mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

A Survey on Gender Bias in Natural Language Processing

arXiv 2112.14168 ↗First posted 28 Dec 2021cs.CL cs.CYcited by 89

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Abstract (arXiv)

Language can be used as a means of reproducing and enforcing harmful stereotypes and biases and has been analysed as such in numerous research. In this paper, we present a survey of 304 papers on gender bias in natural language processing. We analyse definitions of gender and its categories within social sciences and connect them to formal definitions of gender bias in NLP research. We survey lexica and datasets applied in research on gender bias and then compare and contrast approaches to detecting and mitigating gender bias. We find that research on gender bias suffers from four core limitations. 1) Most research treats gender as a binary variable neglecting its fluidity and continuity. 2) Most of the work has been conducted in monolingual setups for English or other high-resource languages. 3) Despite a myriad of papers on gender bias in NLP methods, we find that most of the newly developed algorithms do not test their models for bias and disregard possible ethical considerations of their work. 4) Finally, methodologies developed in this line of research are fundamentally flawed covering very limited definitions of gender bias and lacking evaluation baselines and pipelines. We suggest recommendations towards overcoming these limitations as a guide for future research.

Key facts. Cited by 89 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 84 of its 169 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 28 Dec 2021.

Builds on

84 of 169 references.

References · 84

  1. 2018BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understandingcited by 40,204
  2. 2020Language Models are Few-Shot Learnerscited by 32,199
  3. 2019Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformercited by 14,491
  4. 2019Unsupervised Cross-lingual Representation Learning at Scalecited by 3,907
  5. 2018Deep contextualized word representationscited by 2,285
  6. 2016Man is to Computer Programmer as Woman is to Homemaker? Debiasing Word Embeddingscited by 1,304
  7. 2018Model Cards for Model Reportingcited by 1,068
  8. 2020Language (Technology) is Power: A Critical Survey of "Bias" in NLPcited by 951
  9. 2020StereoSet: Measuring stereotypical bias in pretrained language modelscited by 911
  10. 2016Semantics derived automatically from language corpora contain human-like biasescited by 894
  11. 2020CrowS-Pairs: A Challenge Dataset for Measuring Social Biases in Masked Language Modelscited by 703
  12. 2018Mitigating Unwanted Biases with Adversarial Learningcited by 663
38 more
  1. 2018Gender Bias in Coreference Resolution: Evaluation and Debiasing Methodscited by 657
  2. 2018Gender Bias in Coreference Resolutioncited by 438
  3. 2017Men Also Like Shopping: Reducing Gender Bias Amplification using Corpus-level Constraintscited by 420
  4. 2019On Measuring Social Biases in Sentence Encoderscited by 397
  5. 2019A Multiscale Visualization of Attention in the Transformer Modelcited by 292
  6. 2019Mitigating Gender Bias in Natural Language Processing: Literature Reviewcited by 287
  7. 2019Measuring Bias in Contextualized Word Representationscited by 275
  8. 2019Lipstick on a Pig: Debiasing Methods Cover up Systematic Gender Biases in Word Embeddings But do not Remove Themcited by 268
  9. 2017Word Embeddings Quantify 100 Years of Gender and Ethnic Stereotypescited by 251
  10. 2019Evaluating Gender Bias in Machine Translationcited by 247
  11. 2018Examining Gender and Race Bias in Two Hundred Sentiment Analysis Systemscited by 234
  12. 2019Identifying and Reducing Gender Bias in Word-Level Language Modelscited by 214
  13. 2018Gender Bias in Neural Natural Language Processingcited by 210
  14. 2019Counterfactual Data Augmentation for Mitigating Gender Stereotypes in Languages with Rich Morphologycited by 200
  15. 2013Crowdsourcing a Word-Emotion Association Lexiconcited by 193
  16. 2020Causal Mediation Analysis for Interpreting Neural NLP: The Case of Gender Biascited by 183
  17. 2018Learning Gender-Neutral Word Embeddingscited by 169
  18. 2018Adversarial Removal of Demographic Attributes from Text Datacited by 166
  19. 2018Reducing Gender Bias in Abusive Language Detectioncited by 152
  20. 2019Black is to Criminal as Caucasian is to Police: Detecting and Removing Multiclass Bias in Word Embeddingscited by 146
  21. 2021Bias Out-of-the-Box: An Empirical Analysis of Intersectional Occupational Biases in Popular Generative Language Modelscited by 141
  22. 2019Assessing Social and Intersectional Biases in Contextualized Word Representationscited by 134
  23. 2018Assessing Gender Bias in Machine Translation -- A Case Study with Google Translatecited by 121
  24. 2021Gender Bias in Machine Translationcited by 116
  25. 2019On Measuring and Mitigating Biased Inferences of Word Embeddingscited by 112
  26. 2020Towards Controllable Biases in Language Generationcited by 112
  27. 2021Debiasing Pre-trained Contextualised Embeddingscited by 107
  28. 2019It's All in the Name: Mitigating Gender Bias with Name-Based Counterfactual Data Substitutioncited by 102
  29. 2019Getting Gender Right in Neural Machine Translationcited by 98
  30. 2017Ethical Challenges in Data-Driven Dialogue Systemscited by 86
  31. 2020Reducing Gender Bias in Neural Machine Translation as a Domain Adaptation Problemcited by 86
  32. 2019Toward Gender-Inclusive Coreference Resolutioncited by 84
  33. 2020Contextualizing Hate Speech Classifiers with Post-hoc Explanationcited by 84
  34. 2018Event2Mind: Commonsense Inference on Events, Intents, and Reactionscited by 82
  35. 2020Unmasking Contextual Stereotypes: Measuring and Mitigating BERT's Gender Biascited by 82
  36. 2018Towards Robust and Privacy-preserving Text Representationscited by 75
  37. 2019Equalizing Gender Biases in Neural Machine Translation with Word Embeddings Techniquescited by 65
  38. 2019Attenuating Bias in Word Vectorscited by 64

50 most cited of 84 All 84 (JSON)

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Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2022: 17; 2023: 26; 2024: 16; 2025: 20; 2026: 10.

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  1. 2023Having Beer after Prayer? Measuring Cultural Bias in Large Language Modelscited by 153
  2. 2022Probing Pre-Trained Language Models for Cross-Cultural Differences in Valuescited by 147
  3. 2022Agree to Disagree: Diversity through Disagreement for Better Transferabilitycited by 69
  4. 2023How Ready are Pre-trained Abstractive Models and LLMs for Legal Case Judgement Summarization?cited by 43
  5. 2024Bootstrapping LLM-based Task-Oriented Dialogue Agents via Self-Talkcited by 34
  6. 2023The ROOTS Search Tool: Data Transparency for LLMscited by 30
  7. 2022Choose Your Lenses: Flaws in Gender Bias Evaluationcited by 29
  8. 2023On the Independence of Association Bias and Empirical Fairness in Language Modelscited by 29
  9. 2023Social Bias Probing: Fairness Benchmarking for Language Modelscited by 29
  10. 2022Causally Testing Gender Bias in LLMs: A Case Study on Occupational Biascited by 28
  11. 2023Sociodemographic Bias in Language Models: A Survey and Forward Pathcited by 27
  12. 2023Debiasing Algorithm through Model Adaptationcited by 24
38 more
  1. 2022Looking for a Handsome Carpenter! Debiasing GPT-3 Job Advertisementscited by 21
  2. 2022Gender Biases and Where to Find Them: Exploring Gender Bias in Pre-Trained Transformer-based Language Models Using Movement Pruningcited by 20
  3. 2024Akal Badi ya Bias: An Exploratory Study of Gender Bias in Hindi Language Technologycited by 17
  4. 2022How Conservative are Language Models? Adapting to the Introduction of Gender-Neutral Pronounscited by 16
  5. 2022Don't Forget About Pronouns: Removing Gender Bias in Language Models Without Losing Factual Gender Informationcited by 16
  6. 2023Fairness in Language Models Beyond English: Gaps and Challengescited by 16
  7. 2023Tokenization Matters: Navigating Data-Scarce Tokenization for Gender Inclusive Language Technologiescited by 16
  8. 2023''Fifty Shades of Bias'': Normative Ratings of Gender Bias in GPT Generated English Textcited by 15
  9. 2024From 'Showgirls' to 'Performers': Fine-tuning with Gender-inclusive Language for Bias Reduction in LLMscited by 15
  10. 2024What the Harm? Quantifying the Tangible Impact of Gender Bias in Machine Translation with a Human-centered Studycited by 15
  11. 2023Investigating Bias in Multilingual Language Models: Cross-Lingual Transfer of Debiasing Techniquescited by 14
  12. 2025How Deep Is Representational Bias in LLMs? The Cases of Caste and Religioncited by 14
  13. 2024Social Bias in Large Language Models For Bangla: An Empirical Study on Gender and Religious Biascited by 13
  14. 2023Women Are Beautiful, Men Are Leaders: Gender Stereotypes in Machine Translation and Language Modelingcited by 12
  15. 2022Metaethical Perspectives on 'Benchmarking' AI Ethicscited by 11
  16. 2023Measuring Gender Bias in West Slavic Language Modelscited by 10
  17. 2024No Free Lunch: Retrieval-Augmented Generation Undermines Fairness in LLMs, Even for Vigilant Userscited by 9
  18. 2023In-Depth Look at Word Filling Societal Bias Measurescited by 8
  19. 2023GAIA Search: Hugging Face and Pyserini Interoperability for NLP Training Data Explorationcited by 8
  20. 2022Measuring Harmful Representations in Scandinavian Language Modelscited by 7
  21. 2023Logic Against Bias: Textual Entailment Mitigates Stereotypical Sentence Reasoningcited by 7
  22. 2025Colombian Waitresses y Jueces canadienses: Gender and Country Biases in Occupation Recommendations from LLMscited by 7
  23. 2025Are We Paying Attention to Her? Investigating Gender Disambiguation and Attention in Machine Translationcited by 7
  24. 2022Mitigating Gender Stereotypes in Hindi and Marathicited by 6
  25. 2023Evaluating Bias and Fairness in Gender-Neutral Pretrained Vision-and-Language Modelscited by 6
  26. 2023Test Suites Task: Evaluation of Gender Fairness in MT with MuST-SHE and INEScited by 6
  27. 2024Data Feminism for AIcited by 6
  28. 2025EvalMORAAL: Interpretable Chain-of-Thought and LLM-as-Judge Evaluation for Moral Alignment in Large Language Modelscited by 6
  29. 2023(Ir)rationality in AI: State of the Art, Research Challenges and Open Questionscited by 5
  30. 2024MiTTenS: A Dataset for Evaluating Gender Mistranslationcited by 5
  31. 2024Leveraging Large Language Models to Measure Gender Representation Bias in Gendered Language Corporacited by 5
  32. 2024Large Language Models as Mirrors of Societal Moral Standardscited by 5
  33. 2025Benchmarking Educational LLMs with Analytics: A Case Study on Gender Bias in Feedbackcited by 5
  34. 2022Large scale analysis of gender bias and sexism in song lyricscited by 4
  35. 2022The Lifecycle of "Facts": A Survey of Social Bias in Knowledge Graphscited by 4
  36. 2022Undesirable Biases in NLP: Addressing Challenges of Measurementcited by 4
  37. 2022Azimuth: Systematic Error Analysis for Text Classificationcited by 4
  38. 2023Measuring Intersectional Biases in Historical Documentscited by 4

50 most cited of 89 All 89 (JSON)