cs.CLOct 13, 2026

GENDIS: Gender-Related Discourse and Stance in Multilingual YouTube Comments from India, Kenya, and Nigeria

Authors: Luise Koch, Manuel Tonneau, Niyati Malhotra, Sunny Rai, Ana Maria Munoz Boudet, Victor Orozco-Olvera, Samuel P. Fraiberger, Sharath Chandra Guntuku

Organizations: World Bank · Technical University of Munich · University of Oxford · New York University · 

Abstract

Research on gender-related online content is often operationalized through harm-centered tasks that collapse non-harmful gender-related and unrelated content, while existing datasets remain concentrated in high-resource languages and Global North settings. To bridge these gaps, we introduce GENDIS, a dataset of 9,600 multilingual, human-annotated YouTube comments from India, Kenya, and Nigeria (3,200 per country), annotated using a two-level framework that first identifies whether gender is referenced and then classifies gender-related content as negative, positive, or neutral. This separation provides a denominator for gender-related discourse independent of harm, enabling both prevalence estimation and characterization of its evaluative range. In the uniform random stratum, 23.8-35.0% of comments are gender-related, and among those with a resolved stance, 82% are neutral or positive. Across models, gender-reference detection is substantially easier than stance classification, especially for positive and neutral speech. Lightly supervised classifiers match frontier zero-shot large language models at substantially lower cost and outperform generic toxicity detection, while cross-country transfer remains limited. GENDIS provides a locally grounded resource for measuring when gender is invoked online and how that reference is framed.

Figures & tables

Appendix figures & tables12 assets

Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.

Appendix

Explore similar work

Oct 17, 2026

Ben-Misandry: A Bengali Dataset and Late-Fusion Transformer Framework for Detecting Anti-Male Gender Hate

Gender based hate speech research in Bengali has focused almost exclusively on misogyny, leaving anti male hate, or misandry, entirely unstudied for this language and creating a systematic blind spot in moderation systems trained to catch attacks on women but not on men. We introduce Ben-Misandry, the first Bengali misandry detection dataset: 5,000 comments across six taxonomy classes, including a novel category for mocking male emotional vulnerability with no direct analogue in existing misogyny taxonomies. The corpus is taxonomy-controlled synthetic data generated with GPT-4.1, spot-checked by four human reviewers on a 500-comment sample who confirmed the large majority of assigned labels; a full inter-annotator- agreement study is left to future work. We benchmark it with a classical pipeline (seven classifiers over four text representations) and a transformer pipeline (BanglaBERT, XLM-RoBERTa, and two fusion strategies). The best classical model, a linear SVM over character-level TF-IDF, reaches 91.8% accuracy; a late fusion ensemble averaging BanglaBERT and XLM-RoBERTa softmax outputs reaches 96.6% accuracy and macro ROC-AUC above 99%, nominally ahead of every single model and early fusion, though we have not run significance testing to confirm these margins are meaningful. We relate this to classifier combination theory, under which averaging encoders with decorrelated errors is expected to reduce variance, and corroborate the decision boundary with Shapley explanations that recover the same class- discriminative vocabulary found in our exploratory analysis, while noting this cannot rule out the model partly keying on synthetic-generation artifacts. Our results indicate misandry detection in Bengali is feasible and measurable on this synthetic corpus, offered as an initial public resource pending validation on real-world data.
Mar 29, 2026

ProText: A benchmark dataset for measuring (mis)gendering in long-form texts

We introduce ProText, a dataset for measuring gendering and misgendering in stylistically diverse long-form English texts. ProText spans three dimensions: Theme nouns (names, occupations, titles, kinship terms), Theme category (stereotypically male, stereotypically female, gender-neutral/non-gendered), and Pronoun category (masculine, feminine, gender-neutral, none). The dataset is designed to probe (mis)gendering in text transformations such as summarization and rewrites using state-of-the-art Large Language Models, extending beyond traditional pronoun resolution benchmarks and beyond the gender binary. We validated ProText through a mini case study, showing that even with just two prompts and two models, we can draw nuanced insights regarding gender bias, stereotyping, misgendering, and gendering. We reveal systematic gender bias, particularly when inputs contain no explicit gender cues or when models default to heteronormative assumptions.
Sep 17, 2026

Harm Laundering in GPT Models: Evidence That Gender Discrimination Is Transformed Rather Than Reduced Across Safety-Trained Generations

Safety evaluations for large language models rely on surface-form classifiers that report declining harm scores across model generations. We provide evidence that this methodology is systematically incomplete: explicit discriminatory content is transformed rather than removed. We call this harm laundering. Analysing 450,000 gender-directed completions across 15 models spanning GPT-2 through to GPT-5 (OpenAI GPT lineage; three demographic conditions), we show that sexual violence clusters prevalent in GPT-2 women-directed output disappear by GPT-4, while men-directed completions gain positive representational territory (caregiving, emotional range, ally identity) that women-directed completions do not. The pattern is most visible at GPT-5: Topic5 (1,997documents) frames breast cancer as a men's rights debate, while zero equivalent clusters appear in women-directed output. Three independent classifiers score this content as non-toxic. Sentiment scores invert at GPT-4: early models demean women; later models over-correct. Topic diversity in women-directed completions falls 36% relative to men at the GPT-4 alignment boundary (W/M~=0.58= 0.58, from 0.910.91 at GPT-2). REGARD representational harm disparity correlates with release date (ρ=+0.55ρ= +0.55, p=.034p = .034) while Detoxify does not (ρ=−0.23ρ= -0.23, p=.42p = .42): toxicity scores fall as representational harm grows. We formalise harm laundering as a three-criteria test and provide a three-stage detection protocol applicable to any generative model. Within the OpenAI GPT lineage, toxicity score reduction is not a sufficient proxy for harm reduction.