A Large Scale Analysis of Gender Biases in Text-to-Image Generative Models
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Abstract (arXiv)
With the increasing use of image generation technology, understanding its social biases, including gender bias, is essential. This paper presents a large-scale study on gender bias in text-to-image (T2I) models, focusing on everyday situations. While previous research has examined biases in occupations, we extend this analysis to gender associations in daily activities, objects, and contexts. We create a dataset of 3,217 gender-neutral prompts and generate 200 images over 5 prompt variations per prompt from five leading T2I models. We automatically detect the perceived gender of people in the generated images and filter out images with no person or multiple people of different genders, leaving 2,293,295 images. To enable a broad analysis of gender bias in T2I models, we group prompts into semantically similar concepts and calculate the proportion of male- and female-gendered images for each prompt. Our analysis shows that T2I models reinforce traditional gender roles and reflect common gender stereotypes in household roles. Women are predominantly portrayed in care and human-centered scenarios, and men in technical or physical labor scenarios.
Key facts. Cited by 12 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 78 of its 125 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 30 Mar 2025.
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78 of 125 references.
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Citing papers per year: 2025: 6; 2026: 6.
12 papers.
- 2025Person-Centric Annotations of LAION-400M: Auditing Bias and Its Transfer to Modelscited by 4
- 2025Model-Agnostic Gender Bias Control for Text-to-Image Generation via Sparse Autoencodercited by 3
- 2025Early Estimation of Language to Latent Alignment in Diffusion Modelscited by 3
- 2025From Individuals to Interactions: Benchmarking Gender Bias in Multimodal Large Language Models from the Lens of Social Relationshipcited by 2
- 2025Invisible Attributes, Visible Biases: Exploring Demographic Shortcuts in MRI-based Alzheimer's Disease Classificationcited by 2
- 2026Stay Fair! Ensuring Group Fairness in Diffusion Models Across Guidance Scalescited by 2
- 2026Investigating Associational Biases in Inter-Model Communication of Large Generative Modelscited by 1
- 2026Bias at the End of the Scorecited by 1
- 2025Exposing Hidden Biases in Text-to-Image Models via Automated Prompt Searchcited by 0
- 2026Identifying Ethical Biases in Action Recognition Modelscited by 0
- 2026Beyond wheelchairs and blindfolds: Investigating disability stereotypes in T2I models with INCLUDE-BENCHcited by 0
- 2026ContextBias: Controlled Evaluation of Bias Persistence Under Context Shift in Text-to-Image Modelscited by 0
- 2026ContextBias: Controlled Evaluation of Bias Persistence Under Context Shift in Text-to-Image Models30 Aug 2026
- 2026Beyond wheelchairs and blindfolds: Investigating disability stereotypes in T2I models with INCLUDE-BENCH9 Jul 2026
- 2026Stay Fair! Ensuring Group Fairness in Diffusion Models Across Guidance Scales27 May 2026
- 2026Identifying Ethical Biases in Action Recognition Models20 Apr 2026
- 2026Bias at the End of the Score14 Apr 2026
- 2026Investigating Associational Biases in Inter-Model Communication of Large Generative Models29 Jan 2026
- 2025Exposing Hidden Biases in Text-to-Image Models via Automated Prompt Search9 Dec 2025
- 2025Early Estimation of Language to Latent Alignment in Diffusion Models9 Dec 2025
- 2025Person-Centric Annotations of LAION-400M: Auditing Bias and Its Transfer to Models4 Oct 2025
- 2025Invisible Attributes, Visible Biases: Exploring Demographic Shortcuts in MRI-based Alzheimer's Disease Classification11 Sep 2025
- 2025Model-Agnostic Gender Bias Control for Text-to-Image Generation via Sparse Autoencoder28 Jul 2025
- 2025From Individuals to Interactions: Benchmarking Gender Bias in Multimodal Large Language Models from the Lens of Social Relationship29 Jun 2025