When people say 'people' online they may mostly be thinking about men

When people use gender-neutral words like "people" and "humanity" they tend to be thinking of men rather than women, in reflection of sexism present in many societies, according to an analysis of billions of words published online. The researchers behind the work warn that this sexist bias is being passed on to artificial intelligence models that have been trained on the same text. April Bailey at New York University and colleagues used a statistical algorithm to analyse a collection of 630 billion words contained within 2.96 billion web pages gathered in 2017, including informal text from blogs and discussion forums as well as more formal text written by the media, corporations and governments, mostly in English. They used an approach called word embedding which derives the intended meaning of a word by the frequency it occurs in context with other words. They found that words like "person", "people" and "humanity" are used in contexts that better match the context of words like "men", "he" and "male" than those of words like "women", "she" and "her".