English colour terms carry gender and valence biases: A corpus study using word embeddings

Abstract

In Western societies, the stereotype prevails that pink is for girls and blue is for boys. A third possible gendered colour is red. While liked by women, it represents power, stereotypically a masculine characteristic. Empirical studies confirmed such gendered connotations when testing colour-emotion associations or colour preferences in males and females. Furthermore, empirical studies demonstrated that pink is a positive colour, blue is mainly a positive colour, and red is both a positive and a negative colour. Here, we assessed if the same valence and gender connotations appear in widely available written texts (Wikipedia and newswire articles). Using a word embedding method (GloVe), we extracted gender and valence biases for blue, pink, and red, as well as for the remaining basic colour terms from a large English-language corpus containing six billion words. We found and confirmed that pink was biased towards femininity and positivity, and blue was biased towards positivity. We found no strong gender bias for blue, and no strong gender or valence biases for red. For the remaining colour terms, we only found that green, white, and brown were positively biased. Our finding on pink shows that writers of widely available English texts use this colour term to convey femininity. This gendered communication reinforces the notion that results from research studies find their analogue in real word phenomena. Other findings were either consistent or inconsistent with results from research studies. We argue that widely available written texts have biases on their own, because they have been filtered according to context, time, and what is appropriate to be reported.

Red background color biases gender categorization of human faces

“…Green was selected because it is one of the colors associated with male 7 , 8 and the opposite color of red in many well-established color models 41 . We did not select blue as a choice due to its prevalence as a more preferred color among both males and females 16 , 42 , as well as empirical evidence indicating its lack of gender bias 43 , 44 . Gray was chosen as an achromatic contrasting color that can be matched for saturation and lightness 45 , 46 .…”

An automatic red-female association tested by Stroop task

“…Notably, limited congruency effect of green-male associations was observed. It might be related to that masculine concept was associated with blue colors more than green colors (Cunningham & Macrae, 2011;Chen et al, 2020;Jonauskaite et al, 2021). Future studies are in need to address the blue/green-male associations and testing the automaticity of those color-gender associations.…”

More is Better: English Language Statistics are Biased Toward Addition

“…Just like word frequencies, distributional semantics can reveal biases that exist within a culture (Caliskan, Bryson, & Narayanan, 2017), or across cultures: In their analysis of 25 different languages, Lewis and Lupyan (2020) showed that people's implicit gender biases, measured in a behavioral task, are predicted by language statistics; such as, how much occupation terms like nurse and philosopher overlap with gender‐specific language in their distributional semantics ( he/she , male/female , boy/girl , man/woman , etc.). Similarly, the fact that colors have culture‐specific associations with gender in purely perceptual tasks (Jonauskaite et al., 2019) is reflected in whether color terms have semantic overlap with male‐ or female‐biased words (Jonauskaite, Sutton, Cristianini, & Mohr, 2021). Even moral beliefs are reflected in the semantics extracted from corpora (Jentzsch, Schramowski, Rothkopf, & Kersting, 2019).…”