Women Are Beautiful, Men Are Leaders: Gender Stereotypes in Machine Translation and Language Modeling

Matús Pikuliak, Andrea Hrckova, Stefan Oresko, Marián Simko

Abstract: We present GEST -- a new dataset for measuring gender-stereotypical reasoning in masked LMs and English-to-X machine translation systems. GEST contains samples that are compatible with 9 Slavic languages and English for 16 gender stereotypes about men and women (e.g., Women are beautiful, Men are leaders). The definition of said stereotypes was informed by gender experts. We used GEST to evaluate 11 masked LMs and 4 machine translation systems. We discovered significant and consistent amounts of stereotypical reasoning in almost all the evaluated models and languages.