Effect of Pronouns on Gender Bias

A Simulation Study

As part of my final project for LIN4930 (Computational Linguistics), I worked with a partner to investigate the impact of pronouns on gender bias by making gendered pronouns gender-neutral (singular ’they’ and neopronoun ’ze’). In doing so, we aimed to simulate a situation where all 3rd-person pronouns were gender-neutral in English. We measured this impact by looking at the association between gendered words and occupations using word embedding and cosine similarity.