Language & Technology
Are You a Genius?
See What Nine Out of Nine Computer-Generated Geniuses Have In Common!
In 2015, Ben Schmidt, now director of digital humanities and clinical associate professor of history at New York University, created an interactive chart that let people explore how words are used to describe male and female professors. Based on 14 million reviews from RateMyProfessor.com, the tool revealed that many words are used quite differently for men and women.
Last I checked, the tool itself was down — Schmidt writes that he had trouble keeping the site up during Covid — but it received enough press coverage that I can point to a piece in Vox — Students think their male professors are ‘genius’ and women professors are ‘caring’ — that contains the visualization I wanted to include here today: genius.
Schmidt’s tool reveals that men are far more likely to be called a genius than women are, a finding Alison T Wynn and colleagues also noted when looking at performance evaluations for a Fortune 500 technology company. There’s nothing in the definition of genius — “a person who is exceptionally intelligent or creative, either generally or in some particular respect” — that mentions gender, and yet, the word is used for one gender far more often than others.
Noting that women are underrepresented in careers where ‘genius’ is perceived as necessary for success (e.g., science and technology) Daniel Storage, et al argue that the imbalance in these fields “may be due in part to a gender-brilliance stereotype that portrays men as more brilliant than women.”
In other words, the stereotype is reinforced and perpetuated by how we use language, and that stereotype, in turn, impacts careers. Additionally, as my experiments with Dreamstudio illustrate stereotypes, consumed at scale, affect what machines are learning about us.
The only time Dreamstudio ever generated a female genius was when I explicitly asked for “photograph of a female genius.”
When I look at the gender divide for ‘genius’ in the student evaluations identified by Schmidt’s tool, at least some female professors are described with the word. In the generated images, all the women who beat the stereotype in real-life have been wiped away. It’s eerie not to see them represented.
In its FAQ, Dreamstudio is described as “engineered to grant everyone the power of limitless imagination and the effortless ease of visual expression.” Perhaps future versions will imagine everyone more equally, as well.
Works Cited
Correll, Shelley J., Katherine R. Weisshaar, Alison T. Wynn, and JoAnne Delfino Wehner. “Inside the black box of organizational life: The gendered language of performance assessment.” American Sociological Review 85, no. 6 (2020): 1022–1050.
Nelson, Libby. “Students think their male professors are ‘genius’ and women professors are ‘caring.’” Vox. (2015)
Storage, Daniel, Tessa ES Charlesworth, Mahzarin R. Banaji, and Andrei Cimpian. “Adults and children implicitly associate brilliance with men more than women.” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 90 (2020): 104020.
