arXiv Computation and Language

Language Models Show a "Women-Are-Wonderful" Effect in Blame Attribution That is Not Just Leniency

The study examines the Women‑Are‑Wonderful (WaW) effect in language‑model blame attribution, finding that women receive more favorable evaluations than men in interpersonal conflict scenarios. Using 11,270 r/AmItheAsshole posts and four language models, the authors show that changing the gender of the original poster or counter‑party alters blame verdicts, with women’s presence reducing blame odds for the poster and increasing them for the counter‑party. The effect varies by role and conflict type, and is linked to shifts in judgments of sympathy, reasonableness, harm, and protection.

arXiv Computation and Language
2d ago

LLMs Cannot Be Neutral: Gender Sensitivity Across Candidates, Evaluators, and Models

The study investigates how gender assignments of candidates and evaluators influence decisions made by large language models (LLMs) in a city council voting scenario. Eight LLM-as-a-Judge and decision language models evaluated 240 synthetic professional narratives, producing 30,720 judgments. Results show that explicit candidate gender labels slightly increased the probability of a Yes vote, only nonbinary evaluator assignments had a significant effect, and decision reversals varied across models, with decision language models exhibiting fewer reversals than LLM-as-a-Judge models.

By Danial Amin, Joni Salminen, Bernard J. Jansen
arXiv AI
Sep 11

Voice or Stereotype? Disentangling Acoustic and Content-Based Gender in Speech-to-Speech Models

The study investigates how speech‑to‑speech (S2S) models handle gender, distinguishing between the acoustic voice and the content’s gender cues. Experiments across five models in English, Spanish, and Mandarin show that while the rendered voice remains unbiased, the models consistently attribute speaker gender based on textual content rather than voice. When content and voice disagree, misgendering rates soar to 90%, whereas agreement yields only 2% misgendering.

By Xiaoqun Liu, Tanu Mitra, Harshit Rajgarhia, Abhishek Mukherji