White Men Without Degrees Receive the Lowest Ratings from Large Language Models
cs.CY, cs.AI
Submitted: 2026-09-17
Updated: 2026-09-17
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
The gist: White men without an undergraduate degree receive the lowest average ratings among eight gender-race-education groups in controlled large-language-model evaluations of credit, hiring, and rental
Abstract
White men without an undergraduate degree receive the lowest average ratings among eight gender-race-education groups in controlled large-language-model evaluations of credit, hiring, and rental applications. We conduct full-factorial vignette experiments with 18 models from 12 developer groups, varying gender, race, age, citizenship, and education while holding stated financial or occupational circumstances constant within each setting. Each model evaluates all 32 profiles ten times per setting, yielding 17,280 ratings. Averaging over models, age, and citizenship, ratings for White men without degrees are the lowest among the eight groups, at 75.87 in credit, 92.71 in hiring, and 86.62 in rental housing on a 0-100 scale. Black women with degrees receive the highest average ratings, with corresponding gaps of 2.94, 3.66, and 3.56 points. Separate attribute effects favor women, Black applicants, and degree holders in all three settings. White men without degrees have the lowest or second-lowest mean in 46 of 54 model-scenario combinations (85.2%). This pattern connects to evidence of growing economic and health vulnerabilities among White men without degrees, highlighting a group whose disadvantages can be obscured by broad racial or gender categories.
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- Evaluating and Mitigating Discrimination in Language Model Decisions
- Gender and Positional Biases in LLM-Based Hiring Decisions: Evidence from Comparative CV/R'esum'e Evaluations
- Gender Bias in LLM Hiring Decisions: Evidence from a Japanese Context and Evaluation of Mitigation Strategies
- Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback
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