# Beyond the binary: Limitations and possibilities of gender-related speech technology research

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.13335 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.13335/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 5 of its 48 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Sep 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Common Voice: A Massively-Multilingual Speech Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.06670/) (2019)
- [Do Datasets Have Politics? Disciplinary Values in Computer Vision Dataset Development](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.04308/) (2021)
- [Fairness for Unobserved Characteristics: Insights from Technological Impacts on Queer Communities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.04257/) (2021)
- [A Study of Gender Impact in Self-supervised Models for Speech-to-Text Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.01397/) (2022)
- [On the Use/Misuse of the Term 'Phoneme'](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11640/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [EMO-Debias: Benchmarking Gender Debiasing Techniques in Multi-Label Speech Emotion Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.04652/) (2025)
- [SLAyiNG: A Diverse and Community-validated Dataset of Queer Slang](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.17449/) (2025)
- [Ouvia: A User-centered Framework for Measuring Usability of Speech Translation in Real-World Communication Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.06177/) (2026)
- [Queer inclusion in speech datasets: An audit and taxonomy of practical tensions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.25491/) (2026)
- [Towards participatory speech dataset curation: A queer case study and conceptual framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.25496/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper presents a review of 107 research papers relating to speech and sex or gender in ISCA Interspeech publications between 2013 and 2023. We note the scarcity of work on this topic and find that terminology, particularly the word gender, is used in ways that are underspecified and often out of step with the prevailing view in social sciences that gender is socially constructed and is a spectrum as opposed to a binary category. We draw attention to the potential problems that this can cause for already marginalised groups, and suggest some questions for researchers to ask themselves when undertaking work on speech and gender.