iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Andrea Vial

Kathryn E. Chaffee @chaffeepsych.bsky.social · 01/04/2026

Great article from @avial.bsky.social and @adamstanaland.bsky.social about how boys are motivated to avoid femininity by age 5. Their results show that the problematic trend that "masculine" things are cool for everyone but "feminine" things are only for girls/women starts early.

theconversation.com

Gender conformity starts young – and boys and girls fall in line in different ways

Children learn what it means to be a woman or a man early on. How they respond to threats to how well they conform to gender stereotypes changes with age.

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Reposted by Andrea Vial

Andrei Cimpian @andreicimpian.bsky.social · 26/07/2025

Our new study in Psych Science @psychscience.bsky.social reveals many interesting-- and concerning -- things about the language on kids' shows, including a grammatical bias in favor of men and boys as agents or "doers" 👇

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Andrea Vial @avial.bsky.social · 25/07/2025

For creatives out there producing kid-directed content, esp. if relying on AI: Linguistic biases are subtle and you may not even notice that you’re embedding them in your stories… But you should pay attention because these linguistic cues teach kids what to expect about men and women 8/8

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Andrea Vial @avial.bsky.social · 25/07/2025

For our kindred spirits, the nerds 🤓: results hold using alternative NLP tools & a bunch of robustness tests, inc: testing for serial dependence, accounting for # of sentences and words, the nested structure of the data, show genre and target age, etc. See nitty-gritty in the paper! 7/8

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Andrea Vial @avial.bsky.social · 25/07/2025

For context, female words (e.g., characters) increased over 6 decades (great!) but numeric representation is only part of the story: seeing more fem. chars but in stereotypical ways may reinforce kids’ beliefs in unequal gender roles. Progress in gender rep. in media depends on where one looks 6/8

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Andrea Vial @avial.bsky.social · 25/07/2025

Also, male words co-occurred more w/ words about rewards, money, power, work, but female words appeared more oft. next to words re: family, affiliation, home. Some of these semantic biases have waned a bit since the ‘60s but the overall pattern is still evident in recent years 5/8

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Andrea Vial @avial.bsky.social · 25/07/2025

But our results are NOT fun: Words associated w/ boys/men appear more oft. as grammatical agents (“doers” in a sentence) vs. words associated w/ girls/women. Of 10 times that someone is described as a “doer”, 6.4 it's a male character (vs. only 3.6 female char). This bias hasn’t budged in 60ys! 4/8

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Andrea Vial @avial.bsky.social · 25/07/2025

What children see and hear in media shapes their worldviews. We covered kids’ TV shows from 1960 to ~2020. Many of us grew up with these shows, even outside the US (a bunch of my personal childhood favorites are in our dataset, which made this project pretty fun) 3/8

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Andrea Vial @avial.bsky.social · 25/07/2025

We used NLP tools to examine linguistic gender bias in a large dataset of scripts from 98 children’s TV shows in the US over the past 60 years (~3M sentences). We found gender biases both in syntactic structure and semantic content 2/8

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Andrea Vial @avial.bsky.social · 30/05/2025

Cool approach and interesting findings! I also found in new data a parenthood boost in worker status and hiring, which tends to go away in overly-masculine workplaces (esp for dads). We should talk!

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Reposted by Andrea Vial

Charles Logan @charleswlogan.bsky.social · 02/05/2025

FYI: The Spencer Foundation, Kapor Foundation, The William T. Grant Foundation, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation have collaborated to offer $25K rapid response grants. "This rapid response bridge funding opportunity is for scholars and teams whose grants have recently been cancelled by NSF."

spencer.org

Rapid Response Bridge Funding Program

In the face of recent abrupt shifts in federal funding for education research, including large-scale terminations of National Science Foundation (NSF) research grant awards, we have developed a rap...

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Andrea Vial @avial.bsky.social · 22/02/2025

Happy to hear you liked this work!

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Reposted by Andrea Vial

Jennifer Sheehy-Skeffington @jsskeffington.bsky.social · 03/01/2025

Just one week left to apply for either the 2-year post-doc or 1-year Lab Manager roles at my new lab at NYU Abu Dhabi!

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