Language in 3.5 Million Books... Beautiful Women and Brave Men

Analysing a data set of 3.5 million books (using an AI), fiction and non-fiction, published in English between 1900 and 2008, a research team extracted adjectives and verbs that were associated with gender-specific nouns (e.g. daughter, boy) and examined whether the sentiment was positive, neutral or negative. They came to the conclusion that words chosen for women primarily described their appearance (negative verbs five times the frequency for females than males, positive and neutral adjectives twice as often in descriptions of women) while adjectives chosen for men referred to their behaviour and personal qualities. Women were mostly "beautiful" and "sexy" while men were "righteous", "rational" and "brave" (via and via).



"If the language we use to describe men and women differs, in employee recommendations for example, it will influence who is offered a job when companies use IT systems to sort through job applications."
Isabelle Augenstein

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- Alexander Hoyle et al. (2019). Unsupervised Discovery of Gendered Language through Latent-Variable Modeling. Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pp. 1706-1716
- photograph by Jeff Mermelstein via

The Narrative of Ageing and Health Care Costs

Abstract: This study documents the widespread belief among the public, “pundits,“ and policymakers that health care inflation in the United States is heavily influenced by longevity. It demonstrates the error of that belief. It points out that health care experts recognize that, although health care costs for the elderly are high, the aging of the population is an insignificant factor in health care cost inflation.



Nevertheless, existing literature tends to ignore important influences on cost, such as poverty, lack of access, lifestyle issues, and matters of social justice. It also ignores the differences among numerous subgroups of patients. Ignoring these factors and concentrating on an aging society as a major cause of health care inflation distracts policymakers' attention from the true causes and leads to unjustified calls for benefit reductions in Medicare. As part of this study, the author includes analyses of hospital discharge data that have not been published previously.

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- Kingsley, D. (2015). Aging and Health Care Costs: Narrative Versus Reality: Aging and Health Care Costs. Poverty and Public Policy, 7(1).
- photograph by Jeff Mermelstein via