<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<modsCollection xmlns="http://www.loc.gov/mods/v3">
<mods ID="gadhia-etal-2026-analyzing">
    <titleInfo>
        <title>Analyzing Occupational Gender Bias across the LLM Training Lifecycle</title>
    </titleInfo>
    <name type="personal">
        <namePart type="given">Manthan</namePart>
        <namePart type="family">Gadhia</namePart>
        <role>
            <roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
        </role>
    </name>
    <name type="personal">
        <namePart type="given">Alexander</namePart>
        <namePart type="family">Hoyle</namePart>
        <role>
            <roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
        </role>
    </name>
    <name type="personal">
        <namePart type="given">Karolina</namePart>
        <namePart type="family">Stańczak</namePart>
        <role>
            <roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
        </role>
    </name>
    <originInfo>
        <dateIssued>2026-11</dateIssued>
    </originInfo>
    <typeOfResource>text</typeOfResource>
    <relatedItem type="host">
        <titleInfo>
            <title>Proceedings of the 7th Workshop on Gender Bias in Natural Language Processing (GeBNLP)</title>
        </titleInfo>
        <name type="personal">
            <namePart type="given">Agnieszka</namePart>
            <namePart type="family">Faleńska</namePart>
            <role>
                <roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
            </role>
        </name>
        <name type="personal">
            <namePart type="given">Christine</namePart>
            <namePart type="family">Basta</namePart>
            <role>
                <roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
            </role>
        </name>
        <name type="personal">
            <namePart type="given">Marta</namePart>
            <namePart type="family">Costa-jussà</namePart>
            <role>
                <roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
            </role>
        </name>
        <name type="personal">
            <namePart type="given">Karolina</namePart>
            <namePart type="family">Stańczak</namePart>
            <role>
                <roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
            </role>
        </name>
        <name type="personal">
            <namePart type="given">Debora</namePart>
            <namePart type="family">Nozza</namePart>
            <role>
                <roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
            </role>
        </name>
        <name type="personal">
            <namePart type="given">Giuseppe</namePart>
            <namePart type="family">Attanasio</namePart>
            <role>
                <roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
            </role>
        </name>
        <name type="personal">
            <namePart type="given">Vera</namePart>
            <namePart type="family">Neplenbroek</namePart>
            <role>
                <roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
            </role>
        </name>
        <name type="personal">
            <namePart type="given">Christian</namePart>
            <namePart type="family">Hardmeier</namePart>
            <role>
                <roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
            </role>
        </name>
        <originInfo>
            <publisher>Association for Computational Linguistics</publisher>
            <place>
                <placeTerm type="text">Hengqin, China (remote)</placeTerm>
            </place>
        </originInfo>
        <genre authority="marcgt">conference publication</genre>
        <identifier type="isbn">979-8-89176-447-7</identifier>
    </relatedItem>
    <abstract>Post-training is widely assumed to reduce the social biases language models inherit from pre-training, yet direct evidence for this assumption remains mixed. In this paper, we examine how gender disparities evolve across the language modeling pipeline. In particular, we study occupational gender bias in OLMo 3, a fully open language model family, across its post-training stages by prompting each checkpoint to generate open-ended narratives about synthetic personas given their occupation and education. We consider two settings, a gender-given setting in which the profile states the persona’s gender explicitly and a gender-assumed setting in which it must be inferred by the model. We find that when gender is stated, post-training increases semantic diversity for male-coded profiles, whereas for female-coded profiles the increase is smaller after SFT and not significant after DPO and RLVR. When gender is assumed by the model, post-training affects narratives about female and male personas similarly. The model’s own gender assumptions, however, show a consistent female-preferential skew relative to United States labor-force demographics, except for heavily male-dominated occupations. Every successive post-training stage monotonically increases the odds of attributing a female label over the base model. A provenance analysis of the supervised fine-tuning corpus finds only a modest 7.7% female-token surplus, too small to explain the size of these downstream effects. The project code is available under: https://github.com/manthangadhia/llm-lifecycle-bias.</abstract>
    <identifier type="citekey">gadhia-etal-2026-analyzing</identifier>
    <location>
        <url>https://aclanthology.org/2026.gebnlp-1.11/</url>
    </location>
    <part>
        <date>2026-11</date>
        <extent unit="page">
            <start>157</start>
            <end>172</end>
        </extent>
    </part>
</mods>
</modsCollection>

%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Analyzing Occupational Gender Bias across the LLM Training Lifecycle
%A Gadhia, Manthan
%A Hoyle, Alexander
%A Stańczak, Karolina
%Y Faleńska, Agnieszka
%Y Basta, Christine
%Y Costa-jussà, Marta
%Y Stańczak, Karolina
%Y Nozza, Debora
%Y Attanasio, Giuseppe
%Y Neplenbroek, Vera
%Y Hardmeier, Christian
%S Proceedings of the 7th Workshop on Gender Bias in Natural Language Processing (GeBNLP)
%D 2026
%8 November
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Hengqin, China (remote)
%@ 979-8-89176-447-7
%F gadhia-etal-2026-analyzing
%X Post-training is widely assumed to reduce the social biases language models inherit from pre-training, yet direct evidence for this assumption remains mixed. In this paper, we examine how gender disparities evolve across the language modeling pipeline. In particular, we study occupational gender bias in OLMo 3, a fully open language model family, across its post-training stages by prompting each checkpoint to generate open-ended narratives about synthetic personas given their occupation and education. We consider two settings, a gender-given setting in which the profile states the persona’s gender explicitly and a gender-assumed setting in which it must be inferred by the model. We find that when gender is stated, post-training increases semantic diversity for male-coded profiles, whereas for female-coded profiles the increase is smaller after SFT and not significant after DPO and RLVR. When gender is assumed by the model, post-training affects narratives about female and male personas similarly. The model’s own gender assumptions, however, show a consistent female-preferential skew relative to United States labor-force demographics, except for heavily male-dominated occupations. Every successive post-training stage monotonically increases the odds of attributing a female label over the base model. A provenance analysis of the supervised fine-tuning corpus finds only a modest 7.7% female-token surplus, too small to explain the size of these downstream effects. The project code is available under: https://github.com/manthangadhia/llm-lifecycle-bias.
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.gebnlp-1.11/
%P 157-172

Markdown (Informal)

[Analyzing Occupational Gender Bias across the LLM Training Lifecycle](https://aclanthology.org/2026.gebnlp-1.11/) (Gadhia et al., GeBNLP 2026)

• Analyzing Occupational Gender Bias across the LLM Training Lifecycle (Gadhia et al., GeBNLP 2026)

ACL

• Manthan Gadhia, Alexander Hoyle, and Karolina Stańczak. 2026. Analyzing Occupational Gender Bias across the LLM Training Lifecycle. In Proceedings of the 7th Workshop on Gender Bias in Natural Language Processing (GeBNLP), pages 157–172, Hengqin, China (remote). Association for Computational Linguistics.