Gender and verbs across 100K stories: a tidy analysis
varianceexplained.org
varianceexplained.org
Got mathematical analysis, but terrible semantic interpretation.
There are only 3 really negative verbs for men ("murdered", "kills", "kidnaps"), and 3 distinctly positive ("saves", "defeats", "rescues"). "Beat" is ambiguous, personally I would more likely interpret it as "defeats" rather than "hit"/"punch". This is in no way a "dark" picture, and the only relevant conclusion is the one he briefly mentions in passing: women are described as more passive, men as more active.
I think part of that sentence is amazingly perfect for the leanings exposed in this study.
Women aren't disposable henchmen, or are rather rarely.
Unless we stumble across female societies in the course of a story, the idea of a disposable female character strikes a chord against our idealogies.
It isn't really surprising, killing women and children is considered reprehensible, the thing only the villain would do.
But it does make them unsuitable for henchman material.
Apart from the mustache (or maybe not) this is an apt description of the wicked witch trope of female villains. So I'm going to say, no?
But lets look at a famous villain that has been portrait as both female and male roles and see how they differ. Moriarty is male in the TV show Sherlock (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YN7DYPJLXkc), and female in Elementary (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lY7i8cQontg). Which character is show more as the typical villain, and which is portrait as more complex with redeeming values? If they keep the script identical with the exact same lines, what would happened if the genders was reversed for the two shows?
Yes, but the actual details of the trope go back much farther in time. The Fates of Norse and Greek mythology, the Three Witches in Macbeth, Baba Yaga from Slavic folklore. There is a long, long tradition of female characters with supernatural power, unsettling appearance and behaviour, and a tendency toward transgressing taboos such as cannibalism.
As for your Moriarty example, you're butting up against the TV industry's insistence on casting beautiful actresses in almost every role. This is a problem! If you replaced Natalie Dormer with a woman in her late 70s who's never had plastic surgeries you'd have a different comparison to think about.
If for example we would have Hansel and Gretel, which is full of old symbolism about past cultural views of older women, it would be completely impossible to gender swap the antagonist. Interpreting a male antagonist in that story in current culture we would invoking feelings of pedophilia and not cannibalism, changing the story in a very radical way.
With current cultural values, stories generally cast female antagonists with a strong theme of betrayal. Even in the few cases of female henchmen like that one specific James Bond movie with female henchmen, we still see that arc. Male henchmen in other movies don't get such arcs, and is generally simply thrown in as an obstacle to be disposed of. Female henchmen are also generally not killed, which further limits the possibilities.
Last, the Sherlock version would not work with a late 70 old woman if they kept all other aspect of the character intact. Listen on the clip and try to imagine a old woman saying it. The character explicitly say they want to be seen as the classic villain, and as such it do not work unless its male. Even the wicked witch do not go around and say to the protagonist that "I am the villain and you should hate me".
Think for a minute about why "Fifty shades of grey" is popular among female readers.
If there are many stories are filled with males competing over resources and women (in the form of violent criminals kidnapping women and brave heroes rescuing them) then might it be that these kinds of stories are what people are looking for?
Try to imagine a story about a weak man who cannot defend himself against a gang of three women who kidnap him, only to get saved by his brave girlfriend, who upon rescuing him promises him to stay by his side for ever.
Just try it. Does it sound like an interesting story?
If you mean unfair discrimination against women, then that's not an evidence for it.
If you mean natural difference between men and women that are implicitly understood by people, then yea you can call it sexism but it's not necessarily a bad thing.
But this is all a bit too abstract. Could you be specific of what these determintal effects are?
Please not that any attempt to "make up" some egalitarian idealistic expectations without any regard to the biological reality is definitely going to have detrimental effects on both men and women.
For example, if you try to push the idea that women, all women, should abandon the role of motherhood, because it's an "oppressive" societal expectation, and instead should chase after high paying careers, like the powerful men in society, then I think your idea (if it was like this, or similar to this) will have a detrimental effect on most women (if it were to take hold in society).
A friend of mine studied electrical engineering in Spain, and was so good at it that she got accepted into MIT's Technology and Policy Master's Degree. Back when she was 18 and about to enter college, her father got into a big fight with her, because "engineering wasn't a profession for women".
My mother and I were raised by my mother only. Your idea that motherhood is at odds with "chasing after a high paying career like the powerful men in society" is ridiculous. They aren't at odds, and the propagation of that myth by people like you is detrimental to the women that consider the choice.
My neighbor made more money than her husband. So instead of "abandoning the role of fatherhood, to chase after a higher-paying career", he's the one staying at home raising their daughter, while she keeps working full time. She's the sweetest little girl, and they're very happy. In their case, the man might be better fit for that role than the woman is. I wouldn't have trouble believing that, were their roles reversed, the girl would be a bit less happy, and they certainly would have less income to save for her future.
We like stories where the characters we follow have agency. A story about a brave woman who saves her boyfriend after undergoing hardship - that certainly has the potential to be interesting.
And if this audience exists, why aren't there more mainstream stories catering to them? Surely, this could be an untapped market worth millions of dollars. That is, if it were true that most people would find this kind of plot incredibly interesting.
How can you consider your views as non-sexist? You're clearly defining roles based on gender.
Edit: First story off my head is the first Resident Evil movie. She wakes up in chaos without memory. From what she can discern her would be lover and she are accosted by zombies. She fights her way through as the hero. Ultimately I think she remembers her lover betrayed her and started the outbreak or some such thing. Point is, it wasn't boring.
That's not what I said.
Your example is not of a female rescuing a weak helpless male and then "putting a ring on it". It's of a female hero who rescues herself after discovering her lover betrayed her. Still the bad guy role played by the male. Still the person worth caring about is the female.
> How can you consider your views as non-sexist?
I'm simply not concerned with whether you consider my views sexist or not. I just want to have a realistic understanding of human nature.
Now, if I said that women should have _less_ rights than men, then I would be sexist (in a bad way). But I never even implied anything close to that. So why should I worry about my views being sexist?
That isn't the definition of sexism.
If you define sexism in such broad terms that it includes both bad and neutral things, the word will lose its meaning.
> Prejudice, stereotyping, or discrimination, typically against women, on the basis of sex.
You seem to be making it more specific to exclude things you don't deem important.
The definition is so broad as to be meaningless.
Even having different boxing (the sport) categories for men and women could be construed as "sexism".
Much less any implication that men and woman can have, as genders, different sensibilities and priorities, and not just because they were "raised that way" but also because of biological imperatives.
E.g. something that we know is true for almost all animals in nature (e.g. which gender hunts, etc).
It absolutely is. And that's a good thing.
And boxing's weight classes are weight-ist. Also a good thing.
I disagree that fits under prejudice, stereotyping, or discrimination. But of course it can be overly broad if you apply it overly broadly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hush_(2016_film)
There is one pretty chilling and awesome scene where the psychopath uses the hand of her recently-murdered friend to knock on the window:
Why are the top 100 chess players men? Sexism. Why are there more male than female programmers? Sexism. In non-romance movies, why are there more male leads? Sexism.
There is legitimate wrongful sexism, but they aren't usually found in first world countries.
It's as if we ever agreed there was a significant innate difference between the sexes (or races for that matter), the world would come crashing down and put us in the Stone Age.
Successfully carrying, birthing, and raising the next generation depends almost entirely on the mother.
Look up sexual selection and dimorphism lectures from a respectable university. There's a huge body of evidence about the variation between sexes and a lot of it is beyond me since I'm not a biologist.
It explains rather well how the male population distributions get "cut off" as a result of sexual selection with constraint to resources.
Also, family courts make perfectly fair decisions.
/s
I don't think you read my comment, because it disagrees with that statement.
"There is legitimate wrongful sexism, but they aren't usually found in first world countries."
What's wrong with that story? It'd be more interesting than the inverse actually, because it's plausible but less played out.
Here's a story not so dissimilar if you don't believe it's plausible. Sounds like a script that would write itself:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/three-women-k...
It does not strike anyone's fantasy.
Sure, these kinds of stories may exist and have some audience, but not the wide audience that you would see for mainstream typical romance stories.
Now here is the thing... this is all wishful thinking. And the strong female lead is very much exceptional and stereotyped. She is just really strong and skilled somehow. Nearly all the other women are still weak. Once in a while her skill "rubs off" on her companions but the average woman is still weak.
And this is just about strength and/or fighting skill. How about intelligence? There is a movie now called "Gifted". Same thing - a fictional story about a lineage of women with exceptional gifts in math. None of the other women are portrayed this way.
In other words, whenever a woman is portrayed in fiction, even if she is stronger, more skilled, more resolute, more intelligent etc. than men, she is an exception.
There are a few exceptions, such as Fast and Furious, who just cram their movies chock full of two really exceptional women. But then they also cram them chock full of feats, explosions etc.
Where are the popular movies or literature where nearly all the women are routinely stronger or more intelligent than men at things?
Also, if you're going to say things like "natural difference between men and women that are implicitly understood by people" (down thread), you're going to have to bring some double-blind, peer-reviewed evidence.
This is a controversial subject that's overflowing with armchair sociologists. Right now you're indistinguishable from them.
Strong claims require strong evidence. I did not make any outrageous claim.
It would be incredibly surprising if men and women were identical in every aspect except for their reproductive body parts
Just consider the difference in selection pressure that men and women face.
I read "natural difference between men and women that are implicitly understood by people" as saying that what's "implicitly" (i.e. commonly) understood as to be the natural differences is correct. Because what has been "implicitly" understood has differed substantially across time and cultures, that's a highly suspect claim that requires a matching degree of evidence.
Furthermore, just the long and loud history of people spouting off absolute bullshit about what women are and aren't is, by itself, enough to demand significant evidence for any positive statements of what's natural or not.
Millenia of history is a kind of evidence. And the main answer back is "this history is the history of an oppression". Which doesn't even go to why would (all things being equal) one gender get to be the oppressor and the other always the oppressed within the same society, and with the same population numbers on each side (e.g. we're not talking about slaves captured via force here).
It is quite reasonable that past societies divided labor based on suitability of physical capacities for different tasks. It wouldn't be reasonable to call this 'oppression' per se.
However the structure of roles human societies has always been mediated by the level of technology. Gender divisions of labor, class and caste systems etc, have always shifted when the technological structure of production and warfare have changed as technology has developed.
Reinforcing roles that were developed in a less advanced technological society but are not necessary in the present landscape is most certainly oppression, as is resisting thought that could lead to more freedom for groups you don't belong to.
Wouldn't the same be applicable to our social environment?
Also, technology is not permanent. Consider what would happen if society collapsed for whatever reason.
Plus, "just because technology enables it" is never enough reason for anything.
Having been that way in the past means it's already tried. And if it has been carried on, it means it has passed the test, and it has proven useful. It also means its not fickle.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect
https://medium.com/incerto/an-expert-called-lindy-fdb30f146e...
Just because something works, does not mean it is good to do. And in fact, having seen the undesirable effects of a practice may provide all the reason need for discontinuing it in favor of an untried practice.
You are simply arguing against the development of society.
At least it's clear what kind of logic you are using.
One could have easily said "evergreen" or "tried and true" or "resilient" roles.
Also not being reliant on what's enabled by the available technology for major choices is more than about "being prepared in case society collapses".
For one, technology is neutral, it can enable all kinds of things, including things that are bad for society. What should be going should be a cultural/ethical/etc discussion, not a knee-jerk adoption of any new available option.
Not saying that this is the case here, but there's more to being logical than your critique of the parent.
The parent brought up the idea of society collapsing. Not me. If you have something to add please do, otherwise you are just kicking up dust.
There has been a cultural/ethical discussion going on and a great many people decided that gender roles needed to change. If you 'aren't saying that's what happened here' how is your comment relevant?
All you have attempted to do here is add doubt without adding substance or logic of your own. If you can actually argue your position, go ahead, but engaging in this kind undermining suggests that not only can you not, you are aware of it.
Your other comments on this topic show that your suggestion that you are merely trying to point out that my logic isn't as strong as it could be is a misrepresentation of your view.
Just as our culture has in-built biases against women it also has in-built biases against men who use their brains more than their brawn.
Need I even cite any examples of this? It's such a well-worn trope.
And you know what? That anti-nerd bias is pretty stupid and it needs to change. Just like the anti-female bias is stupid and needs to change.
The anti-nerd bias is finally beginning to change a little as our culture begins to recognize the leadership value of smart men (thanks Elon!). And we're also going to change that anti-female bias.
Why? Because over time anti-sexism will just plain work better than sexism. Just like over time leadership by brainy guys has worked better than leadership by dumb alpha jocks.
It is also possible to misunderstand the market. Remember when people said that the reason why action movies didn't have female leads was because nobody would watch them? And then The Hunger Games and TFA were released?
So how do you visualize changes to these more complex interactions between data points, and also how do you mathematically quantify some of these changes? I'd really appreciate any advice on this. And sorry that this is kind of off topic for the article :)
Animate it?
what do you do if you want to evaluate the changes of more complex relationships over time?
Which complex relationships are you talking about here?
Edit: I think I understand what you're asking. Maybe one good way of doing this would be to cluster word groups for different periods of time. You could then perhaps look at where a word is now, where it was at the beginning of "time" and take the delta to examine words whose meaning has changed the most.
Another approach might be to do apriori over time. Take a text from 1600 and lhs is "some manly action" and rhs is "he". Take a text from 2000 and lhs is "some formerly manly action" and rhs is still "he" but with much lower levels of support.
So for example if you have a word cluster that describes computers, you could see it start growing in the seventies, while having near-zero proportion in 19th century etc.
http://www.gapminder.org/tools/#_locale_id=en;&chart-type=bu...
I imagine a dataset that charted the word use over time would fit into a chart like this.
Alternatively 1d protection + style change for another axis. Like changing the colour, thickness of the line, etc.
What we were trying to do was use word2vec to model changes in relationships between 700 proteins and one in particular, which is related to cancer/tumor growth. We created multiple word2vec models based on year windows of medical journals (so the 2003 model had input journals from 2000 - 2003).
To visualize the models we used a D3 force graph where the nodes were the 700 proteins and the edges were known discoveries of relationships between proteins that had years associated with them - as in X protein was discovered to be related to Y protein in 2007. The relationship data was curated by people, independently of the word2vec models. The size of each of the nodes was determined by the word2vec model for the particular year's similarity score between that protein and the cancer-related protein we were interested in.
To see the changes between years, we used a year slider which the force graph would respond to by animating the sizes of the nodes in line with the particular year model's similarity score for each protein. In addition, the color of the nodes represented changes in the models' similarities between the proteins - more green meant that the word2vec model's similarity score had increased compared to the previous year's model, and red meant it had decreased.
The visualization is useful, but it is a bit of a mess considering there are 700 . I'll message you the link and if anyone else want the link I can send it, but I'd rather not post it here since it's hosted on my college's CS department server and it's not equipped to deal with a lot of traffic.
Also if anyone has an idea of how else we might have done it I'd be interested to hear it.
Edit: Didn't realize HN doesn't have a PM feature - if there's another way to send it to you and you're interested let me know.
I'm also curious if there are any ways to quantify, mathematically, the changes over time. There's the simple sum of the squares of the changes distance to get a sense of the "kinetic energy" of the system, but I'm wondering if there are some more clever analyses, especially something that can quantify localized changes versus global changes.
Edit: so are you running a separate word2vec thing for each year's dataset? If so, how to you map between them, because the orientation the word2vec mapping generates will be random, and I worry that trying to rotate the mappings to some common axis could obscure some of the data.
I enjoyed the technical description, but the results didn't exactly shock me!
It might've been better had the author (and the Jane Austen article's author) used some NLP processing to see whether the pronoun was actually the subject of those verbs. But I'll grant that it's usually the case.
Also interesting: gender and the object of those verbs.
EDIT: after some research (that I should've done before posting), it's a remarkably effective technique and it seems only the most contorted sentences might get tripped up. English is nearly always Subject-Verb-Object.
The forms he, she and they are used when a pronoun is the subject of a sentence. The forms him, her and them are used when a pronoun is the object of a sentence.
https://www.englishgrammar.org/words-heshe-himher-hishers/
I would think looking at the verb that comes after he/she also doubles as a subject/object filter.
(The only one I can think of is that comparatives are meant to take the nominative case, e.g. pedantically it's supposed to be "he" rather than "him" in "A man smarter than he would decline". However, this rather convoluted sentence structure is rare, even more unlikely in a plot summary rather than the full novel text, and almost always followed by the subjunctive rather than an indicative verb.)
My bigger concern was what doesn't get caught because it appears after a noun rather than a pronoun, or has an adverb in the way. I thought major dramatic plot points might be more likely to use the character's name rather than a pronoun, and so we might see fewer words like "murders", "defeats", etc. From the results it seems like those words are still present in large quantities, so perhaps I'm wrong.
I'd like to see it done with "they" too, partly as a control case and partly to see if any verbs are more common for individuals rather than groups (although the rise of impersonal "they" may hinder that aspect of the analysis).
Yeah, some clever gender/name lookup would be a good idea, many subjects in plots are the characters' names. Maybe even more subject names than pronouns.
That said, it seems unlikely that there's a pronoun-substitution gender bias, so it would probably just yield more samples of the same trend.
So yeah, there's plenty more room for making this analysis scientific, and no reason to assume it's unbiased.
In the example "The man winced, then he fell to the floor." You'd only register "he fell." This would also be biased if male or female characters were named more often.
I'd like to see this done by country or year or language or genre.
If I say: "Your manager is good.", it's neutral. You can't figure out if I'm talking about a man or a woman without something additional.
In Romanian, and I guess in most Latin languages, no such luck. Except for a handful of neologisms, everything clearly mentions the gender, for better of for worse.
The direct translation in Romanian: "Managerul tău e bun" is masculine (both the noun and the adjective make that obvious).
The whole neutral gender movement in English sounds kind of funny for us... we could try to do it Romanian but it would be like lobotomizing the language.
Genetic differences are FACTS. If you do not account for facts, you're operating in the twilight zone.
It does not, however, follow that all perceived differences in behavior between gender groups are genetic at root. It would be rather dishonest of me to say "men in the US like trucks, therefore liking trucks is embedded in the male geneome" without considering that there could be a societal aspect to that behavior.
Genetic differences may be facts, but blindly assigning genetic causation to perceived behavior without completely ruling out other possible influencing factors is just bad science.
Seems like the Muslims have taken up the Evil Baton.
That said, what if the Jews had been the outgroup that has no obligations to the ingroup and vice versa? In the Middle Ages there were prohibitions on taking interest and charity was encouraged, which meant credit was unavailable, but relatives had potential to be bottomless barrels. We are still seeing this with athletes from an impoverished background. One can see why a group with no such restrictions would be useful, even successful.
I think in East Africa the Indians occupied a similar position in society, and when Idi Amin emulated the Catholic Majesties and expelled the Indians the outcome was equally disastrous.
Gender isn't "made up" in the same way that words aren't "made up"; it is an aspect of society, but unlike words, gender is with some relation to observable physical biological expression, usually termed as 'sex'. But the concept of gender as I have seen it used is certainly depending on society, rather than physical sex.
Variations within sex (such as intersex) is another question and is unrelated to gender, as far as I know.
I believe that denying these differences is sexist, as it results in laws that affect males and females unequally. Should sentences for violent crimes be shorter for men because higher testosterone levels make them more biologically prone to violence? This is dangerous political territory bordering on eugenics but an interesting question nonetheless.
However, I think the interesting point is that this is the culmination of 100,000 plot descriptions. At that point, it's not a reflection of bias in an author, it's a culturally accepted position on the roles of genders. (whether right or wrong)
...or I guess it could be a bunch of biased wikipedia editors :D
More broadly, this is a case of "right for the wrong reason". Many books mentioning slavery will be racist because many books of all sorts were racist, but we're asking whether this is informative or just a base rate fallacy.
It's true that correlation is not causation. It's true that books that use the words 'black' and 'slave' doesn't say anything about whether they're racist. Nobody in this thread was saying otherwise.
It's also true that the history we actually have is one filled with real racism and writing about real racism. It is not one that had a majority of John Brown writing about the evils of slavery. This isn't speculation, we have a historical record and this has already been demonstrated.
Bigger picture, @artursapek asked an interesting question, is a body of literature sexist if it accurately reflects society? Men do commit more crimes, is it sexist for there to be more writing about men committing crimes than women?
@zebrafish answered with an interesting answer -- we might consider it somewhat sexist because our society is still somewhat sexist. If the degree of sexism in literature and in society are the same, then is the literature sexist on it's own? Maybe it is.
Both are hypotheses, and in my book it's perfectly fine to ponder hypotheses. Neither one said something I would presume to call "wrong".
racist ==> "black" correlates with "slave"
"black" correlates with "slave" =/=> racistIts not just about slavery, and I'm not sure how this analysis would even begin to comprehensively find these currently unfavorable descriptions of people.
- I want to be at the top of the pyramid society
- I want there to be no consequences for promiscuity
- I want a calming mind altering drug that has no side effects
- I want peace and stability to focus on my intellectual tasks
Brave New World accomplishes that.
I'd say that if there is, then yes, content which keeps the idea alive is sexist to an extent. (Unless you're writing non-fiction) And the existence of the adtech, and ideas like brand awareness, and catchy jingles, and recent fake news is a decent example that society is relatively easy to influence just by constant repeating and enforcing of information.
What would that mean? That men commit more aggressive crimes or that the users of the language perceive it that way? Also, what would then be seen as a crime or as violence?
The point I am trying to make is that there is probably a cultural factor in this as well. (How the culture perceives things to be.)
I would say most of the research in this area is in abusive relationships. Where only heterosexual abuse from man to woman is noticed and acted on, which greatly distorts reality and cultural expectations.
Many men are physically abused by women, and this is underreported.
Gay and lesbian relationships also produce a power dynamic, which has also gone underreported, as they were already either marginalized, or collectively too busy trying to make all LGBT relationships seem completely benign so that their neighbors wouldn't marginalize them.
Do I have enough quantitative evidence to disprove your "by far" statement? No, but thats not the point. There is something about HUMANS that we should enlighten ourselves about.
Still, doesn't change the fact that most violent agressors (and victims of violent crime) are men.
will a human being pumped with testosterone and upper body strength be violent? a human being with a Y chromosome? thats currently what culture suspects given the reported information available in crime statistics.
I'm telling you that such reductionism isn't an absolute, as there is enough evidence from marginalized people and power dynamics to warrant altering the cultural assumptions. The culture alone (and the stories written in these cultures) is what perpetuates a lack of further insight into this.
I believe in gender equality. But it is worth thinking about other hypotheses even if you don't accept them, that is, the implications of biology in human behaviour.
(I started this post off as tongue-in-cheek, but now I realise it's probably true)
Much of this reflects reality. Murder in general is committed more by men. Most reported battery and assault (beat) is committed by men. Murder by poisoning is almost exclusively committed by women. First responders or soldiers who are "saving" people trend male, etc.
When you're looking at 100k fiction works, many of them are going to be romance, mystery and other dramatic type stories that reinforce these concepts.
Eh?
Both come so naturally to me that I honestly have no idea which centuries you're talking about, or which you think is obsolete.
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=rob%2C+steal&y...
If I had to guess why (other than reasons...) I'd probably speculate that steal tends to have a broader meaning while rob is more likely to be applied to physically robbing someone.
I'm British, so maybe that explains my initial confusion.
I originally thought that rob vs. steal might be one of those Germanic vs. French roots thing but both words seem to be traceable through Old English.
Google ngram search is case-sensitive though, so that's unlikely to account for much - and probably offset by sentences beginning with the verb, e.g. 'Rob him, quick!' said the man.
http://varianceexplained.org/figs/2017-04-27-tidytext-gender...
The conformity with existing stereotypes was pretty depressing, and they're perpetuated more or less equally be male and female authors.
How's that different from actual real life beatings, murders and kidnappings?
Aren't men usually the aggressors?