Revisiting The Classics: A Study on Identifying and Rectifying Gender Stereotypes in Rhymes and Poems

Rhymes and poems are a powerful medium for transmitting cultural norms and societal roles. However, the pervasive existence of gender stereotypes in these works perpetuates biased perceptions and limits the scope of individuals’ identities. Past works have shown that stereotyping and prejudice emerge in early childhood, and developmental research on causal mechanisms is critical for understanding and controlling stereotyping and prejudice. This work contributes by gathering a dataset of rhymes and poems to identify gender stereotypes and propose a model with 97% accuracy to identify gender bias. Gender stereotypes were rectified using a Large Language Model (LLM) and its effectiveness was evaluated in a comparative survey against human educator rectifications. To summarize, this work highlights the pervasive nature of gender stereotypes in literary works and reveals the potential of LLMs to rectify gender stereotypes. This study raises awareness and promotes inclusivity within artistic expressions, making a significant contribution to the discourse on gender equality.

Recommended citation: Aditya Narayan Sankaran, Vigneshwaran Shankaran, Sampath Lonka, and Rajesh Sharma. 2024. Revisiting the Classics: A Study on Identifying and Rectifying Gender Stereotypes in Rhymes and Poems. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 14092–14102, Torino, Italy. ELRA and ICCL. https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.1228.pdf