# A Moral- and Event- Centric Inspection of Gender Bias in Fairy Tales at A Large Scale

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.14358 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.14358/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 12 of its 36 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Nov 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [Mitigating Gender Bias in Natural Language Processing: Literature Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08976/) (2019)
- [The Values Encoded in Machine Learning Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.15590/) (2021)
- [A Survey of Race, Racism, and Anti-Racism in NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.11410/) (2021)
- [Unsupervised Discovery of Implicit Gender Bias](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.08361/) (2020)
- [Uncovering Implicit Gender Bias in Narratives through Commonsense Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.06437/) (2021)
- [Men Are Elected, Women Are Married: Events Gender Bias on Wikipedia](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.01601/) (2021)
- [EventPlus: A Temporal Event Understanding Pipeline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.04922/) (2021)
- [AI Ethics Issues in Real World: Evidence from AI Incident Database](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.07635/) (2022)
- [Mapping Moral Valence of Tweets Following the Killing of George Floyd](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09578/) (2021)
- [Pretty Princess vs. Successful Leader: Gender Roles in Greeting Card Messages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.13980/) (2021)
- [Anonymous Expression in an Online Community for Women in China](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.07923/) (2022)
- [More Than a Wife and a Mom: A Study of Mom Vlogging Practices in China](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.11843/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Public Perceptions of Gender Bias in Large Language Models: Cases of ChatGPT and Ernie](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.09120/) (2023)
- [The GPT-WritingPrompts Dataset: A Comparative Analysis of Character Portrayal in Short Stories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.16767/) (2024)
- [What If AI Carried Her Imagination? Black Girls as Creators in an AI Storytelling Weekend Program](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.16896/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Fairy tales are a common resource for young children to learn a language or understand how a society works. However, gender bias, e.g., stereotypical gender roles, in this literature may cause harm and skew children's world view. Instead of decades of qualitative and manual analysis of gender bias in fairy tales, we computationally analyze gender bias in a fairy tale dataset containing 624 fairy tales from 7 different cultures. We specifically examine gender difference in terms of moral foundations, which are measures of human morality, and events, which reveal human activities associated with each character. We find that the number of male characters is two times that of female characters, showing a disproportionate gender representation. Our analysis further reveal stereotypical portrayals of both male and female characters in terms of moral foundations and events. Female characters turn out more associated with care-, loyalty- and sanctity- related moral words, while male characters are more associated with fairness- and authority- related moral words. Female characters' events are often about emotion (e.g., weep), appearance (e.g., comb), household (e.g., bake), etc.; while male characters' events are more about profession (e.g., hunt), violence (e.g., destroy), justice (e.g., judge), etc. Gender bias in terms of moral foundations shows an obvious difference across cultures. For example, female characters are more associated with care and sanctity in high uncertainty-avoidance cultures which are less open to changes and unpredictability. Based on the results, we propose implications for children's literature and early literacy research.