How accent bias factors into workplace decisions

Nearly one in five workers worldwide (17%) believe they’ve not been selected for business trips due to their accent, according to an SAP Concur Global Business Travel Survey of 3,850 business travellers.

Many also think they’re denied the opportunities travel affords, such as forming meaningful connections with colleagues and building stronger relationships with clients.

Missing out on career-related opportunities due to accents is something that’s experienced in other areas of the workplace too, such as hiring, according to Jessica Spence, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Queensland - and organisations are missing out on talent as a result.

“Discrimination in hiring contexts is a really important topic,” she says, one of the authors of the 2022 study “Is your accent right for the job?.” “Our research suggests that how we speak plays a critical role for recruiters in deciding who to hire.”

Accents the only difference in candidates

Spence and her colleagues looked at studies that have been conducted on hiring decisions between two potential job candidates – 27 of them, covering 4,576 participants. The only thing that differed between the job candidates was the accent they spoke with.

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“They were coming to the table with completely matched skills and qualifications but one was speaking with a standard accent – or the accent that's considered standard to the region where they were applying for the job - and the other candidate was speaking with a non-standard accent,” she says.

“When two equally qualified candidates differ in accent, the one who speaks with a standard accent is typically hired for the job, rather than the applicant with the non-standard accent.”

It's sad people are facing these hurdles when trying to get into the workplace, even though they are completely matched with the other candidate in terms of skills and qualifications, says Spence.

“There are two broad arguments that have emerged to try and explain this. One is that non-standard accents might impede communication, and therefore, might make employees less effective in their job. The other is that people’s non-standard accents might signal otherness, and then those candidates are devalued as a result.”

Accent bias worse for women

Also alarming is that the research undertaken by Spence and her colleagues found accent bias is especially a problem for women. 

“When the candidates were female, we found a strong preference to hire the one who spoke with the standard accent over the non-standard accent.

“The candidate who spoke with a non-standard accent was significantly downgraded in hiring. But the question of why that’s the case is something that still needs to be investigated, and something I hope to continue researching.”

Spence says the findings suggested it's more complicated than it appears at just face value. “There seem to be other things influencing the way they're making their decisions.

“For example, someone having a non-standard accent, being a woman, and also potentially belonging to an ethnic minority or out group, appears to be subjected to stronger discrimination in hiring contexts, compared to voices that only signal a single marginalized identity, for example, having a non-standard accent alone.”

Organisations are missing out on a huge amount of expertise and talent as a result of this hiring bias, says Spence. Her advice to HR leaders is that more education is needed about how our judgments are influenced by the way people speak.

“Often, particularly with accents, I think our prejudices can fall under the radar,” she says.

“In particular, recruiters should be trained to be aware of the biases that might be influencing their decisions because simply telling people that stereotypes can be elicited based on accents does subsequently reduce the impact of that.

“We all speak with accents so it's something we should be aware of. And with globalization, we're going to keep moving around and having lovely diversity around us. It's something we really need to pay attention to and figure out how it can be reduced.”