Actually, terms like “people” or “people” are intended to include a broad mass of persons, regardless of gender. But that’s not the case: an evaluation of 630 billion words has shown that the English term for people, »people«, primarily refers to men. The team led by April Bailey from New York University in the US reports on this in the journal Science Advances.
Bailey and her colleagues compared the use of gender-neutral terms and those describing women and men across nearly three billion mostly English-language websites. To do this, an intelligent computer program calculated the »word embeddings« of terms such as »human«, »person«, »man« and »woman«. Word embedding shows how often and in what context individual words appear within a text. Word embeddings of terms used synonymously, such as »researcher« and »scientist« are very similar; those of very different words like “researcher” and “instead” have little in common. The method is based on the assumption that words that are used in a similar context are also similar in content.
The analysis showed that the word embeddings of actually neutral terms like “person” resembled the embeddings of “man” or “he” more closely than those of “woman” or “she”. So “men” and “people” are more often used interchangeably. In a further calculation, Bailey and her team found that neuter terms and stereotypically masculine verbs and adjectives also appear in a similar context. So when an article was about people in general, they were more likely to be described as ‘arrogant’ or ‘direct’ than ‘gullible’ or ‘giggling’.