are like, words that describe what people do (e.g., "run")
were also used more similarly to words for men than to words for women --
a difference that was again statistically significant.


========================================================================== Story Source: Materials provided by New_York_University. Note: Content
may be edited for style and length.


========================================================================== Journal Reference:
1. April H. Bailey, Adina Williams, Andrei Cimpian. Based on
billions of
words on the internet, people = men. Science Advances, 2022; 8
(13) DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abm2463 ==========================================================================

Link to news story: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/04/220401141337.htm

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