Pretty Princess vs. Successful Leader: Gender Roles in Greeting Card Messages

TL;DR

This paper analyzes gender stereotypes in greeting card messages across different occasions and sources, revealing prevalent stereotypes, understanding public perception, and developing a visualization tool to raise awareness without altering user-written content.

Contribution

It provides a large-scale analysis of gender stereotypes in greeting cards, explores public perceptions, and introduces GreetA, a tool for visualizing gender perceptions in message drafting.

Findings

Gender stereotypes are widespread in greeting card messages.

People are aware of gender roles but not concerned unless they conflict with personality.

GreetA helps visualize gender perceptions without suggesting text changes.

Abstract

People write personalized greeting cards on various occasions. While prior work has studied gender roles in greeting card messages, systematic analysis at scale and tools for raising the awareness of gender stereotyping remain under-investigated. To this end, we collect a large greeting card message corpus covering three different occasions (birthday, Valentine's Day and wedding) from three sources (exemplars from greeting message websites, real-life greetings from social media and language model generated ones). We uncover a wide range of gender stereotypes in this corpus via topic modeling, odds ratio and Word Embedding Association Test (WEAT). We further conduct a survey to understand people's perception of gender roles in messages from this corpus and if gender stereotyping is a concern. The results show that people want to be aware of gender roles in the messages, but remain unconcerned unless the perceived gender roles conflict with the recipient's true personality. In response, we developed GreetA, an interactive visualization and writing assistant tool to visualize fine-grained topics in greeting card messages drafted by the users and the associated gender perception scores, but without suggesting text changes as an intervention.