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Abstract
Using a corpus of millions of digitized books, we document the presence and trajectory over time of stereotypical gender associations in the written English language from 1800 to 2000. We employ the novel methodology of word embeddings to quantify male gender bias: the tendency to associate a domain with the male gender. We measure male gender bias in four stereotypically gendered domains: career, family, science, and arts. We found that stereotypical gender associations in language have decreased over time but still remain, with career and science terms demonstrating positive male gender bias and family and arts terms demonstrating negative male gender bias. We also seek evidence of changing associations corresponding to the second shift and find partial support. Traditional gender ideology is latent within the text of published English-language books, yet the magnitude of traditionally gendered associations appears to be decreasing over time.
Highlights
Using a corpus of millions of digitized books, we document the presence and trajectory over time of stereotypical gender associations in the written English language from 1800 to 2000
We expand upon existing work that demonstrates stereotypical gender bias in current writing by employing a historical approach that detects the presence of traditional gender ideology in published books and captures how it has changed over time, both across and within domains
This suggests that the overall decrease in traditional gender ideology in language is driven by an imbalanced rather than symmetrical shift whereby the concepts of male and female may diversify in their associated roles, but their primary domain prescriptions remain strongly intact
Summary
Using a corpus of millions of digitized books, we document the presence and trajectory over time of stereotypical gender associations in the written English language from 1800 to 2000. Stereotypical Gender Associations method for studying social life (Garg et al 2018; Kozlowski, Taddy, and Evans 2019; Ornaghi, Ash, and Chen 2018), it remains a largely understudied yet promising new area of research We add to this budding literature and build upon previous qualitative content analyses of gender bias in language and books to quantitatively examine the presence and trajectory of gender ideology in the written English language across 200 years. We further examine the relative “stickiness” of stereotypical associations (England 2010) and find that male–family and female–career terms are becoming increasingly associated, male–career and female–family term associations remain quite stable over time This suggests that the overall decrease in traditional gender ideology in language is driven by an imbalanced rather than symmetrical shift whereby the concepts of male and female may diversify in their associated roles, but their primary domain prescriptions remain strongly intact
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