From Body to Mind: Analyzing Gender Representation in Spanish Generative Language Models

Ismael Garrido-Munoz, Fernando Martínez-Santiago, Arturo Montejo-Raez


Abstract
While Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable text generation capabilities, they also risk inheriting and perpetuating harmful societal biases present in their vast training data. This study presents a rigorous, large-scale analysis of gender bias in a diverse set of 20 publicly available Spanish generative LLMs, ranging from 760M to 11B parameters. Our methodology utilizes a comprehensive set of specifically designed sentence templates to elicit adjectival descriptions associated with men and women in neutral contexts. We then extract and manually classify these adjectives using the Supersenses lexicosemantic framework, focusing on four key domains: BODY, BEHAVIOR, FEELING, and MIND. Our research uncovers systematic patterns consistent with pervasive cultural stereotypes, echoing findings from earlier masked language models. Women are disproportionately described by physical and emotional attributes, whereas men are more frequently associated with behavioral and cognitive traits. Finally, we investigate the relationship between model size and the intensity of these observed gender biases, offering crucial insights into how scaling affects fairness and equity in non-English models.
Anthology ID:
2026.lrec-1.307
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
May
Year:
2026
Address:
Palma de Mallorca, Spain
Editors:
Stelios Piperidis, Núria Bel, Henk van den Heuvel, Nancy Ide, Simon Krek, Antonio Toral
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA Language Resource Association
Note:
Pages:
3861–3874
Language:
External URL:
https://lrec.elra.info/lrec2026-main-307
DOI:
10.63317/5fz5bb6tihu3
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ismael Garrido-Munoz, Fernando Martínez-Santiago, and Arturo Montejo-Raez. 2026. From Body to Mind: Analyzing Gender Representation in Spanish Generative Language Models. In Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 3861–3874, Palma de Mallorca, Spain. ELRA Language Resource Association.
Cite (Informal):
From Body to Mind: Analyzing Gender Representation in Spanish Generative Language Models (Garrido-Munoz et al., LREC 2026)
Copy Citation: