Probing Gender Bias in Multilingual LLMs: A Case Study of Stereotypes in Persian

Ghazal Kalhor, Behnam Bahrak


Abstract
Multilingual Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used worldwide, making it essential to ensure they are free from gender bias to prevent representational harm. While prior studies have examined such biases in high-resource languages, low-resource languages remain understudied. In this paper, we propose a template-based probing methodology, validated against real-world data, to uncover gender stereotypes in LLMs. As part of this framework, we introduce the Domain-Specific Gender Skew Index (DS-GSI), a metric that quantifies deviations from gender parity. We evaluate four prominent models, GPT-4o mini, DeepSeek R1, Gemini 2.0 Flash, and Qwen QwQ 32B, across four semantic domains, focusing on Persian, a low-resource language with distinct linguistic features. Our results show that all models exhibit gender stereotypes, with greater disparities in Persian than in English across all domains. Among these, sports reflect the most rigid gender biases. This study underscores the need for inclusive NLP practices and provides a framework for assessing bias in other low-resource languages.
Anthology ID:
2025.winlp-main.3
Volume:
Proceedings of the 9th Widening NLP Workshop
Month:
November
Year:
2025
Address:
Suzhou, China
Editors:
Chen Zhang, Emily Allaway, Hua Shen, Lesly Miculicich, Yinqiao Li, Meryem M'hamdi, Peerat Limkonchotiwat, Richard He Bai, Santosh T.y.s.s., Sophia Simeng Han, Surendrabikram Thapa, Wiem Ben Rim
Venues:
WiNLP | WS
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Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
19–27
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URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2025.winlp-main.3/
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Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ghazal Kalhor and Behnam Bahrak. 2025. Probing Gender Bias in Multilingual LLMs: A Case Study of Stereotypes in Persian. In Proceedings of the 9th Widening NLP Workshop, pages 19–27, Suzhou, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Probing Gender Bias in Multilingual LLMs: A Case Study of Stereotypes in Persian (Kalhor & Bahrak, WiNLP 2025)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2025.winlp-main.3.pdf