  People tend to use language to mention surprising properties of events: for
example, when a banana is blue, we are more likely to mention color than when
it is yellow. This fact is taken to suggest that yellowness is somehow a
typical feature of bananas, and blueness is exceptional. Similar to how a
yellow color is typical of bananas, there may also be genders that are typical
of occupations. In this work, we explore this question using information
theoretic techniques coupled with corpus statistic analysis. In two distinct
large corpora, we do not find strong evidence that occupations and gender
display the same patterns of mentioning as do bananas and color. Instead, we
find that gender mentioning is correlated with femaleness of occupation in
particular, suggesting perhaps that woman-dominated occupations are seen as
somehow ``more gendered'' than male-dominated ones, and thereby they encourage
more gender mentioning overall.
