Age and gender distortion in online media and large language models.

ABSTRACT: Are widespread stereotypes accurate^1-3 or socially distorted^4-6? This continuing debate is limited by the lack of large-scale multimodal data on stereotypical associations and the inability to compare these to ground truth indicators. Here we overcame these challenges in the analysis of age-related gender bias^7-9, for which age provides an objective anchor for evaluating stereotype accuracy. Despite there being no systematic age differences between women and men in the workforce according to the US Census, we found that women are represented as younger than men across occupations and social roles in nearly 1.4 million images and videos from Google, Wikipedia, IMDb, Flickr and YouTube, as well as in nine language models trained on billions of words from the

SUBMITTER: Guilbeault D 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12571887 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature