@inproceedings{teleki-etal-2025-masculine,
    title = "Masculine Defaults via Gendered Discourse in Podcasts and Large Language Models",
    author = "Teleki, Maria  and
      Dong, Xiangjue  and
      Liu, Haoran  and
      Caverlee, James",
    editor = "Hale, James  and
      Deuksin Kwon, Brian  and
      Dutt, Ritam",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Social Influence in Conversations (SICon 2025)",
    month = jul,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Vienna, Austria",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/acl25-workshop-ingestion/2025.sicon-1.7/",
    pages = "90--96",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-266-4",
    abstract = "Masculine discourse words are discourse terms that are both socially normative and statistically associated with male speakers. We propose a twofold framework for (i) the large-scale discovery and analysis of gendered discourse words in spoken content via our Gendered Discourse Correlation Framework; and (ii) the measurement of the gender bias associated with these words in LLMs via our Discourse Word-Embedding Association Test. We focus our study on podcasts, a popular and growing form of social media, analyzing 15,117 podcast episodes. We analyze correlations between gender and discourse words {--} discovered via LDA and BERTopic. We then find that gendered discourse-based masculine defaults exist in the domains of business, technology/politics, and video games, indicating that these gendered discourse words are socially influential. Next, we study the representation of these words from a state-of-the-art LLM embedding model from OpenAI, and find that the masculine discourse words have a more stable and robust representation than the feminine discourse words, which may result in better system performance on downstream tasks for men. Hence, men are rewarded for their discourse patterns with better system performance {--} and this embedding disparity constitutes a representational harm and a masculine default."
}