Frequency of singular they for gender stereotypes and the influence of the queer community
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Singular they has been denounced in formal grammars since the mid-18th century (see Bodine 1975; Paterson 2014), yet it dates to at least the 14th century (Balhorn 2004; Curzan 2003), persevering in both writing and speech (e.g., Baranowski 2002; Balhorn 2009; Newman 1992; Strahan 2008). Linguistic investigations of pronominal use suggest an envelope of variation (e.g., LaScotte 2016; Maryna 1978; Meyers 1990) in which speakers make choices based on a multiplicity of factors (e.g., gender stereotypicality, antecedent type). The role of LGBTQ+ community remains less examined. Do aspects of identity impact an individual’s choice of pronoun for singular generic nouns (e.g., a student), and is that dependent on the referent’s perceived gender? A 2018 survey garnered responses across Canada and the United States from 623 participants (289 LGBTQ+, 196 “queer-adjacent”, 131 non LGBTQ+, and 7 no response). The stimuli consisted of six filler questions interspersed among three targets (mechanic, secretary, student). LaScotte’s (2016) open-ended student question was replicated, and Martyna’s (1978) fill-in-the-blank style was modelled for mechanic and secretary—nouns with perceived gender stereotypes (masculine and feminine respectively; Haines, Deaux, & Lofaro 2016). Finally, participants rated occupations on a sliding scale for perception of role performance (masculine to feminine, with gender neutral at the midpoint). Quantifying the frequency of third-person pronouns across all occupations resulted in 2249 tokens split between they (n=1712), he (n=269), she (n=189), and he/she (n=78). Overall, singular they prevails. But, its patterns of use are not parallel. Mechanic and secretary remain gendered (he and she respectively), whereas student is gender-neutral (they). These results are reflected by the ratings: mechanic skews masculine, secretary skews feminine, and student remains neutral. Across all occupations, non-LGBTQ+ participants use singular they the least frequently, followed by queer-adjacent participants, and then LGBTQ+ participants. Non-binary participants use singular they at the highest rate amongst the LGBTQ+ participants (i.e., more frequently than LGBTQ+ men and women). Additionally, participation in events has an impact: singular they is used more by those who attend LGBTQ+ events. Thus, this study provides empirical evidence about the multifaceted interactions of identity and network, as well as uncovering persistent gender biases.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it