  The rise of concern around Natural Language Processing (NLP) technologies
containing and perpetuating social biases has led to a rich and rapidly growing
area of research. Gender bias is one of the central biases being analyzed, but
to date there is no comprehensive analysis of how "gender" is theorized in the
field. We survey nearly 200 articles concerning gender bias in NLP to discover
how the field conceptualizes gender both explicitly (e.g. through definitions
of terms) and implicitly (e.g. through how gender is operationalized in
practice). In order to get a better idea of emerging trajectories of thought,
we split these articles into two sections by time.
  We find that the majority of the articles do not make their theorization of
gender explicit, even if they clearly define "bias." Almost none use a model of
gender that is intersectional or inclusive of nonbinary genders; and many
conflate sex characteristics, social gender, and linguistic gender in ways that
disregard the existence and experience of trans, nonbinary, and intersex
people. There is an increase between the two time-sections in statements
acknowledging that gender is a complicated reality, however, very few articles
manage to put this acknowledgment into practice. In addition to analyzing these
findings, we provide specific recommendations to facilitate interdisciplinary
work, and to incorporate theory and methodology from Gender Studies. Our hope
is that this will produce more inclusive gender bias research in NLP.
