Rejecting the gender binary: a vector-space operation
November 1, 2015 10:27 PM   Subscribe

“Word Embedding Models let us take a stab formalizing an interesting counterfactual question: what would the networks of meaning in language look like if patterns that map onto gender did not exist?”

Ben Schmidt, an assistant professor of history at Northeastern University, previously analyzed gendered language in 14 million reviews from ratemyprofessors.com. Now he has used word embedding models to factor out gender differences entirely, viewing the semantic content of words without their gender-specific parts.

One way to approach this is by looking at “gendered synonyms”: pairs of words like “mother” and “father” whose difference in meaning is mostly due to gender. When this is done:
“Professor” replaces “teacher” [in proximity to “she” when gender is factored out], because students are more likely to use the more elevated title in referring to men (presumably either because women occupy more marginal instructional positions, or because students are less likely to use the more respectful title with women than with men.) [...] Women are “nasty” while men are “disgusting.” Adorable women are “kittens,” adorable men are “[teddy] bears.” [...] Male “liberals” are “feminists”; “gender” itself is the female counterpart of “masculinity”; women teach “children’s [literature]” while men teach “comic [books].” When women do philosophy, it is called “sociology.” Mean teach policing, women teach victomology.
(Please note the disclaimer: “I hope I’m succeeding at reporting stereotypes and not perpetuating them here.”)
posted by Rangi (17 comments total) 36 users marked this as a favorite
 
Really interesting, thanks! Also, it looks to me as though it's the sort of analysis that's easy to do nowadays, but would have been literally impossible a few decades ago.
posted by Joe in Australia at 12:15 AM on November 2, 2015 [1 favorite]


Interesting. I think it gets a lot better as it goes along. The first parts are pretty uninspiring, but I really liked the construction of the "he -> she" gendered pairs. Some are trivial ("girlfriend -> boyfriend"), others are silly ("goofy -> wacky"), but there are some surprisingly informative examples there. The gender difference in the "humble -> compassionate" example immediately rings true to me the moment my attention is called to it, but they don't have the same connotations. Worse, those connotations are in fact somewhat sexist. Maybe it's just that I am a jerk, but to me a humble man is not as kind as a compassionate woman. On the flip side I assume that a humble man has genuine accomplishments that he is being humble about, and I don't make the same assumption for compassionate woman. And as for the "absentminded -> scatterbrained" pair, well, the sexism on that one isn't even subtle. Thanks for sharing that.
posted by langtonsant at 1:00 AM on November 2, 2015 [5 favorites]


Interesting that pronouns "he, she, his, hers" are more skewed than any of the nouns. I wonder if this is an artifact of relative frequency of use or if there is something more to it.
posted by three blind mice at 3:59 AM on November 2, 2015


The general pattern is all too clear, but a few of these are strangely enigmatic.

"professore->molto" ?

And um,

"kermit->degeneres" ?
posted by Segundus at 4:39 AM on November 2, 2015 [1 favorite]


Of the top negative words to describe male and female teachers, many of the words for a female teacher seem to indicate that the writers found her to be aggressive and obnoxious (psycho, vindictive, snotty, witch, hateful). There's some of that for male teachers (egomaniac, jackass, SOB) but a fair number of them make the male teacher sound weak (mumbles, stutters, pathetic, aimlessly) while it's striking that none of the ones for female teachers do. (Well, unless you take "nun", "kindergarten" or "wretched" as weak. I'm guessing they were used like "she was like some nasty nun teaching Catholic school," "she made me feel like I was in kindergarten again" and "her teaching is just wretched".)

Nobody there complains about female teachers muttering or being aimless or pathetic, it's pretty much all about the women teachers supposedly being these raging hell-beasts. When people hate a female teacher, they say she's too aggro. When they hate a male teacher, he may be a bastard in their eyes... but it seems nearly as likely they hate him because they think he's weak.

The positive words are depressing in a whole other way. The positive words for a woman teacher make her sound like some kind mama figure, while the guy teacher words add up to paint a picture of some fatherly/sexy, geeky-cool joker. "Humble" is as close as he gets to compassion or caring, while it comes up for women over and over. Also, there are a few mentions of his sexiness, and the closest she gets is "stylish". I'm certainly not saying the students SHOULD be rating the women teachers for sexiness, merely that it's striking that male teachers ARE rated for sexiness and the women aren't. That's a total reversal of what we'd expect in nearly any other job. If a female teacher's appearance is mentioned, she is a "hag".

It sounds like there are some really vile kids doing the rating. "Itch" as a common negative word for women? "Menopause"? God damn.
posted by Ursula Hitler at 4:43 AM on November 2, 2015 [11 favorites]


> Interesting that pronouns "he, she, his, hers" are more skewed than any of the nouns. I wonder if this is an artifact of relative frequency of use or if there is something more to it.

He's using a vector running from "he" to "she" to define the gender coordinate, so those are the most disparately gendered by construction.
posted by Westringia F. at 4:46 AM on November 2, 2015 [8 favorites]


"Itch" as a common negative word for women?

I assumed it was missing the "W". There seem to be lot of typos.
posted by Segundus at 5:54 AM on November 2, 2015


The female teacher I liked least was excessively strict and domineering; everything had to be done her way, down to the items you had on your desk and their relative placement at any given time. I think if she were allowed to deliver electric shocks to students for insufficiently perfect compliance , she would have.

The male teacher I liked least was also excessively strict, and spiteful. He played a role halfway between drill sergeant and mad genius, disgusted to be teaching a summer session of macroeconomics at a community college to, apparently, a bunch of imbeciles.

It's odd for me to think of my impressions in terms of gender. Mostly I think the first was in constant pain and wanted to inflict it on everyone else, and the second was disappointed with his own career arc and was projecting it onto his students.
posted by Foosnark at 5:54 AM on November 2, 2015


I'm certainly not saying the students SHOULD be rating the women teachers for sexiness, merely that it's striking that male teachers ARE rated for sexiness and the women aren't.

I think most students know at a more conscious level that they should not be ogling their female teachers; for male teachers, it's a bit more socially acceptable to explicitly talk about that. Also, I think RateMyProfessor has the chili pepper option, so some of that can be done there, without having to actually articulate the words.

And, from the evaluations I've heard about from my colleagues--students do comment on female attractiveness, or lack there of, just in a bit more of a coded way. Students are totally OK with calling out female TAs for not looking "professional" enough; meanwhile, the male TAs in our department can regularly show up in flannel + graphic T-shirt + chucks and nobody makes a peep.
posted by damayanti at 6:52 AM on November 2, 2015


"kermit->degeneres" ?

kermit->degeneres
posted by Shmuel510 at 7:31 AM on November 2, 2015


Never mind gendered language, all the academic jargon in there made my head hurt.
posted by jonmc at 8:04 AM on November 2, 2015 [1 favorite]


I was a little disappointed by what seemed like frequent "algebra is scary" asides.

The idea of finding the subspace orthogonal to some difference is interesting. I'd probably think you'd want to take a vector from a pair of averages, though, to reduce noise. Say from the centroid of {'she', 'her', 'hers'} to {'he', 'him', 'his'}.

If you wanted to be all intersectional you could repeatedly apply such a transformation. A GSM axis would probably be straightforward. Race would be harder, although I guess you could lean on the age of the corpus for now dispreferred terms.

Questions I would ask at a seminar: are the model and derived subspace robust to corpus selection? How do the 'spatial' relationships change over time?
posted by PMdixon at 9:56 AM on November 2, 2015 [4 favorites]


I assumed it was missing the "W".

Oh, that does make sense! I was assuming it was part of some disgusting comment like, "Maybe she's so mean because her yeast infection is making her itch or something." A typo does sound more likely.
posted by Ursula Hitler at 1:31 PM on November 2, 2015


"Itch" as a common negative word for women?

I assumed it was missing the "W". There seem to be lot of typos.


I thought that was a bleeped-out B. "tch" is high on the women list too.
posted by thetortoise at 1:49 PM on November 2, 2015 [2 favorites]


Really fascinating. More fascinating if used on an actually interesting dataset. RateMyWhatNow? What nasty little gutter of the Internet is this? I always thought peer-review journals were how lecturers got rated.
posted by stanf at 3:27 PM on November 2, 2015


I've always thought of myself as a true arrogent (anyone else spot that jarring, almost Freudian typo in story link, too?)
posted by Perko at 4:36 PM on November 2, 2015


"Itch" as a common negative word for women?

I assumed it was missing the "W". There seem to be lot of typos.

I thought that was a bleeped-out B. "tch" is high on the women list too.


Thinking about it: Typos should be over-represented on lists of extrema, as a corollary to rare words being over-represented, since they'll have more noise in their position in word space.
posted by PMdixon at 8:51 PM on November 2, 2015


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