# Do LLMs have a Gender (Entropy) Bias?

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.20343 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.20343/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 18 of its 49 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 May 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arena](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05685/) (2023)
- [TruthfulQA: Measuring How Models Mimic Human Falsehoods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07958/) (2021)
- [Gender Bias in Coreference Resolution: Evaluation and Debiasing Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.06876/) (2018)
- [Towards Understanding and Mitigating Social Biases in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.13219/) (2021)
- [LEACE: Perfect linear concept erasure in closed form](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03819/) (2023)
- [Large Language Model as Attributed Training Data Generator: A Tale of Diversity and Bias](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.15895/) (2023)
- ["Kelly is a Warm Person, Joseph is a Role Model": Gender Biases in LLM-Generated Reference Letters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.09219/) (2023)
- [Gender bias and stereotypes in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.14921/) (2023)
- [Reducing Sentiment Bias in Language Models via Counterfactual Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.03064/) (2019)
- [Should ChatGPT be Biased? Challenges and Risks of Bias in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03738/) (2023)
- [A Survey on Fairness in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.10149/) (2023)
- [Measuring Implicit Bias in Explicitly Unbiased Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.04105/) (2024)
- [Disclosure and Mitigation of Gender Bias in LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.11190/) (2024)
- [The Unequal Opportunities of Large Language Models: Revealing Demographic Bias through Job Recommendations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.02053/) (2023)
- [Bias of AI-Generated Content: An Examination of News Produced by Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.09825/) (2023)
- [Bias in Generative AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.02726/) (2024)
- [Investigating Bias Representations in Llama 2 Chat via Activation Steering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.00402/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [BiasScope: Towards Automated Detection of Bias in LLM-as-a-Judge Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.09383/) (2026)
- [Information-Consistent Language Model Recommendations through Group Relative Policy Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.12858/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We investigate the existence and persistence of a specific type of gender bias in some of the popular LLMs and contribute a new benchmark dataset, RealWorldQuestioning (released on HuggingFace ), developed from real-world questions across four key domains in business and health contexts: education, jobs, personal financial management, and general health. We define and study entropy bias, which we define as a discrepancy in the amount of information generated by an LLM in response to real questions users have asked. We tested this using four different LLMs and evaluated the generated responses both qualitatively and quantitatively by using ChatGPT-4o (as "LLM-as-judge"). Our analyses (metric-based comparisons and "LLM-as-judge" evaluation) suggest that there is no significant bias in LLM responses for men and women at a category level. However, at a finer granularity (the individual question level), there are substantial differences in LLM responses for men and women in the majority of cases, which "cancel" each other out often due to some responses being better for males and vice versa. This is still a concern since typical users of these tools often ask a specific question (only) as opposed to several varied ones in each of these common yet important areas of life. We suggest a simple debiasing approach that iteratively merges the responses for the two genders to produce a final result. Our approach demonstrates that a simple, prompt-based debiasing strategy can effectively debias LLM outputs, thus producing responses with higher information content than both gendered variants in 78% of the cases, and consistently achieving a balanced integration in the remaining cases.