If They Say Tomato, and You Say To-Mah-To, What Then?
A recent study released by the University of North Texas at Denton has revealed an alarming trend: Employers may be basing hiring decisions on their judgments of regional accents. "People are usually judged for their intelligence and other qualities based on how they sound," said Dianne Markley, director of the university's Center for Cooperative Education. And that's adding up to some strange hiring choices.
Markley and her co-workers created a CD-ROM on which 10 white men read the same 45-second passage. Each speaker came from a different region of the country and spoke with a distinct accent. After listening to each voice, employers were asked to judge each voice according to 14 criteria, from education, to personality type, to where the speaker was from.
Employers were then asked to identify for which jobs each speaker might be qualified: jobs with outside contact, jobs requiring high technology skills, jobs requiring in-house communication, and those requiring little technical or communicative skill.
The study found that employers were more likely to choose those voices they had rated as "intelligent" or "charming" for highly skilled positions. As well, those voices judged negatively were generally assigned to lower-skilled and lower-contact (in terms of communication) positions.
There's one thing that really caught our eye from this study: the more likely an employer was to be able to identify that the speaker was from a specific area of the country--i.e., that the speaker had an easily identifiable accent--the more likely the employer was to assign that speaker to a lower-tier job. "This would lead you to conclude," Markley said, "that the more regional-sounding a person is, the less likely he is to be picked for high profile jobs."
What's the danger here? For one, you might end up turning down Henry Kissinger for a job. Be careful to be cognizant of regional bias in your interviewing techniques and in those of your staff. Just because someone sports a nice slow Southern drawl doesn't mean he or she can't rise to the top of your organization. We see discrimination of many kinds, but sometimes it lurks where we'd least expect it. Be careful out there, y'all.
