Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Gender and verbs across 100K stories: a tidy analysis

varianceexplained.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 178 posts

Re: Gender and verbs across 100K stories: a tidy analysis

#101

Post by rhcom2 »

hasenj wrote: post #99
jayd16 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Female hero? How boring!" How can you consider your views as non-sexist? You're clearly defining roles based on gender. Edit: First story off my head is the first Resident Evil movie. She wakes up in chaos without memory. From what she can discern her would be lover and she are accosted by zombies. She fights her way through as the hero. Ultimately I think she remembers her lover betrayed her and started the outbrea…

> Female hero? How boring! That's not what I said. Your example is not of a female rescuing a weak helpless male and then "putting a ring on it". It's of a female hero who rescues herself after discovering her lover betrayed her. Still the bad guy role played by the male. Still the person worth caring about is the female. > How can you consider your views as non-sexist? I'm simply not concerned with whether you consi…

> if I said that women should have _less_ rights than men, then I would be sexist (in a bad way).

That isn't the definition of sexism.

Re: Gender and verbs across 100K stories: a tidy analysis

#102

Post by wyldfire »

coroxout wrote: post #70
dahart wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you need NLP for that? The forms he, she and they are used when a pronoun is the subject of a sentence. The forms him, her and them are used when a pronoun is the object of a sentence. https://www.englishgrammar.org/words-heshe-himher-hishers/ I would think looking at the verb that comes after he/she also doubles as a subject/object filter.

I agree that the nominative case endings and usual SVO order of English should prevent (nearly all) false positives. (The only one I can think of is that comparatives are meant to take the nominative case, e.g. pedantically it's supposed to be "he" rather than "him" in "A man smarter than he would decline". However, this rather convoluted sentence structure is rare, even more unlikely in a plot summary rather than th…

> My bigger concern was what doesn't get caught because it appears after a noun rather than a pronoun,

Yeah, some clever gender/name lookup would be a good idea, many subjects in plots are the characters' names. Maybe even more subject names than pronouns.

That said, it seems unlikely that there's a pronoun-substitution gender bias, so it would probably just yield more samples of the same trend.

Re: Gender and verbs across 100K stories: a tidy analysis

#103

Post by 3131s »

jayd16 wrote: post #81
hasenj wrote: post #68

People who have poor understanding of human nature will consider this an evidence of sexism. Think for a minute about why "Fifty shades of grey" is popular among female readers. If there are many stories are filled with males competing over resources and women (in the form of violent criminals kidnapping women and brave heroes rescuing them) then might it be that these kinds of stories are what people are looking for…

"Female hero? How boring!" How can you consider your views as non-sexist? You're clearly defining roles based on gender. Edit: First story off my head is the first Resident Evil movie. She wakes up in chaos without memory. From what she can discern her would be lover and she are accosted by zombies. She fights her way through as the hero. Ultimately I think she remembers her lover betrayed her and started the outbrea…

One of the better horror movies that I've seen in a while, Hush, features a deaf woman as the protagonist. She is writing a novel in a cabin in the woods, but then is taunted by a psychopath and she has to fight like hell to survive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hush_(2016_film)

There is one pretty chilling and awesome scene where the psychopath uses the hand of her recently-murdered friend to knock on the window:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9p2KPPRp7ZY

Re: Gender and verbs across 100K stories: a tidy analysis

#104

Post by 3131s »

hasenj wrote: post #77
aradhakrishnan wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think your story example is a bit forced. After all, there are few stories about what the princess is doing in the castle while waiting for the brave knight to rescue her. We like stories where the characters we follow have agency. A story about a brave woman who saves her boyfriend after undergoing hardship - that certainly has the potential to be interesting.

Not if her boyfriend is weak and helpless before, during, and after the story.

Not interesting to YOU. And why that is, I'm not sure.

Re: Gender and verbs across 100K stories: a tidy analysis

#105

Post by ghaff »

OJFord wrote: post #89
ghaff wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Steal has become relatively more popular over time although the difference is probably not large enough to attach a lot of significance to it. https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=rob%2C+steal&y... If I had to guess why (other than reasons...) I'd probably speculate that steal tends to have a broader meaning while rob is more likely to be applied to physically robbing someone.

Interesting, playing around with that shows it's a lot tighter in Britain - where it's also the other way around in the past tense by quite a margin. (Likewise in the USA until recently.) I'm British, so maybe that explains my initial confusion.

Comparing the past tenses is probably more appropriate as that's the tense that those verbs are most commonly used in. It also occurs to me that a lot of the use of just "rob" may well be the name "Rob." Given that, the usage of stole vs. robbed tracks quite closely with just a bit of an upward track of stole over the past couple of decades.

I originally thought that rob vs. steal might be one of those Germanic vs. French roots thing but both words seem to be traceable through Old English.

Re: Gender and verbs across 100K stories: a tidy analysis

#106

Post by hasenj »

3131s wrote: post #91
hasenj wrote: post #68

People who have poor understanding of human nature will consider this an evidence of sexism. Think for a minute about why "Fifty shades of grey" is popular among female readers. If there are many stories are filled with males competing over resources and women (in the form of violent criminals kidnapping women and brave heroes rescuing them) then might it be that these kinds of stories are what people are looking for…

> Try to imagine a story about a weak man who cannot defend himself against a gang of three women who kidnap him, only to get saved by his brave girlfriend, who upon rescuing him promises him to stay by his side for ever. What's wrong with that story? It'd be more interesting than the inverse actually, because it's plausible but less played out. Here's a story not so dissimilar if you don't believe it's plausible. So…

The story is only interesting because it's strange. Like if you heard of a man who was stuck on top of an electricity column.

It does not strike anyone's fantasy.

Sure, these kinds of stories may exist and have some audience, but not the wide audience that you would see for mainstream typical romance stories.

Re: Gender and verbs across 100K stories: a tidy analysis

#107

Post by [deleted] »

paulddraper wrote: post #90
hasenj wrote: post #68

People who have poor understanding of human nature will consider this an evidence of sexism. Think for a minute about why "Fifty shades of grey" is popular among female readers. If there are many stories are filled with males competing over resources and women (in the form of violent criminals kidnapping women and brave heroes rescuing them) then might it be that these kinds of stories are what people are looking for…

Unfortunately, every single difference of any significance is often took to be sexist and (of course) wrong sexist. Why are the top 100 chess players men? Sexism. Why are there more male than female programmers? Sexism. In non-romance movies, why are there more male leads? Sexism. There is legitimate wrongful sexism, but they aren't usually found in first world countries. It's as if we ever agreed there was a signifi…

[deleted]

Re: Gender and verbs across 100K stories: a tidy analysis

#108

Post by hasenj »

badsock wrote: post #98
hasenj wrote: post #68

People who have poor understanding of human nature will consider this an evidence of sexism. Think for a minute about why "Fifty shades of grey" is popular among female readers. If there are many stories are filled with males competing over resources and women (in the form of violent criminals kidnapping women and brave heroes rescuing them) then might it be that these kinds of stories are what people are looking for…

That plot would fit into, say, Buffy the Vampire Slayer (which had a viewship in the millions) no problem. Also, if you're going to say things like "natural difference between men and women that are implicitly understood by people" (down thread), you're going to have to bring some double-blind, peer-reviewed evidence. This is a controversial subject that's overflowing with armchair sociologists. Right now you're indi…

You have it backwards. If you think there are no natural difference between men and women you better bring a mountain of evidence.

Strong claims require strong evidence. I did not make any outrageous claim.

It would be incredibly surprising if men and women were identical in every aspect except for their reproductive body parts

Just consider the difference in selection pressure that men and women face.

Re: Gender and verbs across 100K stories: a tidy analysis

#109

Post by jayd16 »

wyldfire wrote: post #30

> what verbs are used after “he” and “she”, and therefore what roles male and female characters tend to have within stories. It might've been better had the author (and the Jane Austen article's author) used some NLP processing to see whether the pronoun was actually the subject of those verbs. But I'll grant that it's usually the case. Also interesting: gender and the object of those verbs. EDIT: after some research…

One thing that might cause error is the difference in pronouns vs proper names names or other labels.

In the example "The man winced, then he fell to the floor." You'd only register "he fell." This would also be biased if male or female characters were named more often.

Re: Gender and verbs across 100K stories: a tidy analysis

#110

Post by dahart »

wyldfire wrote: post #102
coroxout wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that the nominative case endings and usual SVO order of English should prevent (nearly all) false positives. (The only one I can think of is that comparatives are meant to take the nominative case, e.g. pedantically it's supposed to be "he" rather than "him" in "A man smarter than he would decline". However, this rather convoluted sentence structure is rare, even more unlikely in a plot summary rather than th…

> My bigger concern was what doesn't get caught because it appears after a noun rather than a pronoun, Yeah, some clever gender/name lookup would be a good idea, many subjects in plots are the characters' names. Maybe even more subject names than pronouns. That said, it seems unlikely that there's a pronoun-substitution gender bias, so it would probably just yield more samples of the same trend.

What doesn't get caught is a super interesting question. (As is object genders too.) How often he occurs vs she is important. How long he is talked about vs how long she is talked about; I'm not certain about screenplay conventions, but usually the first sentence would name the character and some number of subsequent sentences might use she rather than repeat her name.

So yeah, there's plenty more room for making this analysis scientific, and no reason to assume it's unbiased.

Post reply on HN