On the Mutual Influence of Gender and Occupation in LLM Representations

Haozhe An, Connor Baumler, Abhilasha Sancheti, Rachel Rudinger


Abstract
We examine LLM representations of gender for first names in various occupational contexts to study how occupations and the gender perception of first names in LLMs influence each other mutually. We find that LLMs’ first-name gender representations correlate with real-world gender statistics associated with the name, and are influenced by the co-occurrence of stereotypically feminine or masculine occupations. Additionally, we study the influence of first-name gender representations on LLMs in a downstream occupation prediction task and their potential as an internal metric to identify extrinsic model biases. While feminine first-name embeddings often raise the probabilities for female-dominated jobs (and vice versa for male-dominated jobs), reliably using these internal gender representations for bias detection remains challenging.
Anthology ID:
2025.acl-long.83
Volume:
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2025
Address:
Vienna, Austria
Editors:
Wanxiang Che, Joyce Nabende, Ekaterina Shutova, Mohammad Taher Pilehvar
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1663–1680
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-acl-25/2025.acl-long.83/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Haozhe An, Connor Baumler, Abhilasha Sancheti, and Rachel Rudinger. 2025. On the Mutual Influence of Gender and Occupation in LLM Representations. In Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 1663–1680, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
On the Mutual Influence of Gender and Occupation in LLM Representations (An et al., ACL 2025)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-acl-25/2025.acl-long.83.pdf