Do Gender Cues Affect LLM Value Trade-offs? Evidence from a Controlled Decision Benchmark

Yangyang Liu, Dong Yu, Pengyuan Liu


Abstract
Large language models are increasingly used in value-sensitive decision settings, where irrelevant demographic cues should not alter judgments. We construct the Realistic Value Decision Benchmark (RVDB), a controlled benchmark that varies only the role-gender configuration while holding the scenario, ordered value pair, roles, candidate decisions, Value Distance, and Decision Severity fixed. Using a position-balanced evaluation across seven models, we test whether models preserve decision invariance under gender perturbations and whether their self-attributions reflect observed behavioral changes. We find that explicit gender cues induce bounded but systematic decision flips, including under an explicit gender-attribution prompt that asks models to report whether gender influenced their choice. Cross-gender role swaps reveal a consistent female-proposed-decision asymmetry, while models often attribute flipped decisions to No Influence or other non-gender factors. Further analysis shows that gender effects concentrate near less determinate value boundaries and under more severe decision contexts, suggesting that gender cues act as local boundary-shifting factors rather than global overrides of value reasoning. Value rankings remain largely stable, but ordered value-pair trade-offs shift unevenly across role-gender configurations. These results show that gender can enter LLM value trade-offs behaviorally while remaining obscured in self-attribution, motivating controlled behavioral audits beyond explanation-based evaluation.
Anthology ID:
2026.findings-emnlp.2287
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Month:
October
Year:
2026
Address:
Budapest, Hungary
Editors:
Hung-Yi Lee, Sunipa Dev, Jessy Li, Desmond Elliott
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
49016–49039
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.2287/
DOI:
10.18653/2026.findings-emnlp.2287
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yangyang Liu, Dong Yu, and Pengyuan Liu. 2026. Do Gender Cues Affect LLM Value Trade-offs? Evidence from a Controlled Decision Benchmark. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026, pages 49016–49039, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Do Gender Cues Affect LLM Value Trade-offs? Evidence from a Controlled Decision Benchmark (Liu et al., Findings 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.2287.pdf