Run Like a Girl! Sports-Related Gender Bias in Language and Vision
Sophia Harrison Eleonora Gualdoni Gemma Boleda
Gender bias in Language and Vision datasets and models has the potential to
perpetuate harmful stereotypes and discrimination. We analyze gender bias in
two Language and Vision datasets. Consistent with prior work, we find that both
datasets underrepresent women, which promotes their invisibilization. Moreover,
we hypothesize and find that a bias affects human naming choices for people
playing sports: speakers produce names indicating the sport (e.g. 'tennis
player' or 'surfer') more often when it is a man or a boy participating in the
sport than when it is a woman or a girl, with an average of 46% vs. 35% of
sports-related names for each gender. A computational model trained on these
naming data reproduces the bias. We argue that both the data and the model
result in representational harm against women.