Man Made Language Models? Evaluating LLMs' Perpetuation of Masculine Generics Bias

Large language models (LLMs) have been shown to propagate and even amplify gender bias, in English and other languages, in specific or constrained contexts. However, no studies so far have focused on gender biases conveyed by LLMs' responses to generic instructions, especially with regard to masculine generics (MG). MG are a linguistic feature found in many gender-marked languages, denoting the use of the masculine gender as a "default" or supposedly neutral gender to refer to mixed group of men and women, or of a person whose gender is irrelevant or unknown. Numerous psycholinguistics studies have shown that MG are not neutral and induce gender bias. This work aims to analyze the use of MG by both proprietary and local LLMs in responses to generic instructions and evaluate their MG bias rate. We focus on French and create a human noun database from existing lexical resources. We filter existing French instruction datasets to retrieve generic instructions and analyze the responses of 6 different LLMs. Overall, we find that $\approx$39.5\% of LLMs' responses to generic instructions are MG-biased ($\approx$73.1\% across responses with human nouns). Our findings also reveal that LLMs are reluctant to using gender-fair language spontaneously.