  Users of search systems often reformulate their queries by adding query terms
to reflect their evolving information need or to more precisely express their
information need when the system fails to surface relevant content. Analyzing
these query reformulations can inform us about both system and user behavior.
In this work, we study a special category of query reformulations that involve
specifying demographic group attributes, such as gender, as part of the
reformulated query (e.g., "olympic 2021 soccer results" to "olympic 2021
women's soccer results"). There are many ways a query, the search results, and
a demographic attribute such as gender may relate, leading us to hypothesize
different causes for these reformulation patterns, such as under-representation
on the original result page or based on the linguistic theory of markedness.
This paper reports on an observational study of gender-specializing query
reformulations -- their contexts and effects -- as a lens on the relationship
between system results and gender, based on large-scale search log data from
Bing. We find that these reformulations sometimes correct for and other times
reinforce gender representation on the original result page, but typically
yield better access to the ultimately-selected results. The prevalence of these
reformulations -- and which gender they skew towards -- differ by topical
context. However, we do not find evidence that either group
under-representation or markedness alone adequately explains these
reformulations. We hope that future research will use such reformulations as a
probe for deeper investigation into gender (and other demographic)
representation on the search result page.
