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Auteurs principaux: Ju, Da, Ulrich, Karen, Williams, Adina
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2024
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Accès en ligne:https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.02948
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author Ju, Da
Ulrich, Karen
Williams, Adina
author_facet Ju, Da
Ulrich, Karen
Williams, Adina
contents People tend to use language to mention surprising properties of events: for example, when a banana is blue, we are more likely to mention color than when it is yellow. This fact is taken to suggest that yellowness is somehow a typical feature of bananas, and blueness is exceptional. Similar to how a yellow color is typical of bananas, there may also be genders that are typical of occupations. In this work, we explore this question using information theoretic techniques coupled with corpus statistic analysis. In two distinct large corpora, we do not find strong evidence that occupations and gender display the same patterns of mentioning as do bananas and color. Instead, we find that gender mentioning is correlated with femaleness of occupation in particular, suggesting perhaps that woman-dominated occupations are seen as somehow ``more gendered'' than male-dominated ones, and thereby they encourage more gender mentioning overall.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2408_02948
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Are Female Carpenters like Blue Bananas? A Corpus Investigation of Occupation Gender Typicality
Ju, Da
Ulrich, Karen
Williams, Adina
Computation and Language
People tend to use language to mention surprising properties of events: for example, when a banana is blue, we are more likely to mention color than when it is yellow. This fact is taken to suggest that yellowness is somehow a typical feature of bananas, and blueness is exceptional. Similar to how a yellow color is typical of bananas, there may also be genders that are typical of occupations. In this work, we explore this question using information theoretic techniques coupled with corpus statistic analysis. In two distinct large corpora, we do not find strong evidence that occupations and gender display the same patterns of mentioning as do bananas and color. Instead, we find that gender mentioning is correlated with femaleness of occupation in particular, suggesting perhaps that woman-dominated occupations are seen as somehow ``more gendered'' than male-dominated ones, and thereby they encourage more gender mentioning overall.
title Are Female Carpenters like Blue Bananas? A Corpus Investigation of Occupation Gender Typicality
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.02948