
Google pulls gender pronouns from Gmail Smart Compose to reduce bias - Pharmakon
https://www.engadget.com/2018/11/27/google-removes-gender-from-gmail-smart-compose/
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jakelazaroff
There's another discussion here, albeit with a more sensationalist article
(which seems to be the original source):
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18542635](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18542635)

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Raphmedia
What a clickbait article. Reading the title alone gives the impression that
this is a change to appease the LGBT community or after receiving some similar
pressure.

All that happened is that the strings are hardcoded so they removed pronouns
because they don't want to go though your entire email history to find out the
person's gender.

That's something that everyone do at some point when programming systems. You
remove plurals and pronouns so that you do not have to manage them.

Using gender neutral pronoun when writing about people whose gender you do not
know is simply being polite.

I wouldn't want Google to show me autocomplete suggestions for "do you want to
meet him" when I'm writing an email to my mom or my girlfriend.

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gnicholas
> _All that happened is that the strings are hardcoded so they removed
> pronouns because they don 't want to go though your entire email history to
> find out the person's gender._

This gives the impression that they'll never use a gendered pronoun. I assumed
from reading the article that they're leaving off gender in cases where it
isn't known. But in some cases it would be very known ("do you want to meet
him?" / "yes, I'd love to meet him."). Are they really not going to include it
even where it has been specifically referenced in the prior email?

~~~
Raphmedia
My understanding is that they will show pronouns when it's clear. The system
might repeat the last one you used or something like that. So if your entire
email is about a woman the feature might suggest "her".

The article seems to say that they are mainly removing the pronoun after
titles. E.g. a secretary always being "her" but a CEO always being "him".

According to the Reuters article:

"Gmail product manager Paul Lambert said a company research scientist
discovered the problem in January when he typed “I am meeting an investor next
week,” and Smart Compose suggested a possible follow-up question: “Do you want
to meet him?” instead of “her.”"

The same article claims:

"The gendered pronoun ban affects fewer than 1 percent of cases where Smart
Compose would propose something, Lambert said."

So that's really a clickbait article based on a non-issue.

[https://www.reuters.com/article/us-alphabet-google-ai-
gender...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-alphabet-google-ai-
gender/fearful-of-bias-google-blocks-gender-based-pronouns-from-new-ai-tool-
idUSKCN1NW0EF)

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lostlogin
> When a scientist talked about meeting an investor in January, for example,
> Gmail offered the follow-up "do you want to meet him" \-- not considering
> the possibility that the investor could be a woman.

So the option was to remove the gendered pronouns or change the product name
to “Google Compose”. I get there there are other arguments for removing
gendered pronouns, but is working out the gender from past communications
beyond Google? What am I missing?

~~~
jkaplowitz
Presumably they'd get it right some of the time but the exceptions would be
common enough and rather impactful.

Example scenario: "Hey, I have an investor you should meet. Does next Tuesday
at 11am work?"

Problematic response if the unspecified investor isn't a man: "Yes. It'll be
great to meet him."

Good alternative: "Yes, that sounds great. Looking forward to the meeting."

Another good alternative: "Yes. It'll be great to meet them."

~~~
lostlogin
We had a visit from an individual and the rider of their email politely asked
for them to be referred to in gender neutral terms. This was done by all but
it’s very hard when you are not used to it.

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jkaplowitz
Agreed it's hard to retrain one's brain. I have now had multiple non-binary
colleagues and I still occasionally slip up despite a lot of practice. Most of
the time I do get it right now.

They can tell I'm making an effort in general, and I generally self-correct
right after saying the wrong pronoun, so (as they've confirmed to me) no
offense results from the mistakes. The offense happens when people don't
genuinely try.

Nobody's trying to make it a gotcha game, and I'm sure the person appreciated
your attempts to respect their wishes, whether or not any mistakes were made!
It will become more natural with more practice.

~~~
coolso
Agreed, and this is exactly what I tell people who sometimes forget to compose
their emails to me in 12pt Comic Sans font like my email rider requests.

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detcader
What is the purpose of specific, separate pronouns in speech to begin with?
It's clear they arose in languages hundreds or thousands of years before any
current understandings or politics of how and when they are "supposed" to be
used.

I do have some ideas why but I don't think it's relevant to bring them up
outright, I just think the question should be pondered on.

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wrs
In many Latin languages _all nouns_ have genders, which surely never made
sense, but here we are thousands of years later.

French speakers: is there some process under way to address this? Given that
the word “doctor” itself is masculine, is that inherent bias disturbing to
people?

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kinghajj
Grammatical gender is an unfortunately-named construct that has little to do
with sociological gender. The main connection is that _most_ common words have
grammatical genders matching their sociological one ("der Vater," "die
Mutter"), but even that doesn't hold very well ("das Mädchen"). There's an
interesting theory that grammatical gender helps reduce ambiguity, because the
inflections of surrounding words make it clearer which roots they modify.

~~~
wrs
Sure, it’s not literally that objects have a gender, and it is an extra bit of
redundant information that probably helps with intelligibility. But even
though “he” is the generic first person pronoun in English and doesn’t
literally mean a male person when used that way, you can’t avoid the
connotations, which is where the controversy arises.

I’m imagining a similar effect with noun genders — they aren’t called “noun
type A” and “noun type B”, they are known as masculine and feminine, and
things that literally are masculine and feminine can use the same mechanism.
E.g., a generic dog in French is masculine (le chien), but if I want to
communicate that I have a female dog it’s acceptable to make up a feminine
form (la chienne). Thus, noun genders are not quite arbitrary; they can be
used to communicate actual genders, so do they not have some small connotation
at all times?

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gizmo686
Linguists do refer to "gender" as "noun class". In languages where noun
classes happen to align with gender, reffering to them as gender has stuck
around.

It is true that noun classes tend to make a gender distinction, so there is
likely something innate in human language about that.

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superfamicom
I would love if I had the option to alway use "'em"\- it has always felt much
less formal than "them" without upsetting folks on either side of the pronoun
"debate". The world eventually caved on "ain't", so I propose this as a
solution. Your probability of being correct with "'em" is near 100%.

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jaclaz
Just in case, xe, xem, xyr:

[https://jdebp.eu/FGA/sex-neutral-pronouns.html](https://jdebp.eu/FGA/sex-
neutral-pronouns.html)

as possible betterings to "Spivak" pronouns (of which you are proposing the
"Tintajl" version):

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spivak_pronoun](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spivak_pronoun)

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rjplatte
Normally, "fixing" ML systems to "Remove Bias" seems like a pointless exercise
(e.g. hiring algorithms that somehow still pick more male candidates in a
gender-blind test, when 75% of applicants are male), but here it's done
correctly.

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ajoy39
It obviously depends on the algorithm but if you train your hiring algorithm
based on past hires, and your company has predominantly hired males in the
past, your going to end up preselecting males. algorithms aren't bias in
themselves but if you want to avoid biased results you have to be very careful
on the data sets you use to train them with.

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rjplatte
That's why you scrub gender data, and it's still biased. the fact that more
men work, period, means that it will always be biased based on that fact.

~~~
ajoy39
unless you make a conscious effort to select your dataset to avoid that bias
sure. You don't have to give the algorithm ALL of your hiring data. Balance
the data you train it on to avoid the bias.

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thrower123
I'll admit, I don't use this feature, so I'm not sure exactly how it works. Is
it firing off a reply directly, or is it prepopulating the reply email, which
you can then edit as appropriate? The latter strikes me as how this ought to
work.

~~~
plorkyeran
It prepopulates an email which you then edit (but there's nothing indicating
such in the UI, so a lot of people are naturally scared to even touch the
buttons).

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_red
How is it reducing bias?

~~~
modwilliam
From the article:

When a scientist talked about meeting an investor in January, for example,
Gmail offered the follow-up "do you want to meet him" \-- not considering the
possibility that the investor could be a woman.

The problem is a typical one with natural language generation systems like
Google's: it's based on huge volumes of historical data. As certain fields
tend to be dominated by people from one gender, the AI can sometimes assume
that a person belongs to that gender.

~~~
vorticalbox
Then isn't that a fair assumption for an AI or any one to make?

If you're offended by how a computer looked at statistics and came to a likely
conclusion, it's probally time take a step back and have a good think about
why you're even offended.

~~~
jkaplowitz
If the AI is telling you, "based on the statistics in the field, the odds of
this person being a woman, a man, or a non-binary gender are X%, Y%, and Z%
respectively," I agree there's no reason for offense.

But if the AI has no information about the email recipient's individual
gender, it's much safer for the AI to use the default pronoun (singular they)
that English already has where we don't want to assume the gender of a
particular person, or else for it to avoid the use of a pronoun.

If a person who is not a man works in a male-dominated field and gets
mislabeled as a man, it just makes them feel out of place and unwelcome.
Doubly so if the AI-generated words are attributed to an individual colleague
who knows their actual gender but doesn't fully edit the suggestion before
sending.

~~~
vorticalbox
Except this isn't a person walking into a place and being mislabeled by
another person.

it's a computer that has zero concept of gender.

I don't think that being mistake for a different sex is even cause to be
offended.

That person doesn't know and can only go only by what they have seen before.

~~~
jkaplowitz
The mistake is being attributed to a human email sender as perceived by the
email recipient, not to an AI, since it's an email suggestion. Many such email
senders will know the recipient's gender better than the AI, and the recipient
will know that.

As for your broader doubt that misgendering leads to offense, that's a longer
conversation than I can shoehorn into this thread today, but the Geek Feminism
wiki is one of several good places to which you can turn to start learning
about that topic if you want to.

I'm a cisgender man myself, but I have heard enough personal stories from
friends who aren't to know that misgendering can and often does offend.

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thoughtexplorer
It makes sense to base things on probabilities, but it also makes sense to
play it safe in some cases.

The upside of it predicting him/her is minor and doesn't outweigh the times
that it gets it wrong.

"Do you want to meet [name || them]" or simply "Do you want to meet" works
well enough usually.

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Someone1234
What's interesting is that English doesn't have a great slot in for gendered
pronouns. If we take the example from this article:

\- "Do you want to meet him?"

There's no genderless slot in for him/her. If you say "them" that infers
multiple or an unknown party. You could use their name (e.g. "Do you want to
meet Jim?") but that requires information that their system may not have.

Is there a singular genderless pronoun that would fit in there? Do other
languages have a similar limitation?

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lostlogin
The persons name works quite well.

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vorticalbox
And if you don't have a person's name?

The AIs only option in English is to go for him/her.

~~~
lostlogin
Would you often know their gender but not their name? Additionally, if you had
the person in front of you and couldn’t tell their gender, would you go 50/50?

