The Male Abstraction Bias in Internet Culture and Large Language Models

Abstract

Conceptual abstraction and gender are two equally central aspects of the human mind, yet they have traditionally been studied in isolation from one another, as though they were fundamentally separate. Here, we find gender and abstraction are systematically linked throughout the space of concepts spanning single (N = 40,000) and multi-word expressions (N = 67,000): across billions of words and millions of images on the internet --- and across numerous measurement techniques, including human and AI classifications --- more abstract concepts are more associated with men, a pattern we show replicates in languages around the world. This male abstraction bias not only holds across semantic domains, but it also maps onto grammatical structure: verbs and adverbs are more abstract and more male-coded, revealing a system-wide trace of stereotypes accentuating agentic qualities in men. Furthermore, we show this bias readily emerges in the free associations humans and AIs produce in controlled online tasks, indicating its psychological internalization and its algorithmic reproduction. These findings identify a latent structure in conceptual space that unifies a range of stereotypes: for example, framings of women as more embodied, emotional, and warm, versus men as more cognitive, rational, and competent; as well as erroneous views of men as better at mathematics, science, and engineering. More broadly, by analyzing an unprecedentedly large, multimodal sample of online data, we provide culture-wide evidence of gender as a core organizing principle shaping conceptual space far beyond the characterization of people and social roles.