Workshop Proceedings of the 17th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media

Workshop: Workshop on Data for the Wellbeing of Most Vulnerable

DOI: 10.36190/2023.02

Published: 2023-06-01
What are Your Pronouns? Examining Gender Pronoun Usage on Twitter
Julie Jiang, Emily Chen, Luca Luceri, Goran Muric, Francesco Pierri, Ho-Chun Herbert Chang, Emilio Ferrara

The increasing awareness of nonconforming gender identities puts discussions of gender inclusivity at the forefront. Using people's preferred pronouns is a primary way to develop gender-inclusive language. This work presents the first empirical research on the self-disclosure of gender pronouns on social media. Leveraging a Twitter dataset with over 2 billion tweets collected over two years, we find that the public self-disclosure of gender pronouns is on the rise. The disclosure of gender pronouns is particularly popular among users employing she series pronouns, followed by he series pronouns, and a smaller but sizable amount of non-binary pronouns. By analyzing Twitter messages and users' sharing activities, we identify the users who choose to disclose their gender pronouns and additionally distinguish users of various gender pronoun categories. Analyzing the relationship between social network exposure to gender pronouns and gender pronoun adoption, we show that those who frequently interact with users who disclose gender pronouns are also more likely to adopt gender pronouns in the future. This work carries implications for research on gender inclusivity.