How Aunt-Like Are You? Exploring Gender Bias in the Genderless Estonian Language: A Case Study (2025)

Abstract: This paper examines gender bias in Estonian, a grammatically genderless Finno-Ugric language, which doesn’t have gendered noun system nor any gendered pronouns, but expresses gender through vocabulary. In this work, we focus on the male-female compound words ending with -tädi ‘aunt’ and -onu ‘uncle’, aiming to pinpoint the occupations these words signify for women and men, and to examine whether they reveal occupational differentiation and gender stereotypes. The findings indicate that these compounds go beyond occupational titles and highlight prevalent gender bias.

## introduction languages are divided into three groups based on gender expression: firstly, there are grammatical gender languages (such as russian, french, german, etc.), which use a gendered noun class system. secondly, there are natural gender languages (e.g. english, swedish, etc.), which incorporate gender-specific pronouns. lastly, there are genderless languages (e.g. hungarian, finnish, turkish, etc.), which lack gendered nouns as well as pronouns @xcite . estonian, representing a balto-finnic language, is grammatically genderless and thus incorporates only lexical resources, i.e. gender-specific vocabulary for gender expression. while a grammatical gender does not correlate with gender equality or neutrality in a certain society @xcite , gender bias and stereotyping can still be prevalent not only in societies where a genderless language is spoken, but also within those languages themselves. this work illustrates how gender stereotypes are manifested in estonian gendered vocabulary, specifically compound words ending with lemmas tädi and onu that refer to occupations, shedding light on which professions are more commonly associated with women or men, and thus, how a genderless language exhibits bias and stereotypes. the gender stereotypes referred to here are mainly beliefs about occupational and social roles that are assumed to be held by men or by women more dominantly @xcite . in estonian, the terms tädi and onu are primarily used to denote kinship, however, they also serve other purposes. for instance, they are commonly used in children's language, when referring to unfamiliar individuals or family friends when talking to children. additionally, tädi and onu can be used humorously and they frequently appear in compound words denoting occupations @xcite . such words were chosen for this paper, since they represent more informal and non-standardized language use. furthermore, as these words represent informal language, they might reflect stereotypes more directly and with less linguistic filtering, as opposed to potentially more moderated words used in formal contexts. examining gender bias in genderless languages, such as estonian, is crucial because this topic has received little attention in the context of low-resource languages. such languages still provide valuable insights into gender dynamics and social beliefs, which help to identify harmful and discriminatory gender stereotypes as well as raise awareness of gender inequality and occupational segregation. the research questions this study aims to address are as follows: (1) what kinds of occupations do the compound words ending with tädi and onu express? (2) how do occupational titles ending with tädi (aunt) and onu (uncle) propagate gender bias in large language models (llms)? ## gender expression in estonian gender in estonian is only expressed through vocabulary. this can be done, for instance, by using there is also a third option -derivation, which specifically denotes female agents, including female representatives of different ethnicities, for example, lauljanna 'female singer', venelanna 'female russian', poetess 'female poet', sõbratar 'female friend', 'girlfriend' etc. @xcite . however, derivation, compared to single words and compound words, is perhaps not that widely used in everyday language today. derivation is the only instance where a gendered morpheme is used in estonian vocabulary. as for compound words with a gendered base form, generally the most common nouns used in such compounds are -mees 'man' and -naine 'woman' (especially -mees, since mees-ending compounds are used generically, like esimees 'chairman'). however, other nouns, such as -tädi 'aunt' and -onu 'uncle' can also be included. @xcite @xcite . ## dataset the dataset used in this study comes from the web subcorpus of the estonian national corpus of 2021, contains 724 million words (882 million tokens), with a variety of genres (e.g. online forums, e-commerce, online periodicals, property portals, recipe collections, etc.). to navigate the corpus, the sketchengine tools @xcite are used to extract compound words ending with lemmas -tädi and -onu. the extract token frequencies of compound words are 6500 (830 types) for the male compounds -onu and 6100 (700 types) for the female compounds -tädi. compound words that occurred in the data were classified into semantic categories (see figure 1 ), based on the meaning of the first part (or the prefix) of the compound. from these categories, words referring to occupations were specifically selected and chosen for analysis. the total number of occupational titles after preprocessing is 206 titles. we use the estonian labor force statistics foot_0 to illustrate descriptive gender bias as shown in ## discussion the analysis of compound words suggests women typically assume caregiving roles and are often associated with children, while men occupy professions like law enforcement. additionally, men are more common in fields such as construction, business, entrepreneurship, and science. conversely, the data indicates that men are rarely seen working in the educational sector. while this could indicate coincidental occupational gender differences, the results appear to reflect sectorial segregation, with women overrepresented in low-paid sectors like care, education, and customer service. evidence from the 2021 estonian census supports this, showing 86% of healthcare and social welfare, 83% of education, and 82.3% of the service sector workers are women. the analysis of llms revealed that these models propagate occupational biases related to compound words. specifically, the fine-tuned estonian llammas model reflects biases from estonian labor force statistics more accurately than the similar-sized llama-3-8b and larger llama-3-70b models. this indicates that the process of fine-tuning has amplified the inherent biases within the model. for instance, the secretary as a femalebiased occupation aligned correctly with all models (except for llama family). however, in the finetuned model that incorporates additional parallel data (english-estonian sentence pairs), the labor force data alignment bias ratio is lower compared to all other models, particularly for highly femalebiased occupations (e.g. nanny, hairdresser, etc.). ## conclusion this paper examined estonian compound words ending with tädi ('aunt') and onu ('uncle') in the estonian web corpus 2021. the findings indicate these terms reflect traditional gender roles and stereotypes in occupational contexts, which are also mirrored by llms, reinforcing gender biases.