Do Gender Cues Affect LLM Value Trade-offs? Evidence from a Controlled Decision Benchmark

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2606.02214v1
• Date: Mon, 01 Jun 2026 13:14:10 GMT
• Title: Do Gender Cues Affect LLM Value Trade-offs? Evidence from a Controlled Decision Benchmark
• Abstract summary: We construct a benchmark that varies only the role-gender configuration while holding the scenario.<n>We find that explicit gender cues induce bounded but systematic decision flips.<n>Gender effects concentrate near less determinate value boundaries, suggesting that gender cues act as local boundary-shifting factors.
• Score: 33.25199452418043
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Large language models are increasingly used in value-sensitive decision settings, where irrelevant demographic cues should not alter judgments. We construct the Realistic Value Decision Benchmark (RVDB), a controlled benchmark that varies only the role-gender configuration while holding the scenario, ordered value pair, roles, candidate decisions, Value Distance, and Decision Severity fixed. Using a position-balanced evaluation across seven models, we test whether models preserve decision invariance under gender perturbations and whether their self-attributions reflect observed behavioral changes. We find that explicit gender cues induce bounded but systematic decision flips, including under an explicit gender-attribution prompt that asks models to report whether gender influenced their choice. Cross-gender role swaps reveal a consistent female-proposed-decision asymmetry, while models often attribute flipped decisions to No Influence or other non-gender factors. Further analysis shows that gender effects concentrate near less determinate value boundaries and under more severe decision contexts, suggesting that gender cues act as local boundary-shifting factors rather than global overrides of value reasoning. Value rankings remain largely stable, but ordered value-pair trade-offs shift unevenly across role-gender configurations. These results show that gender can enter LLM value trade-offs behaviorally while remaining obscured in self-attribution, motivating controlled behavioral audits beyond explanation-based evaluation.

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