Word2Gender

Immersive Spatial Installation on Implicit Gender Bias Online

Through NLP and Word2Vec

Word2Gender Forest, 2018

dimension: site-specific

aluminium, steel, LCD, projectors, perspex, mirror, acrylic, keyboard, laptop, custom electronics

Overview

Word2Gender is a site-specific, interactive, data-driven installation that explores the intersection of implicit gender stereotypes and environmental responses through natural language processing. While gender expression is often considered uniquely human, broader environmental conditions—such as those in forests—can influence the gender and sexuality of animals. This project draws a parallel to humans, asking: Could environmental conditions similarly shape our gender identities? The Word2Gender Forest serves as an interpretive space, reflecting the gender identity of a participant based on the implicit gender stereotypes embedded in online text.

The installation dynamically transforms its spatial environment—comprising video, sound, and lighting—based on the participant’s responses to three predefined questions. Using natural language processing techniques with the Word2Vec model, the system interprets participants’ word choices to construct a figurative representation of a forest animal symbolic of a gender identity. The immersive environment thus reveals how subconscious constructs of gender stereotypes online influence identity perception.

Participants’ interactions with Word2Gender highlight a dual dynamic: while the output seems to represent how the world perceives their gender identity, it simultaneously underscores how their word choices contribute to perpetuating existing biases embedded in online text data. By interacting with the system, participants inadvertently shape the implicit stereotypes that influence how others are perceived.

The project draws on research methodologies like the Implicit Association Test (IAT) from psychology to emphasize that gender bias is often subtle, unconscious, and automatic. It demonstrates that stereotypes are deeply entrenched in societal structures and individual subconsciouses, making them difficult to avoid, even for those actively seeking to mitigate their effects.