  Many natural languages assign grammatical gender also to inanimate nouns in
the language. In such languages, words that relate to the gender-marked nouns
are inflected to agree with the noun's gender. We show that this affects the
word representations of inanimate nouns, resulting in nouns with the same
gender being closer to each other than nouns with different gender. While
"embedding debiasing" methods fail to remove the effect, we demonstrate that a
careful application of methods that neutralize grammatical gender signals from
the words' context when training word embeddings is effective in removing it.
Fixing the grammatical gender bias yields a positive effect on the quality of
the resulting word embeddings, both in monolingual and cross-lingual settings.
We note that successfully removing gender signals, while achievable, is not
trivial to do and that a language-specific morphological analyzer, together
with careful usage of it, are essential for achieving good results.
