It's How You Ask: Gender-Associated Linguistic Bias in LLMs

Comments

Computer Science > Computation and Language

[Submitted on 13 Aug 2026]

Title: It’s How You Ask: Gender-Associated Linguistic Bias in LLMs

View PDF

Abstract

Professional communication is increasingly mediated by LLMs - but do these models serve all users equally? We show that when prompts contain linguistic features more commonly used by women (hedges, tag questions, collective reference), they systematically elicit shorter, less sophisticated, and less formal responses across three document types and four models. These effects persist after controlling for prompt complexity and feature carry-over. Explicit gender cues like sign-off names are encoded in the same representational space as linguistic dialect - suggesting shared underlying mechanisms - yet linguistic register is far more influential, producing large, consistent effects where names produce none. Our results further reveal that post-hoc mitigation is challenging: because these patterns are culturally embedded and outside conscious control, users cannot easily avoid them through strategic self-presentation, and mechanistic analysis reveals that linguistic features are encoded in early transformer layers and entangled with other features. Our work calls for upstream consideration of the influences of linguistic variation to mitigate disparate impacts of LLM-mediated workplace communication.

Submission history

From: Katherine Van Koevering [view email]

[v1] Thu, 13 Aug 2026 14:54:23 UTC (84 KB)

References & Citations

Loading...

Bibliographic and Citation Tools

• Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?)
• Connected Papers (What are Connected Papers?)
• Litmaps (What are Litmaps?)
• scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?)

Code, Data and Media Associated with this Article

• alphaXiv (What is alphaXiv?)
• CatalyzeX Code Finder for Papers (What is CatalyzeX?)
• DagsHub (What is DagsHub?)
• Gotit.pub (What is GotitPub?)
• Hugging Face (What is Huggingface?)
• ScienceCast (What is ScienceCast?)

Demos Recommenders and Search Tools

• Influence Flower (What are Influence Flowers?)
• CORE Recommender (What is CORE?)

arXivLabs: experimental projects with community collaborators

arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website. Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them. Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs.