Are Female Carpenters like Blue Bananas? A Corpus Investigation of Occupation Gender Typicality

TL;DR

This study investigates whether gender associations with occupations are similar to typical features like color in objects, finding that gender mentions are more linked to female-dominated jobs rather than occupation type itself.

Contribution

It applies information theoretic and corpus analysis techniques to explore occupation gender typicality, revealing gender mentions are more related to femaleness than occupation type.

Findings

Gender mentioning correlates with femaleness of occupation.

No strong evidence that occupation and gender show similar mention patterns as objects and features.

Women-dominated occupations are perceived as more gendered.

Abstract

People tend to use language to mention surprising properties of events: for example, when a banana is blue, we are more likely to mention color than when it is yellow. This fact is taken to suggest that yellowness is somehow a typical feature of bananas, and blueness is exceptional. Similar to how a yellow color is typical of bananas, there may also be genders that are typical of occupations. In this work, we explore this question using information theoretic techniques coupled with corpus statistic analysis. In two distinct large corpora, we do not find strong evidence that occupations and gender display the same patterns of mentioning as do bananas and color. Instead, we find that gender mentioning is correlated with femaleness of occupation in particular, suggesting perhaps that woman-dominated occupations are seen as somehow ``more gendered'' than male-dominated ones, and thereby they encourage more gender mentioning overall.