AI chatbots may show gender bias in workplace writing, study finds

Katherine Van Koevering, an inaugural postdoctoral fellow at the university’s Data Science and AI Institute and the study’s lead author, said the size of the difference surprised the team.

“The headline finding, of course, is that when we rewrote prompts asking for workplace communication using more women-associated linguistic features, the model output was of a lower complexity level, lower grade level, I believe less formal,” Van Koevering said. “It looked surprisingly different.”

Anjalie Field, the study’s senior author and a Johns Hopkins computer scientist in Baltimore who studies ethics and discrimination in AI, said earlier research has examined bias in what the models produce.

“There’s been a lot less research that really focuses on the perspective of people using these models and how models perform for different groups of people or even different individuals,” Field said.

Ruling out mirroring

One obvious question is whether the models were simply echoing the style of the person writing the prompt. To test for that, the researchers measured the complexity of each prompt and compared it with the complexity of the response.