Investigating Gender Bias in STEM Job Advertisements

Malika Dikshit, Houda Bouamor, Nizar Habash

Abstract
Gender inequality has been historically prevalent in academia, especially within the fields of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM). In this study, we propose to examine gender bias in academic job descriptions in the STEM fields. We go a step further than previous studies that merely identify individual words as masculine-coded and feminine-coded and delve into the contextual language used in academic job advertisements. We design a novel approach to detect gender biases in job descriptions using Natural Language Processing techniques. Going beyond binary masculine-feminine stereotypes, we propose three big group types to understand gender bias in the language of job descriptions, namely agentic, balanced, and communal. We cluster similar information in job descriptions into these three groups using contrastive learning and various clustering techniques. This research contributes to the field of gender bias detection by providing a novel approach and methodology for categorizing gender bias in job descriptions, which can aid more effective and targeted job advertisements that will be equally appealing across all genders.
Anthology ID:
2024.gebnlp-1.11
Volume:
Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Gender Bias in Natural Language Processing (GeBNLP)
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand
Editors:
Agnieszka Faleńska, Christine Basta, Marta Costa-jussà, Seraphina Goldfarb-Tarrant, Debora Nozza
Venues:
GeBNLP | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
179–189
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.gebnlp-1.11
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Malika Dikshit, Houda Bouamor, and Nizar Habash. 2024. Investigating Gender Bias in STEM Job Advertisements. In Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Gender Bias in Natural Language Processing (GeBNLP), pages 179–189, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Investigating Gender Bias in STEM Job Advertisements (Dikshit et al., GeBNLP-WS 2024)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-4/2024.gebnlp-1.11.pdf
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