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Gender and verbs across 100K stories: a tidy analysis
- stefanwlb 9y agoThe author failed to mention the context of the data chosen; specifically the dates. For example, rob vs. steal, would change depending on the century the work was created.
- swf 9y agoThe author mentions in the second paragraph that the data comes from scraping Wikipedia articles' plot descriptions. So the plots might be old, but the descriptions (and language) were all written recently.
- SerLava 9y agoHm. Wouldn't that have little bearing on the result? Can't really say "he poisons" when that wasn't the plot of the story.
- lmkg 9y agoBut that's the point. "She poisons" is more likely to be the plot of the story than "he poisons."
- davrosthedalek 9y agoThere could be a bias in the summary writers too, in that they prefer "he murders" and "she poisons" for the same method of killing.
- Bartweiss 9y agoIt might have a large impact on the language, though. 'Empoison' used to be a verb, 'burgle' has largely been replaced with 'rob', and so on. I think this would tend to improve the data, though - 'empoison' and 'poison' ought to be grouped.
- ghaff 9y agoBefore drawing any strong conclusions, I'd probably want to do at least some validation against original sources, e.g. Project Gutenberg. You're talking about plot descriptions written by a mostly fairly narrow demographic. I'd be hesitant to use that to draw conclusions about the source material.
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- OJFord 9y ago> For example, rob vs. steal, would change depending on the century the work was created. Eh? Both come so naturally to me that I honestly have no idea which centuries you're talking about, or which you think is obsolete.
- ghaff 9y agoSteal 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&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Crob%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Csteal%3B%2Cc0 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.
- OJFord 9y agoInteresting, 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.
- ghaff 9y agoComparing 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.
- OJFord 9y ago> a lot of the use of just "rob" may well be the name "Rob." Google ngram search is case-sensitive though, so that's unlikely to account for much - and probably offset by sentences beginning with the verb, e.g. 'Rob him, quick!' said the man.
- _nalply 9y agoDirect link to a scatter plot (x axis: quantity, y axis: gender): http://varianceexplained.org/figs/2017-04-27-tidytext-gender-plots/total_log_ratio_scatter-1.png http://varianceexplained.org/figs/2017-04-27-tidytext-gender...
- empath75 9y agoIt's interesting how thoroughly ingrained sexist concepts are in the language. Even a verb that's fairly active like 'resist' assumes a power relation in which they are in a worse position. I'd like to see this done by country or year or language or genre.
- oblio 9y agoHeh. You have no idea. English doesn't even have proper genders. You're on easy mode. If I say: "Your manager is good.", it's neutral. You can't figure out if I'm talking about a man or a woman without something additional. In Romanian, and I guess in most Latin languages, no such luck. Except for a handful of neologisms, everything clearly mentions the gender, for better of for worse. The direct translation in Romanian: "Managerul tău e bun" is masculine (both the noun and the adjective make that obvious). The whole neutral gender movement in English sounds kind of funny for us... we could try to do it Romanian but it would be like lobotomizing the language.
- vacri 9y agoA Bulgarian colleague of mine said that even surnames are gendered - her surname is Nakova, her father's is Nakov. It plays merry hell with admin software from anglo nations which assume surnames aren't gendered, apparently.
- viraptor 9y agoSame in Czech, which I believe still enforces the -ova ending. (Please correct me if that changed)
- phillc73 9y agoNot just Bulgarian. I know Latvian surnames have the same concept. Probably others too.
- 3131s 9y agoRussian too, I'm pretty sure from watching years of tennis. Marat Safin, for example, and his sister Dinara Safina.
- godmodus 9y agoI dont see apache helicopters mentioned anywhere, which makes me doubt this works rigor.
- Xophmeister 9y agoAs in "She Apache helicoptered him in the face"?
- Traubenfuchs 9y agoSome people identify as "attack helicopter".
- intjk 9y ago...No they don't. If you manage to find two people who do, congratulations on being "technically" correct.
- oblio 9y agoIt's a meme, relax. I think it's not as funny as the Navy Seal meme, though! http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/navy-seal-copypasta http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/navy-seal-copypasta
- cronjobber 9y agoTIL, and it's even a first page search result. > I’m beautiful. I’m having a plastic surgeon install rotary blades, 30 mm cannons and AMG-114 Hellfire missiles on my body. From now on I want you guys to call me “Apache” and respect my right to kill from above
- zyx321 9y agoIt's a stupid meme, mocking the trend among Tumblr's sexually confused teenagers to put down "autism", or "zodiac", or "Sherlock Holmes" as their gender and insisting that everyone refer to them using their super special unique pronouns they invented.
- openasocket 9y agoThe reference at the end talking about comparing changes over time reminded me of a problem I've been kicking around. For this particular system that's not too hard, since you're putting each word on a one-dimensional femininity/masculinity scale, so you could plot a word on a line graph or something. But what do you do if you want to evaluate the changes of more complex relationships over time? Not just mapping words to a constant vector space, but modeling the relationships between words, such as clusters or word2vec representations. With something like word2vec you can take a bunch of words and project the vector space onto a plane so you can see the relative distances, but how do you express changes over time? You could show a bunch of planar projections for different instants in time, but it's hard to look at that and capture the changes. So how do you visualize changes to these more complex interactions between data points, and also how do you mathematically quantify some of these changes? I'd really appreciate any advice on this. And sorry that this is kind of off topic for the article :)
- pg_is_a_butt 9y agomeasure change in relativity
- joshuacc 9y ago> With something like word2vec you can take a bunch of words and project the vector space onto a plane so you can see the relative distances, but how do you express changes over time? Animate it?
- zebrafish 9y agoI don't think I understand what your end goal is. what do you do if you want to evaluate the changes of more complex relationships over time? Which complex relationships are you talking about here? Edit: I think I understand what you're asking. Maybe one good way of doing this would be to cluster word groups for different periods of time. You could then perhaps look at where a word is now, where it was at the beginning of "time" and take the delta to examine words whose meaning has changed the most. Another approach might be to do apriori over time. Take a text from 1600 and lhs is "some manly action" and rhs is "he". Take a text from 2000 and lhs is "some formerly manly action" and rhs is still "he" but with much lower levels of support.
- jameskegel 9y agoHN : Social Issues :: general conversation : a vegan
- Neliquat 9y agoThat cuts so many ways... But more than ever, I see a great diversity of social outlooks on HN. Might be recent politics, but the result is the same. I love the sub arguments on lab meat, tech ethics, gender equality and representation, and vi vs emacs. Even when I do not agree, I find coherent and consistent alternate points of view useful in seeing the world.
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- wyldfire 9y ago> 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 (that I should've done before posting), it's a remarkably effective technique and it seems only the most contorted sentences might get tripped up. English is nearly always Subject-Verb-Object.
- burkaman 9y agoCan you give an example sentence where this isn't the case?
- dahart 9y agoDo 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/ 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.
- coroxout 9y agoI 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 the full novel text, and almost always followed by the subjunctive rather than an indicative verb.) My bigger concern was what doesn't get caught because it appears after a noun rather than a pronoun, or has an adverb in the way. I thought major dramatic plot points might be more likely to use the character's name rather than a pronoun, and so we might see fewer words like "murders", "defeats", etc. From the results it seems like those words are still present in large quantities, so perhaps I'm wrong. I'd like to see it done with "they" too, partly as a control case and partly to see if any verbs are more common for individuals rather than groups (although the rise of impersonal "they" may hinder that aspect of the analysis).
- merricksb 9y agoRelated post from a week or two ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14156079 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14156079
- joaomacp 9y agoAren't there different activities for different genders in all of the animal world? Why would the human species have equal wants / needs / activities for both genders?
- tomp 9y ago> I think this paints a somewhat dark picture of gender roles within typical story plots. Women are more likely to be in the role of victims- “she screams”, “she cries”, or “she pleads.” Men tend to be the aggressor: “he kidnaps” or “he beats”. Not all male-oriented terms are negative- many, like “he saves”/”he rescues” are distinctly positive- but almost all are active rather than receptive. Got mathematical analysis, but terrible semantic interpretation. There are only 3 really negative verbs for men ("murdered", "kills", "kidnaps"), and 3 distinctly positive ("saves", "defeats", "rescues"). "Beat" is ambiguous, personally I would more likely interpret it as "defeats" rather than "hit"/"punch". This is in no way a "dark" picture, and the only relevant conclusion is the one he briefly mentions in passing: women are described as more passive, men as more active.
- belorn 9y agoThe term aggressor is misplaced. The data shows how men as a general rule always play the antagonist and the disposable henchmen. The mustache-twirling, eye-rolling, leering, cackling, and hand-rubbing villain is by definition male, and in the rare occasion a plot is different and switches the gender of the antagonist it also adds additional changes like poison and stabbing instead of guns and punching.
- shakna 9y ago> The data shows how men as a general rule always play the antagonist and the disposable henchmen I think part of that sentence is amazingly perfect for the leanings exposed in this study. Women aren't disposable henchmen, or are rather rarely. Unless we stumble across female societies in the course of a story, the idea of a disposable female character strikes a chord against our idealogies. It isn't really surprising, killing women and children is considered reprehensible, the thing only the villain would do. But it does make them unsuitable for henchman material.
- chongli 9y agomustache-twirling, eye-rolling, leering, cackling, and hand-rubbing villain is by definition male Apart from the mustache (or maybe not) this is an apt description of the wicked witch trope of female villains. So I'm going to say, no?
- hajesahebnoori 9y agoHi my name is aj
- darkerside 9y agoI'd wager that much of this could be explained by the "masculine" verbs being used in relation to a protagonist more often, whereas the "feminine" verbs describe reactions to the actions of a protagonist.
- hasenj 9y agoPeople 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. Just try it. Does it sound like an interesting story?
- yannyu 9y agoEven if it were true that "these kinds of stories are what people are looking for", that doesn't mean it's not "evidence of sexism".
- hasenj 9y agoDepends on what you mean by sexism. If you mean unfair discrimination against women, then that's not an evidence for it. If you mean natural difference between men and women that are implicitly understood by people, then yea you can call it sexism but it's not necessarily a bad thing.
- hanoz 9y agoIf you're finding some disonnence between 100K stories and your own interpretation of reality, you've really got to ask yourself where the problem might lie.
- zakk 9y agoThe gender is strongly correlated to the biological sex. The biological sex is, in turn, strongly correlated to physical strength, aggressivity and other traits. I enjoyed the technical description, but the results didn't exactly shock me!
- futun 9y agoThis whole story is sexist. Any scientific study that concludes anything other than 100% behavioral sameness between men and women must have been done by Nazis. /s
- sctb 9y agoPlease stop breaking the guidelines. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- coldtea 9y ago>I think this paints a somewhat dark picture of gender roles within typical story plots. Women are more likely to be in the role of victims- “she screams”, “she cries”, or “she pleads.” Men tend to be the aggressor: “he kidnaps” or “he beats”. How's that different from actual real life beatings, murders and kidnappings? Aren't men usually the aggressors?
- kaybe 9y ago> It’s interesting to compare this to an analysis from the Washington Post of real murders in America. Based on this text analysis, a fictional murderer is about 2.5X as likely to be male than female, but in America (and likely elsewhere) murderers are about 9X more likely to be male than female. This means female murderers may be overrepresented in fiction relative to reality.
- unignorant 9y agoWe did a similar analysis of gender stereotypes in the Wattpad online writing community last year: https://www.aaai.org/ocs/index.php/ICWSM/ICWSM16/paper/view/13112 https://www.aaai.org/ocs/index.php/ICWSM/ICWSM16/paper/view/... The conformity with existing stereotypes was pretty depressing, and they're perpetuated more or less equally be male and female authors.
- red023 9y agoOh stop it already. This gendermainstream bs is getting pushed out because there is a agenda behind it. Genders are in fact different, its nature its good that way and it should stay that way. But there is a open agenda that is out to make everybody equal. And I am not speaking of equality in a rights sense like PAST feminism was about and reached its goal in the west. These people can not stop the see sexism everywhere but its in fact only nature everywhere. Genders are different and I really hope they stay different and will not artificially turned onto a weirdo sauce of people who get a kick out of "I am not 'defined' by gender roles" but ultimately become unhappy. You can not have a formula of what 'should be' and expect it to work for 2 very very different kinds of people.