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How Humans and LLMs Read Gender into "Gender-Neutral" Physical Descriptions

arXiv · AI, language, vision and robotics · article · Sep 14, 2026 · UTC

When foundation models describe people, recent work in AI fairness, accessibility, and ethics recommends avoiding inferred identity labels (e.g., "she", "his") in favor of seemingly "objective" physical descriptions (e.g., "short hair", "a defined jawline"). Yet whether such descriptive language achieves gender-neutral communication remains an open empirical question. To study this, we introduce GAPA (Gender Associations of Physical Attributes), a dataset of 316 common physical attributes drawn from diverse sources, paired with 14,706 gender-association ratings from 304 US-based annotators. Re

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Evidence & attribution

First collected: 2026-09-20T09:01:24.920Z. This is not the publication date.