Researchers at the University of Copenhagen, among other things, were able to analyze 3.5 million books published in English between 1900 and 2008, using a new computer model, and find out which adjectives most often describe women and men respectively. At the top of the list of positive adjectives for women was beautiful and beautiful, and for men it was fair and healthy.

"We discovered well-known gender stereotypes, but we were able to implement this on a larger scale than previously," says Isabelle Augenstein, a researcher in computer science and assistant professor at the University of Copenhagen, and continues:

- The result itself did not come as a surprise. But the magnitude was surprising, that there was such a big difference.

Five times more space for women

- We have used a method that looks for nouns that have a verb or an adjective that modifies it. For example, the beautiful girl or man runs. Then you could also see if these adjectives and verbs were negative, positive or neutral in their context, says Augenstein.

They found that negative verbs associated with the external occur five times more for women than for men, and neutral and positive twice as many. What is used for men is more about behavior and personality.

There are flaws

This can, for example, be of significance when companies sort their job applications digitally, and the language we use to describe men and women differs and is valued differently, the researchers say.

The researchers point out that there are flaws in the study that they continue to work with. Among other things, they have not included the author in question, if the work was published several decades ago, and they have not made a difference in different types of genres, such as romance and facts. Later, they also plan to analyze whether the language regarding gender stereotypes has changed from 1900 to 2008.