Elisabeth Kaukonen
2025
How Aunt-Like Are You? Exploring Gender Bias in the Genderless Estonian Language: A Case Study
Elisabeth Kaukonen
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Ahmed Sabir
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Rajesh Sharma
Proceedings of the Joint 25th Nordic Conference on Computational Linguistics and 11th Baltic Conference on Human Language Technologies (NoDaLiDa/Baltic-HLT 2025)
This paper examines gender bias in Estonian, a grammatically genderless Finno-Ugric language, which doesn’t have gendered noun system nor any gendered pronouns, but expresses gender through vocabulary. In this work, we focus on the male-female compound words ending with -tädi ‘aunt’ and -onu ‘uncle’, aiming to pinpoint the occupations these words signify for women and men, and to examine whether they reveal occupational differentiation and gender stereotypes. The findings indicate that these compounds go beyond occupational titles and highlight prevalent gender bias.