For the Underrepresented in Gender Bias Research: Chinese Name Gender Prediction with Heterogeneous Graph Attention Network
This addresses the issue of biased gender representation in datasets for researchers and policymakers, though it is incremental as it improves on existing methods for a specific domain.
The paper tackled the problem of underrepresentation of Chinese females in gender bias research due to inadequate name-gender prediction tools, by developing a Chinese Heterogeneous Graph Attention (CHGAT) model that outperforms current tools and state-of-the-art algorithms.
Achieving gender equality is an important pillar for humankind's sustainable future. Pioneering data-driven gender bias research is based on large-scale public records such as scientific papers, patents, and company registrations, covering female researchers, inventors and entrepreneurs, and so on. Since gender information is often missing in relevant datasets, studies rely on tools to infer genders from names. However, available open-sourced Chinese gender-guessing tools are not yet suitable for scientific purposes, which may be partially responsible for female Chinese being underrepresented in mainstream gender bias research and affect their universality. Specifically, these tools focus on character-level information while overlooking the fact that the combinations of Chinese characters in multi-character names, as well as the components and pronunciations of characters, convey important messages. As a first effort, we design a Chinese Heterogeneous Graph Attention (CHGAT) model to capture the heterogeneity in component relationships and incorporate the pronunciations of characters. Our model largely surpasses current tools and also outperforms the state-of-the-art algorithm. Last but not least, the most popular Chinese name-gender dataset is single-character based with far less female coverage from an unreliable source, naturally hindering relevant studies. We open-source a more balanced multi-character dataset from an official source together with our code, hoping to help future research promoting gender equality.