Accent Bias and Perceptions of Professional Competence in England
Evidence that England's general public judges speakers of some accents less suitable for professional employment, though the bias is more nuanced and subtle than previously reported and appears confined to a subset of listeners. Levon, Sharma, Watt, Cardoso and Ye had 848 adults, recruited to match the adult population of England by gender, region and ethnicity, rate candidates for an entry-level post at a major UK law firm. Ten young men, two for each of five accents (Received Pronunciation or RP, Estuary English, Multicultural London English, General Northern English, Urban West Yorkshire English), recorded the same ten interview answers, half requiring legal expertise; listeners were told all were equally qualified.
RP scored highest and Estuary English lowest, a gap of 2.2 per cent of the scale, with no significant main effect of accent. Listeners over 45 rated the two Southern working-class accents, Estuary and Multicultural London English, below RP and the Northern accents, while younger listeners made no such distinction; the downgrading came only from older listeners in the South and, less so, the Midlands. Expert answers drew higher mean ratings across the board, and on them older Midlands listeners no longer rated Multicultural London English significantly below RP; older Southern listeners still downgraded both accents. Listeners scoring higher on motivation to control prejudiced reactions rated candidates higher and showed no significant accent differences. Levon and colleagues read expertise as a specific status cue and accent as a diffuse cue to class and ethnicity. A companion study, in which legal professionals rated candidates at work with answer quality varied, found no accent bias, which they suggest reflects its context, not lawyers lacking bias.
Their stated limits: a general-public sample rather than an actual hiring context; a restricted range of accents, one profession and entry-level recruitment only; England only. The speakers were all young men, by design. The paper concerns hiring, not psychological safety; the bridge is ours. We read it as one reason the risk of speaking up is not the same for everyone: the same words can be judged less hirable in some accents by some listeners, and what the listener attends to can blunt that. Read from the accepted manuscript.
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