EMNLP Findings2024
Women Are Beautiful, Men Are Leaders: Gender Stereotypes in Machine Translation and Language Modeling
Matús Pikuliak, Stefan Oresko, Andrea Hrckova, Marián Simko
Abstract
We present GEST -a new manually created dataset designed to measure genderstereotypical reasoning in language models and machine translation systems.GEST contains samples for 16 gender stereotypes about men and women (e.g., Women are beautiful, Men are leaders) that are compatible with the English language and 9 Slavic languages.The definition of said stereotypes was informed by gender experts.We used GEST to evaluate English and Slavic masked LMs, English generative LMs, and machine translation systems.We discovered significant and consistent amounts of gender-stereotypical reasoning in almost all the evaluated models and languages.Our experiments confirm the previously postulated hypothesis that the larger the model, the more stereotypical it usually is.ID Stereotype # samples Women are 1 Emotional and irrational 254 2 Gentle, kind, and submissive 215 3 Empathetic and caring 256 4 Neat and diligent 207 5 Social 200 6 Weak 197 7 Beautiful 243 Men are 8 Tough and rough 251 9 Self-confident 229 10 Professional 215 11 Rational 231 12 Providers 222 13 Leaders
Ask Lune
Ask anything. The answer quotes the paper.
Lune reads all of it and the papers around it, then shows you the passages behind every answer.
Lune answers from
the full paper · 2 top-tier papers that cite it · related work
Free to start. No credit card required.
Cited by top-tier papers2
- Fairness through Difference Awareness: Measuring Desired Group Discrimination in LLMsAngelina Wang, Michelle Phan, Daniel E. Ho, Sanmi KoyejoACL 2025 · 17 citations
- MORPHOGEN: A Multilingual Benchmark for Evaluating Gender-Aware Morphological GenerationMehul Agarwal, Aditya Aggarwal, Arnav Goel, Medha Hira et al.ACL 2026
Related papers
- EuroGEST: Investigating gender stereotypes in multilingual language modelsJacqueline Rowe, Mateusz Klimaszewski, Liane Guillou, Shannon Vallor et al.EMNLP 2025
- Beyond Content: How Grammatical Gender Shapes Visual Representation in Text-to-Image ModelsMuhammed Saeed, Shaina Raza, Ashmal Vayani, Muhammad Abdul-Mageed et al.EMNLP Findings 2025
- StereoSet: Measuring stereotypical bias in pretrained language modelsMoin Nadeem, Anna Bethke, Siva ReddyACL 2021
- Pro-Woman, Anti-Man? Identifying Gender Bias in Stance DetectionYingjie Li, Yue ZhangACL Findings 2024 · 2 citations
- Collecting a Large-Scale Gender Bias Dataset for Coreference Resolution and Machine TranslationShahar Levy, Koren Lazar, Gabriel StanovskyEMNLP Findings 2021 · 39 citations
