Gender stereotypes embedded in natural language are stronger in more economically developed and individualistic countries

Clotilde Napp ()
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Clotilde Napp: DRM - Dauphine Recherches en Management - Université Paris Dauphine-PSL - PSL - Université Paris Sciences et Lettres - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique

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Abstract: Gender stereotypes contribute to gender imbalances, and analyzing their variations across countries is important for understanding and mitigating gender inequalities. However, measuring stereotypes is difficult, particularly in a cross-cultural context. Word embeddings are a recent useful tool in natural language processing permitting to measure the collective gender stereotypes embedded in a society. In this work, we used word embedding models pre-trained on large text corpora from more than 70 different countries to examine how genderstereotypes vary across countries. We considered stereotypes associating men with career and women with family as well as those associating men with math or science and women with arts or liberal arts. Relying on two different sources (Wikipedia and Common Crawl), we found that these gender stereotypes are all significantly more pronounced in the text corpora of more economically developed and more individualistic countries. Our analysis suggests that more economically developed countries, while being more gender equal along several dimensions, also have stronger gender stereotypes. Public policy aiming at mitigating gender imbalances in these countries should take this feature into account. Besides, our analysis sheds light on the "gender equality paradox," i.e. on the fact that gender imbalances in a large number of domains are paradoxically stronger in more developed/gender equal/individualisticcountries.

Keywords: gender stereotypes; gender equality; cross-cultural variations; gender equality paradox; word embeddings (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-big and nep-gen
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Published in PNAS Nexus, 2023, 2 (11), ⟨10.1093/pnasnexus/pgad355⟩

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:hal-04316389

DOI: 10.1093/pnasnexus/pgad355

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