gender difference
Exploring Gender Differences in Chronic Pain Discussions on Reddit
Andrade, Ancita Maria, Banerjee, Tanvi, Mundugar, Ramakrishna
Pain is an inherent part of human existence, manifesting as both physical and emotional experiences, and can be categorized as either acute or chronic. Over the years, extensive research has been conducted to understand the causes of pain and explore potential treatments, with contributions from various scientific disciplines. However, earlier studies often overlooked the role of gender in pain experiences. In this study, we utilized Natural Language Processing (NLP) to analyze and gain deeper insights into individuals' pain experiences, with a particular focus on gender differences. We successfully classified posts into male and female corpora using the Hidden Attribute Model-Convolutional Neural Network (HAM-CNN), achieving an F1 score of 0.86 by aggregating posts based on usernames. Our analysis revealed linguistic differences between genders, with female posts tending to be more emotionally focused. Additionally, the study highlighted that conditions such as migraine and sinusitis are more prevalent among females and explored how pain medication affects individuals differently based on gender.
Algorithmic Hiring and Diversity: Reducing Human-Algorithm Similarity for Better Outcomes
Parasurama, Prasanna, Ipeirotis, Panos
Algorithmic tools are increasingly used in hiring to improve fairness and diversity, often by enforcing constraints such as gender-balanced candidate shortlists. However, we show theoretically and empirically that enforcing equal representation at the shortlist stage does not necessarily translate into more diverse final hires, even when there is no gender bias in the hiring stage. We identify a crucial factor influencing this outcome: the correlation between the algorithm's screening criteria and the human hiring manager's evaluation criteria -- higher correlation leads to lower diversity in final hires. Using a large-scale empirical analysis of nearly 800,000 job applications across multiple technology firms, we find that enforcing equal shortlists yields limited improvements in hire diversity when the algorithmic screening closely mirrors the hiring manager's preferences. We propose a complementary algorithmic approach designed explicitly to diversify shortlists by selecting candidates likely to be overlooked by managers, yet still competitive according to their evaluation criteria. Empirical simulations show that this approach significantly enhances gender diversity in final hires without substantially compromising hire quality. These findings highlight the importance of algorithmic design choices in achieving organizational diversity goals and provide actionable guidance for practitioners implementing fairness-oriented hiring algorithms.
Revisiting gender bias research in bibliometrics: Standardizing methodological variability using Scholarly Data Analysis (SoDA) Cards
Lee, HaeJin, Mishra, Shubhanshu, Mishra, Apratim, You, Zhiwen, Kim, Jinseok, Diesner, Jana
Gender biases in scholarly metrics remain a persistent concern, despite numerous bibliometric studies exploring their presence and absence across productivity, impact, acknowledgment, and self-citations. However, methodological inconsistencies, particularly in author name disambiguation and gender identification, limit the reliability and comparability of these studies, potentially perpetuating misperceptions and hindering effective interventions. A review of 70 relevant publications over the past 12 years reveals a wide range of approaches, from name-based and manual searches to more algorithmic and gold-standard methods, with no clear consensus on best practices. This variability, compounded by challenges such as accurately disambiguating Asian names and managing unassigned gender labels, underscores the urgent need for standardized and robust methodologies. To address this critical gap, we propose the development and implementation of ``Scholarly Data Analysis (SoDA) Cards." These cards will provide a structured framework for documenting and reporting key methodological choices in scholarly data analysis, including author name disambiguation and gender identification procedures. By promoting transparency and reproducibility, SoDA Cards will facilitate more accurate comparisons and aggregations of research findings, ultimately supporting evidence-informed policymaking and enabling the longitudinal tracking of analytical approaches in the study of gender and other social biases in academia.
Investigating writing style as a contributor to gender gaps in science and technology
Kedrick, Kara, Levitskaya, Ekaterina, Funk, Russell J.
In his classic essay, "The Normative Structure of Science," sociologist Robert K. Merton identified universalism as a foundational principle of the scientific enterprise, one that distinguishes science from other competing systems of knowing. According to Merton and Storer's formulation (Merton and Storer, 1973, p. 270), universalism holds that the evaluation of scientific contributions "is not to depend on the personal or social attributes of their protagonist; his race, nationality, religion, class, and personal qualities are as such irrelevant." The value of universalism is manifested perhaps most concretely in the practice of double-blind peer review, wherein the identities of both those making scientific claims and those evaluating them are obscured from one another (Bornmann, 2011). While scholars have long observed that adherence to the principle of universalism is far from universal (Mulkay, 1976; Cole, 1992; Long and Fox, 1995), the growing availability of large-scale databases is creating opportunities for unprecedented insight into processes of scientific evaluation (Teplitskiy et al., 2018; Dondio et al., 2019; Lane et al., 2021), including the barriers that inhibit objective assessments. Recent literature in particular has raised considerable concern about the role of gender in scientific evaluation (Moss-Racusin et al., 2012; Reuben et al., 2014; Oliveira et al., 2019; Card et al., 2020a).
Evaluation of Large Language Models: STEM education and Gender Stereotypes
Due, Smilla, Das, Sneha, Andersen, Marianne, Lรณpez, Berta Plandolit, Nexรธ, Sniff Andersen, Clemmensen, Line
Large Language Models (LLMs) have an increasing impact on our lives with use cases such as chatbots, study support, coding support, ideation, writing assistance, and more. Previous studies have revealed linguistic biases in pronouns used to describe professions or adjectives used to describe men vs women. These issues have to some degree been addressed in updated LLM versions, at least to pass existing tests. However, biases may still be present in the models, and repeated use of gender stereotypical language may reinforce the underlying assumptions and are therefore important to examine further. This paper investigates gender biases in LLMs in relation to educational choices through an open-ended, true to user-case experimental design and a quantitative analysis. We investigate the biases in the context of four different cultures, languages, and educational systems (English/US/UK, Danish/DK, Catalan/ES, and Hindi/IN) for ages ranging from 10 to 16 years, corresponding to important educational transition points in the different countries. We find that there are significant and large differences in the ratio of STEM to non-STEM suggested education paths provided by chatGPT when using typical girl vs boy names to prompt lists of suggested things to become. There are generally fewer STEM suggestions in the Danish, Spanish, and Indian context compared to the English. We also find subtle differences in the suggested professions, which we categorise and report.
Stanford study confirms men and women's brains function differently: 'Sex plays a crucial role'
Men and women have "distinct brain organization patterns" according to a new Stanford Medicine study. The findings were published in the "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences" journal on Tuesday. According to Stanford Medicine's statement on the study, it was conducted utilizing a new artificial intelligence model to scan around 1,500 brains. The AI was then instructed to determine whether the brain scan came from a man or a woman, predicting correctly with a 90% accuracy rate. "A key motivation for this study is that sex plays a crucial role in human brain development, in aging, and in the manifestation of psychiatric and neurological disorders," Vinod Menon, PhD, professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences and director of the Stanford Cognitive and Systems Neuroscience Laboratory, said.
Causal foundations of bias, disparity and fairness
The study of biases, such as gender or racial biases, is an important topic in the social and behavioural sciences. However, the literature does not always clearly define the concept. Definitions of bias are often ambiguous or not provided at all. To study biases in a precise manner, it is important to have a well-defined concept of bias. We propose to define bias as a direct causal effect that is unjustified. We propose to define the closely related concept of disparity as a direct or indirect causal effect that includes a bias. Our proposed definitions can be used to study biases and disparities in a more rigorous and systematic way. We compare our definitions of bias and disparity with various criteria of fairness introduced in the artificial intelligence literature. We also illustrate our definitions in two case studies, focusing on gender bias in science and racial bias in police shootings. Our proposed definitions aim to contribute to a better appreciation of the causal intricacies of studies of biases and disparities. We hope that this will also promote an improved understanding of the policy implications of such studies.
A Moral- and Event- Centric Inspection of Gender Bias in Fairy Tales at A Large Scale
Zhou, Zhixuan, Sun, Jiao, Pei, Jiaxin, Peng, Nanyun, Xiong, Jinjun
Fairy tales are a common resource for young children to learn a language or understand how a society works. However, gender bias, e.g., stereotypical gender roles, in this literature may cause harm and skew children's world view. Instead of decades of qualitative and manual analysis of gender bias in fairy tales, we computationally analyze gender bias in a fairy tale dataset containing 624 fairy tales from 7 different cultures. We specifically examine gender difference in terms of moral foundations, which are measures of human morality, and events, which reveal human activities associated with each character. We find that the number of male characters is two times that of female characters, showing a disproportionate gender representation. Our analysis further reveal stereotypical portrayals of both male and female characters in terms of moral foundations and events. Female characters turn out more associated with care-, loyalty- and sanctity- related moral words, while male characters are more associated with fairness- and authority- related moral words. Female characters' events are often about emotion (e.g., weep), appearance (e.g., comb), household (e.g., bake), etc.; while male characters' events are more about profession (e.g., hunt), violence (e.g., destroy), justice (e.g., judge), etc. Gender bias in terms of moral foundations shows an obvious difference across cultures. For example, female characters are more associated with care and sanctity in high uncertainty-avoidance cultures which are less open to changes and unpredictability. Based on the results, we propose implications for children's literature and early literacy research.
The ProfessionAl Go annotation datasEt (PAGE)
Gao, Yifan, Zhang, Danni, Li, Haoyue
The game of Go has been highly under-researched due to the lack of game records and analysis tools. In recent years, the increasing number of professional competitions and the advent of AlphaZero-based algorithms provide an excellent opportunity for analyzing human Go games on a large scale. In this paper, we present the ProfessionAl Go annotation datasEt (PAGE), containing 98,525 games played by 2,007 professional players and spans over 70 years. The dataset includes rich AI analysis results for each move. Moreover, PAGE provides detailed metadata for every player and game after manual cleaning and labeling. Beyond the preliminary analysis of the dataset, we provide sample tasks that benefit from our dataset to demonstrate the potential application of PAGE in multiple research directions. To the best of our knowledge, PAGE is the first dataset with extensive annotation in the game of Go. This work is an extended version of [1] where we perform a more detailed description, analysis, and application.
Women are better at finding and remembering words than men, study shows
That's because a new study has found that women are better at finding and remembering words than men. Researchers from the University of Bergen in Norway have analysed the results of 168 studies on gender differences in'verbal fluency' and'verbal-episodic memory'. Verbal fluency is a measure of one's vocabulary, while verbal-episodic memory is the ability to recall words one has come across in the past. The female advantage is consistent across time and life span, but it is also relatively small,' said Professor Marco Hirnstein. Researchers from the University of Bergen in Norway have analysed the results of 168 studies on gender differences in'verbal fluency' and'verbal-episodic memory' (stock image) A study by a team from the University of Pennsylvania scanned the brains of 900 men, women and children aged eight to 22. From the scans they were able to create a complete road map of the connections in each of their brains, called their'connectome'.