# Nichelle and Nancy: The Influence of Demographic Attributes and Tokenization Length on First Name Biases

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.16577 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16577/

## Key facts

- Cited by 12 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 23 of its 37 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 May 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 23 of 23)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Neural Machine Translation of Rare Words with Subword Units](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.07909/) (2015)
- [Google's Neural Machine Translation System: Bridging the Gap between Human and Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.08144/) (2016)
- [Aligning Books and Movies: Towards Story-like Visual Explanations by Watching Movies and Reading Books](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.06724/) (2015)
- [Language (Technology) is Power: A Critical Survey of "Bias" in NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14050/) (2020)
- [StereoSet: Measuring stereotypical bias in pretrained language models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09456/) (2020)
- [CrowS-Pairs: A Challenge Dataset for Measuring Social Biases in Masked Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.00133/) (2020)
- [BBQ: A Hand-Built Bias Benchmark for Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.08193/) (2021)
- [Gender Bias in Coreference Resolution: Evaluation and Debiasing Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.06876/) (2018)
- [Gender Bias in Coreference Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.09301/) (2018)
- [Social Bias Frames: Reasoning about Social and Power Implications of Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.03891/) (2019)
- [Social Chemistry 101: Learning to Reason about Social and Moral Norms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.00620/) (2020)
- [Gender Bias in Contextualized Word Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03310/) (2019)
- [UnQovering Stereotyping Biases via Underspecified Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02428/) (2020)
- [It's All in the Name: Mitigating Gender Bias with Name-Based Counterfactual Data Substitution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.00871/) (2019)
- [Quantifying Social Biases in NLP: A Generalization and Empirical Comparison of Extrinsic Fairness Metrics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.14574/) (2021)
- [Perturbation Augmentation for Fairer NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.12586/) (2022)
- ["You are grounded!": Latent Name Artifacts in Pre-trained Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.03012/) (2020)
- [Low Frequency Names Exhibit Bias and Overfitting in Contextualizing Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.00672/) (2021)
- [Measuring Representational Harms in Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.07173/) (2022)
- [SODAPOP: Open-Ended Discovery of Social Biases in Social Commonsense Reasoning Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.07269/) (2022)
- [Race and ethnicity data for first, middle, and last names](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.12443/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [From Understanding to Utilization: A Survey on Explainability for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.12874/) (2024)
- [Do Large Language Models Discriminate in Hiring Decisions on the Basis of Race, Ethnicity, and Gender?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10486/) (2024)
- [Agree to Disagree? A Meta-Evaluation of LLM Misgendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.17075/) (2025)
- [The Devil is in the Neurons: Interpreting and Mitigating Social Biases in Pre-trained Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10130/) (2024)
- [A Study of Nationality Bias in Names and Perplexity using Off-the-Shelf Affect-related Tweet Classifiers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.01834/) (2024)
- [On the Mutual Influence of Gender and Occupation in LLM Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.06792/) (2025)
- [How Does "English (US)" Become the Default? Triangulating Structural Bias Towards American English Across the LLM Pipeline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.04204/) (2026)
- [Talent or Luck? Evaluating Attribution Bias in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.22910/) (2025)
- [Small Changes, Large Consequences: Analyzing the Allocational Fairness of LLMs in Hiring Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.04316/) (2025)
- [On the Influence of Gender and Race in Romantic Relationship Prediction from Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.03996/) (2024)
- [Teaching and Critiquing Conceptualization and Operationalization in NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.18505/) (2025)
- [Who Gets a Token, and What Does It Carry? Unequal Name Support and Concept Access in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.34065/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Through the use of first name substitution experiments, prior research has demonstrated the tendency of social commonsense reasoning models to systematically exhibit social biases along the dimensions of race, ethnicity, and gender (An et al., 2023). Demographic attributes of first names, however, are strongly correlated with corpus frequency and tokenization length, which may influence model behavior independent of or in addition to demographic factors. In this paper, we conduct a new series of first name substitution experiments that measures the influence of these factors while controlling for the others. We find that demographic attributes of a name (race, ethnicity, and gender) and name tokenization length are both factors that systematically affect the behavior of social commonsense reasoning models.