Massive Machine Learning Study Demonstrates Gender Stereotyping And Sexist Language In Literature

An unsupervised machine learning study presented at the 2019 meeting of Association for Computational Linguistics--which examined 3.5M books published between 1900 and 2008--indicates that men are described based on their behavior, where women are described based on appearance. In specific, words like "beautiful" and "sexy" are two of the adjectives most frequently used to describe women, while common descriptors for men were "brave," "rational," and "righteous." The books, which amounted to approximately 11B words in sum, included a mix of fiction and non-fiction. "We are clearly able to see that the words used for women refer much more to their appearances than the words used to describe men," said University of Copenhagen computer scientist and assistant professor Isabelle Augenstein in a statement. "Thus, we have been able to confirm a widespread perception, only now at a statistical level."