Google pulls gender pronouns from Gmail Smart Compose to reduce bias | Hacker News Reader

Google pulls gender pronouns from Gmail Smart Compose to reduce bias

engadget.com

36 pointsPharmakon60 comments

There's another discussion here, albeit with a more sensationalist article (which seems to be the original source): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18542635

What a clickbait article. Reading the title alone gives the impression that this is a change to appease the LGBT community or after receiving some similar pressure.

All that happened is that the strings are hardcoded so they removed pronouns because they don't want to go though your entire email history to find out the person's gender.

That's something that everyone do at some point when programming systems. You remove plurals and pronouns so that you do not have to manage them.

Using gender neutral pronoun when writing about people whose gender you do not know is simply being polite.

I wouldn't want Google to show me autocomplete suggestions for "do you want to meet him" when I'm writing an email to my mom or my girlfriend.

> All that happened is that the strings are hardcoded so they removed pronouns because they don't want to go though your entire email history to find out the person's gender.

This gives the impression that they'll never use a gendered pronoun. I assumed from reading the article that they're leaving off gender in cases where it isn't known. But in some cases it would be very known ("do you want to meet him?" / "yes, I'd love to meet him."). Are they really not going to include it even where it has been specifically referenced in the prior email?

My understanding is that they will show pronouns when it's clear. The system might repeat the last one you used or something like that. So if your entire email is about a woman the feature might suggest "her".

The article seems to say that they are mainly removing the pronoun after titles. E.g. a secretary always being "her" but a CEO always being "him".

According to the Reuters article:

"Gmail product manager Paul Lambert said a company research scientist discovered the problem in January when he typed “I am meeting an investor next week,” and Smart Compose suggested a possible follow-up question: “Do you want to meet him?” instead of “her.”"

The same article claims:

"The gendered pronoun ban affects fewer than 1 percent of cases where Smart Compose would propose something, Lambert said."

So that's really a clickbait article based on a non-issue.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-alphabet-google-ai-gender...

it saves them a condition in frontend code. Now take all languages that google supports into considerations and the fact that some do gender pronouns differently than others (for example some change a suffix of the gendered word, some just add the pronoun in front).

Its just easier to use neutral pronouns and neutral gendered words

> When a scientist talked about meeting an investor in January, for example, Gmail offered the follow-up "do you want to meet him" -- not considering the possibility that the investor could be a woman.

So the option was to remove the gendered pronouns or change the product name to “Google Compose”. I get there there are other arguments for removing gendered pronouns, but is working out the gender from past communications beyond Google? What am I missing?

Presumably they'd get it right some of the time but the exceptions would be common enough and rather impactful.

Example scenario: "Hey, I have an investor you should meet. Does next Tuesday at 11am work?"

Problematic response if the unspecified investor isn't a man: "Yes. It'll be great to meet him."

Good alternative: "Yes, that sounds great. Looking forward to the meeting."

Another good alternative: "Yes. It'll be great to meet them."

We had a visit from an individual and the rider of their email politely asked for them to be referred to in gender neutral terms. This was done by all but it’s very hard when you are not used to it.

Agreed it's hard to retrain one's brain. I have now had multiple non-binary colleagues and I still occasionally slip up despite a lot of practice. Most of the time I do get it right now.

They can tell I'm making an effort in general, and I generally self-correct right after saying the wrong pronoun, so (as they've confirmed to me) no offense results from the mistakes. The offense happens when people don't genuinely try.

Nobody's trying to make it a gotcha game, and I'm sure the person appreciated your attempts to respect their wishes, whether or not any mistakes were made! It will become more natural with more practice.

Agreed, and this is exactly what I tell people who sometimes forget to compose their emails to me in 12pt Comic Sans font like my email rider requests.

What is the purpose of specific, separate pronouns in speech to begin with? It's clear they arose in languages hundreds or thousands of years before any current understandings or politics of how and when they are "supposed" to be used.

I do have some ideas why but I don't think it's relevant to bring them up outright, I just think the question should be pondered on.

From a utilitarian perspective, it makes sense why a society would want a quick and simple way to disambiguate between two common categories. When talking about a heterosexual couple, one could say "he gave her", and the meaning of the statement is immediately understood. An alternative might be to have general reusable pronouns that can be reassigned, but that requires additional setup ("Jeff is ze, Stacy is xe", then the main clause, "ze gave xem".)

In many Latin languages all nouns have genders, which surely never made sense, but here we are thousands of years later.

French speakers: is there some process under way to address this? Given that the word “doctor” itself is masculine, is that inherent bias disturbing to people?

Grammatical gender is an unfortunately-named construct that has little to do with sociological gender. The main connection is that most common words have grammatical genders matching their sociological one ("der Vater," "die Mutter"), but even that doesn't hold very well ("das Mädchen"). There's an interesting theory that grammatical gender helps reduce ambiguity, because the inflections of surrounding words make it clearer which roots they modify.

Sure, it’s not literally that objects have a gender, and it is an extra bit of redundant information that probably helps with intelligibility. But even though “he” is the generic first person pronoun in English and doesn’t literally mean a male person when used that way, you can’t avoid the connotations, which is where the controversy arises.

I’m imagining a similar effect with noun genders — they aren’t called “noun type A” and “noun type B”, they are known as masculine and feminine, and things that literally are masculine and feminine can use the same mechanism. E.g., a generic dog in French is masculine (le chien), but if I want to communicate that I have a female dog it’s acceptable to make up a feminine form (la chienne). Thus, noun genders are not quite arbitrary; they can be used to communicate actual genders, so do they not have some small connotation at all times?

Linguists do refer to "gender" as "noun class". In languages where noun classes happen to align with gender, reffering to them as gender has stuck around.

It is true that noun classes tend to make a gender distinction, so there is likely something innate in human language about that.

Originally Indoeuropean had two noun classes, animate and inanimate, which did correspond to the meaning of words. The genders we know today evolved from those.

Feminisation of words for professions has been going on for a while now in French. Either a new word consistent with French rules is made (e.g. "docteure") or the feminine article is simply used in front of the same word ("madame la ministre"). There is also a broader "écriture inclusive" (inclusive writing) movement militating against things like defaulting to masculine forms of plural nouns and adjectives for groups of people of indeterminate sex, but that is less popular so far.

Thats not the issue, though — it isn’t that there’s no word for a female doctor. If you know someone’s male, in English everyone’s happy to use “he” (I think). The issue at hand is that there’s no word for a doctor of unknown gender.

What does the inclusive writing movement suggest one should do in this case? In English, only the pronouns are concerned, so you can advocate using a different pronoun, but in French the genders of nouns have more pervasive effects.

It depends on the person you ask. Some propose using parentheses (docteur(e)), others using a dot (docteur.e), still others writing out both words (docteur ou docteure). Articles on slate.fr use that last convention.

I’m only a beginner in French, but doesn’t this syntax explode because of the other gender implications? Do you have to write things like “l(e/a) docteur(e) est grand(e)” or “L’histoire d(u/e la) docteur(e)”? And how does this work in speech?

You're right that it can get pretty clumsy and you can end up with parentheses all over the place. Paraphrasing to avoid it can only help so much.

In speech the only feasible solution is to use both forms, separated by "ou" or "et" according to the meaning you want ("les étudiants et étudiantes"). Some advocate using the "rule of proximity," which means that the adjective accords with the noun that is closest to it. So, "les hommes et les femmes sont belles," whereas traditionally the adjective would be "beaux."

I would love if I had the option to alway use "'em"- it has always felt much less formal than "them" without upsetting folks on either side of the pronoun "debate". The world eventually caved on "ain't", so I propose this as a solution. Your probability of being correct with "'em" is near 100%.

Just in case, xe, xem, xyr:

https://jdebp.eu/FGA/sex-neutral-pronouns.html

as possible betterings to "Spivak" pronouns (of which you are proposing the "Tintajl" version):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spivak_pronoun

Normally, "fixing" ML systems to "Remove Bias" seems like a pointless exercise (e.g. hiring algorithms that somehow still pick more male candidates in a gender-blind test, when 75% of applicants are male), but here it's done correctly.

It obviously depends on the algorithm but if you train your hiring algorithm based on past hires, and your company has predominantly hired males in the past, your going to end up preselecting males. algorithms aren't bias in themselves but if you want to avoid biased results you have to be very careful on the data sets you use to train them with.

That's why you scrub gender data, and it's still biased. the fact that more men work, period, means that it will always be biased based on that fact.

unless you make a conscious effort to select your dataset to avoid that bias sure. You don't have to give the algorithm ALL of your hiring data. Balance the data you train it on to avoid the bias.

I'll admit, I don't use this feature, so I'm not sure exactly how it works. Is it firing off a reply directly, or is it prepopulating the reply email, which you can then edit as appropriate? The latter strikes me as how this ought to work.

It prepopulates an email which you then edit (but there's nothing indicating such in the UI, so a lot of people are naturally scared to even touch the buttons).

How is it reducing bias?

From the article:

When a scientist talked about meeting an investor in January, for example, Gmail offered the follow-up "do you want to meet him" -- not considering the possibility that the investor could be a woman.

The problem is a typical one with natural language generation systems like Google's: it's based on huge volumes of historical data. As certain fields tend to be dominated by people from one gender, the AI can sometimes assume that a person belongs to that gender.

The AI just generalizes to match the best possible output. all this bias reducing stuff in ML will backfire

Machine learning matches the input and the training it's put through. This is not even close to the same thing as "best possible output".

what do you mean by "best"?

Then isn't that a fair assumption for an AI or any one to make?

If you're offended by how a computer looked at statistics and came to a likely conclusion, it's probally time take a step back and have a good think about why you're even offended.

Maybe computers that interact with humans should sometimes err on the side of those humans' feelings rather than cold statistics?

If I were addressing someone whose gender I didn't know, I would just omit a gendered term rather than assume their gender. There's no reason a computer shouldn't do the same.

If the AI is telling you, "based on the statistics in the field, the odds of this person being a woman, a man, or a non-binary gender are X%, Y%, and Z% respectively," I agree there's no reason for offense.

But if the AI has no information about the email recipient's individual gender, it's much safer for the AI to use the default pronoun (singular they) that English already has where we don't want to assume the gender of a particular person, or else for it to avoid the use of a pronoun.

If a person who is not a man works in a male-dominated field and gets mislabeled as a man, it just makes them feel out of place and unwelcome. Doubly so if the AI-generated words are attributed to an individual colleague who knows their actual gender but doesn't fully edit the suggestion before sending.

Except this isn't a person walking into a place and being mislabeled by another person.

it's a computer that has zero concept of gender.

I don't think that being mistake for a different sex is even cause to be offended.

That person doesn't know and can only go only by what they have seen before.

Not sure why you are making this about "being offended" or not.

In some case a program makes mistakes --> a simple solution is implemented.

The mistake is being attributed to a human email sender as perceived by the email recipient, not to an AI, since it's an email suggestion. Many such email senders will know the recipient's gender better than the AI, and the recipient will know that.

As for your broader doubt that misgendering leads to offense, that's a longer conversation than I can shoehorn into this thread today, but the Geek Feminism wiki is one of several good places to which you can turn to start learning about that topic if you want to.

I'm a cisgender man myself, but I have heard enough personal stories from friends who aren't to know that misgendering can and often does offend.

> Then isn't that a fair assumption for an AI or any one to make?

Sure. They are just choosing not to make that fair assumption even though they could make a correct guess more often than not.

> If you're offended

I don't think it's about being offended. It's about reducing bias.

In the statistical sense, assuming equal gender ratios in contexts that do not actually have equal gender ratios is an INCREASE in bias.

It doesn’t assume equal gender ratio. It will use a neutral pronom that will ensure it gets the response 100% right. Solution will be right 100% of the time, wouldn’t you prefer than may be being right at 70%?

Why do you assume that correcting bias must come from some position of personal offense?

> fair assumption

does this have any relevance? a variety of things could be a "fair assumption", but it's not like you must make some assumptions.

> you're offended

this seems reductive if not an outright strawman. in many ways, language is power, and being a little conscientious isn't going to end the world.

In other words, machine learning is very good at giving you output like the input, but that doesn't mean the input is good.

It makes sense to base things on probabilities, but it also makes sense to play it safe in some cases.

The upside of it predicting him/her is minor and doesn't outweigh the times that it gets it wrong.

"Do you want to meet [name || them]" or simply "Do you want to meet" works well enough usually.

What's interesting is that English doesn't have a great slot in for gendered pronouns. If we take the example from this article:

- "Do you want to meet him?"

There's no genderless slot in for him/her. If you say "them" that infers multiple or an unknown party. You could use their name (e.g. "Do you want to meet Jim?") but that requires information that their system may not have.

Is there a singular genderless pronoun that would fit in there? Do other languages have a similar limitation?

The persons name works quite well.

And if you don't have a person's name?

The AIs only option in English is to go for him/her.

Singular they/them works great. Only in the Victorian era did we start viewing that as a problem. It's got a way longer history than that.

Would you often know their gender but not their name? Additionally, if you had the person in front of you and couldn’t tell their gender, would you go 50/50?

> Is there a singular genderless pronoun that would fit in there?

By the time English gets this word, if it hasn't already, it will be "them".

We've long had singular "them" with a history dating back to at least Chaucer. It's the best we've got.

Yes, other languages have the same problem.

Them works just fine here, get over yourself. The use of singular they in English is hundreds of years old.

Singular they for known specific persons is not hundreds of years old, singular they for unknown/unspecified persons (e.g., known only from a role) is.

OTOH, using it as gender-neutral for a known person isn't a big stretch, and it's the least awkward option for that role.

"Them" almost always works fine if you don't know the name.

You don't really get asked "do you want to meet him?" without getting more details prior in the conversation that help set the context around group/singular.

"Them" has been valid English usage for centuries. It fell out of favor somewhat in the late 19th century (thanks to the same sniffy Victorian prescriptivists who decided that you shouldn't end a sentence on a preposition just because it's not allowed in Latin), but has been on the rise again for several decades. Yes, it's somewhat ambiguous, but it's grammatically correct and it's really the best option we have.

> If you say "them" that infers multiple or an unknown party.

If it's unknown you can say them. If you know the person then presumably you know their gender. Why can't you say him or her in that case?

As I understand it Google is trying to avoid assigning gender statistically to an unknown person based on their job title, not avoiding using the gender to a someone who is known.

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