2.3.2. WEAT6 - Male/Female Names vs. Career/Family Words

The WEAT6 experiment from the original paper considers American male/female names and career/family words. We translated (and where necessary adapted) the original experiment to Italian and Swedish. Table 3 shows the complete listing of the selected words. In the following paragraphs, we describe particularities regarding the selection and translation of words for each language:

The terms from the original WEAT6 experiment (Caliskan et al., 2017) and our adaptations/translations to Italian and Swedish.

For Italian, a Swiss and an Italian version of the experiment was used.

Italian - For Italian, two different experiments were conducted. Once, we considered the most often used names in Italy from the Italian National Statistics Institute, as in the previous experiment. In the second experiment, we considered the most common names in the Italian-speaking region of Switzerland, provided by the Swiss Federal Statistics Office⁷. The career and family words were in both cases translated from English to Italian. As opposed to English, in Italian often male and female versions of professions exist (e.g., il professore, la professoressa). However, the female version is not used consequently, often the generic male version of the word is used for both genders. To avoid this having an impact on our results, we picked words in the word set that do not express gender (e.g., il/la dirigente). To further validate the impact of such personal words, we repeated the experiment by replacing the word dirigente with the word successo (engl: success).

Swedish - For the typical Swedish names for men and women, we considered the data made available through Statistics Sweden⁸. We translated the English words from the original experiments to Swedish. However, the word corporation was replaced with the Swedish translation of company, and leader was used instead of executive to better match the Swedish language.