  Translating from languages without productive grammatical gender like English
into gender-marked languages is a well-known difficulty for machines. This
difficulty is also due to the fact that the training data on which models are
built typically reflect the asymmetries of natural languages, gender bias
included. Exclusively fed with textual data, machine translation is
intrinsically constrained by the fact that the input sentence does not always
contain clues about the gender identity of the referred human entities. But
what happens with speech translation, where the input is an audio signal? Can
audio provide additional information to reduce gender bias? We present the
first thorough investigation of gender bias in speech translation, contributing
with: i) the release of a benchmark useful for future studies, and ii) the
comparison of different technologies (cascade and end-to-end) on two language
directions (English-Italian/French).
