# Analyzing Gender Bias within Narrative Tropes

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2011.00092 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.00092/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 30 Oct 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [Phrase-BERT: Improved Phrase Embeddings from BERT with an Application to Corpus Exploration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.06304/) (2021)
- [Uncovering Implicit Gender Bias in Narratives through Commonsense Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.06437/) (2021)
- [Modeling Exemplification in Long-form Question Answering via Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.09278/) (2022)
- [Revealing Fine-Grained Values and Opinions in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.19238/) (2024)
- [Gender Representation and Bias in Indian Civil Service Mock Interviews](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12194/) (2024)
- [When Stereotypes GTG: The Impact of Predictive Text Suggestions on Gender Bias in Human-AI Co-Writing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.20390/) (2024)
- [A Close Reading Approach to Gender Narrative Biases in AI-Generated Stories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.09651/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Popular media reflects and reinforces societal biases through the use of tropes, which are narrative elements, such as archetypal characters and plot arcs, that occur frequently across media. In this paper, we specifically investigate gender bias within a large collection of tropes. To enable our study, we crawl tvtropes.org, an online user-created repository that contains 30K tropes associated with 1.9M examples of their occurrences across film, television, and literature. We automatically score the "genderedness" of each trope in our TVTROPES dataset, which enables an analysis of (1) highly-gendered topics within tropes, (2) the relationship between gender bias and popular reception, and (3) how the gender of a work's creator correlates with the types of tropes that they use.