A Multilingual, Culture-First Approach to Addressing Misgendering in LLM Applications

Abstract

Misgendering is the act of referring to someone by a gender that does not match their chosen identity. It marginalizes and undermines a person's sense of self, causing significant harm. English-based approaches have clear-cut approaches to avoiding misgendering, such as the use of the pronoun ``they''. However, other languages pose unique challenges due to both grammatical and cultural constructs. In this work we develop methodologies to assess and mitigate misgendering across 42 languages and dialects using a participatory-design approach to design effective and appropriate guardrails across all languages. We test these guardrails in a standard LLM-based application (meeting transcript summarization), where both the data generation and the annotation steps followed a human-in-the-loop approach. We find that the proposed guardrails are very effective in reducing misgendering rates across all languages in the summaries generated, and without incurring loss of quality. Our human-in-the-loop approach demonstrates a method to feasibly scale inclusive and responsible AI-based solutions across multiple languages and cultures. We release the guardrails and synthetic dataset encompassing 42 languages, along with human and LLM-judge evaluations, to encourage further research on this subject.