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Southern accents could cost job seekers a 20% wage penalty, study finds
- erehweb 3y agoThe study https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w26719/w26719.pdf https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w26719/w267...
- Freedom2 3y agoThe article reports (emphasis mine): > A _new_ study Yet this study appears to be from 2020. Is this the correct study?
- helloworld 3y agoAnd it's not about Southern accents: Previous work has documented that speaking one’s native language with an accent distinct from the mainstream is associated with lower wages. In this study, we seek to estimate the causal effect of speaking with a distinctive regional accent, disentangling the effect of the accent from that of omitted variables. We collected data on workers’ speech in Germany, a country with wide variation in regional dialects. We use a variety of strategies in estimation, including an instrumental variables strategy in which the instruments are based on research findings from the linguistics of accent acquisition. All of our estimators show that speaking with a distinctive regional accent reduces wages by an amount that is comparable to the gender wage gap. We also find that workers with distinctive regional accents tend to sort away from occupations that demand high levels of face-to-face contact, consistent with various occupational sorting models.
- refurb 3y agoOriginal title is "THE WAGE PENALTY OF REGIONAL ACCENTS".
- zimpenfish 3y ago> And it's not about Southern accents: To be fair, they do make specific mention of (Germanic) "Southern states" which you could imagine that someone at a less reputable news outlet like Fox might gloss over in order to spin some bullshit. "The Southern states have the highest share of speakers with distinct accent. The interaction term is positive, hinting at a lower penalty for Southern dialects. (which, if I'm reading correctly, suggests that "Southern accents" actually hurt you less - at least in Germany?) Also not reviewed but that seems an irrelevant nit compared with "it's talking about an entirely different country". "[NBER working papers] have not been peer-reviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications."
- Jedd 3y agoIn the UK the direction is inverted - Northern accents tend to be discriminated against, some people opt to try to maintain southern counties or city accents. https://www.theguardian.com/careers/accent-hinder-job-prospects https://www.theguardian.com/careers/accent-hinder-job-prospe... (Was David Tennant's Doctor Who an example of this bias? ; ) I'd guess there's a lot more variation in British accents, despite being such a tiny landmass. Here in Australia I struggle to pick regional accents - sure, there's a lot fewer of us, but the geographical spread is much larger, and I'd presumed that would be a stronger factor for dialect drift.
- EdwardDiego 3y agoLikewise in NZ, we only have one very distinctive accent, the Southland one that likes to roll the Rs. But as a Mainlander (i.e., the South Island), I can often pick when someone is from Auckland, as there's more of a Polynesian influence on their vowels. (Auckland is sometimes to referred to as the unofficial capital of Tonga/Samoa as the populations of both peoples in Auckland exceeds that in their countries). In contrast, when I visited family in Rugby, UK, my uncle would amuse people at parties by parodying the (many!) varying accents found along the 55km trip from Rugby to Birmingham. I suppose it's the difference that several centuries of history makes.
- ghaff 3y ago>I'd guess there's a lot more variation in British accents, despite being such a tiny landmass. That was the whole point of Pygmalion of course.
- weinzierl 3y agoDid you mean Christopher Eccleston? As an ESL learner I found the ninth doctor hard to understand sometimes but had no troubles with the tenth. I think David Tennant hides his Scottish accent pretty well, but again I'm not a native speaker. Christopher Eccleston on the other hand claimed himself, that his northern accent had held him back. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-43139805.amp https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-43139805.amp
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- Xcelerate 3y agoI grew up mostly in the southeastern U.S. and have a very slight accent, to the extent that only someone else who grew up in Appalachia would likely notice. This article made me pause for a second, because of all the dozens of different accents from around the world I heard while working at a FANG company, I cannot recall one other person having a southern accent (I'm sure there were others — I just never ran into them). My wife has a much more pronounced southern accent than I do, and I remember that on the occasions when she would visit the campus to have lunch with me, a lot of heads would turn to see who was speaking. I kind of doubt this was due to any negative connotation with southern accents though — I think it was just unusual to hear one there.
- ghaff 3y agoI work for a company that has HQ (though not engineering/product) in the Southeast. So lot of calls with fairly mild educated/urban southern accents. Not something anyone really notices. You get into rural southern accents, especially things like Cajun dialects, and it becomes more pronounced.
- uncletaco 3y agoSounds like Shipt
- dalke 3y agoAt college in Tallahassee my friends would have a stronger accent when talking on the phone to family than talking to friends, even at a Southern college. This is either part of, or related to, "code-switching". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code-switching https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code-switching . That could be the case at your FANG company, for one or multiple of the reasons given.
- SOLAR_FIELDS 3y agoI’m from Texas but you would never know it in normal conversation. But it will come out when speaking with relatives. It’s like a dial that you can turn up and down at will, but my normal state is to have it turned off entirely. Except for y’all. That one gets used at work
- amanaplanacanal 3y agoI haven't read the study, but it wouldn't surprise me if this were true. People are biased by default, and some accents are valued more highly than others. I fight against my own biases every day.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- aaron695 3y ago[dead]
- sigstoat 3y agopeople are nuts about southern accents: i had a manager (not my manager but one of his peers) actively mocking me for having a southern accent after finding i’d grown up in the south. weird thing, though, my accent (since everyone has one) matches the area i live perfectly, which isn’t much of a surprise since my parents grew up here before moving to the south.
- zerbinxx 3y agoFor a lot of Americans, unfortunately, the biggest exposure one gets to Southern Accents is from the fake, “dumb on purpose” caricature that defines country music stars and Larry The Cable Guy. I’m from Montana, and know several born-and-raised Montanans (and Oregonians, Washingtonians, even Californians) with completely inexplicable drawls (people decidedly not sharing any familial or otherwise relationship with the South) that lapse in and out of perceptibility based on circumstance. It wasn’t until I had a research advisor who was verifiably not a dullard that I even had an option to consider anything to the contrary of the base American conception that a Southern accents indicates stupidity, laziness, pig-headedness, etc. The death of the region accent really is a crying shame. Glad my folks still have their hokey Saskatchewanesque lilt.
- Obscurity4340 3y agoWhat does "saskatchewanesque" sound like, Corner Gas?
- zerbinxx 3y agoNot familiar with the reference but I would describe it as similar to the classic Midwest/Minnesota/Wisconsin “ohyooobetcha” parody, but more dour/deadpan in delivery, and almost with a lilt. People from Saskatchewan would say Saskatchuwun, “we are” becomes “were” exclusively, “you” becomes “yeh” (as opposed to classic Midwest “yuu” or “yah”). I’ve had people tell me, and noticed it in other children-of-Montanans, that it’s reminiscent of a Scottish/Irish manner of speaking, which makes sense as my great great grandad emigrated from Ireland to Butte in the 1800’s, as did many Irish people at the time.
- cjohnson318 3y agoI figure they can usually tell where you grew up by looking at your resume, so it doesn't really matter. To be fair, Black people have been fighting this battle a lot longer than white people that get out of the South; if you sound "too black" people low ball you and make sure you have zero visibility to customers or management. It's interesting that the article never mentions code-switching.
- steve76 3y ago[dead]
- it_citizen 3y agoMaybe we should start with that to explain intersectionality in southern states. :)
- wmf 3y agoI've been identifying as Redneck-American for years.
- eyelidlessness 3y agoThe bumpkins are way ahead of whatever you think you’re suggesting, despite whatever you’re unintentionally reinforcing about the stereotype.
- jquery 3y agoWhat do you mean by "way ahead"? I don't follow.
- eyelidlessness 3y agoThey are already having these conversations.
- irrational 3y agoFor many, a Southern accent immediately invokes thoughts of MAGA, gun fanatics, Republicans, Trump supporters, anti-science, racists, homophobes, fascists, xenophobes, misogynists, etc. There are so many negative stereotypes tied up with the Bible Belt that this study doesn’t surprise me at all.
- decremental 3y agoThe reason for that is liberals creating that stereotype in media you consume. It's not by accident or just the way things are. It's quite deliberate.
- stonogo 3y agoAh yes, the liberals who voted for Trump, passed anti-gun-control legistlation, vote Republican, push creationism into schools, judge people based on skin color, vote anti-gay-rights clauses into their state constitutions, gerrymander or limit polling stations to push urban areas out of representation, complain about immigrants, and vote for removing womens' agency in health care. Couldn't be the voters in the south, must be The Media. Speaking as someone who spent two thirds of his life in the south, you can turn off the TV and nothing changes. It sucks that someone would make all these assumptions based on someone's accent, but all of this negative press for the South is entirely earned.
- shjake 3y ago> Couldn't be the voters in the south, must be The Media. You do realize that in even even in the reddest southern state (Alabama) 35% of people did not vote for Trump? Also that if your diatribe was targeted at any other ethnic group or nationality it would almost invariably be perceived as racist by most?
- rightbyte 3y agoMoral standards does not apply to self righteous people. Since they are good people and only bad people do bad stuff.
- regpertom 3y agoCould be wrong but this was a bit in Silence of the lambs. Roughly that Clarice was hiding her southern accent to not invoke northernerns prejudices so she could advance her career?
- infinghxsg 3y ago[dead]
- markatto 3y agoI’m surprised that this doesn’t get talked about more - I’ve worked with plenty of women, minorities, and immigrants at large tech companies, but I can’t recall a single person with a southern accent.
- hifromLA 3y agoSame for me, but even more than that I can’t remember ever speaking to someone with a southern accent outside of work.
- pfannkuchen 3y agoNobody from the south would be caught dead in California? Mostly kidding.
- ok_dad 3y agoI recently worked with a guy from the south who had a wicked accent. I could understand him because I spent time in the military and one gets used to all kinds of accents, but no one else could understand him. He was pretty smart and I’m sure he will do fine, but his accent definitely got some mean comments. I told a few people to knock it off because he didn’t deserve them.
- junofan 3y agoTech is brutal. Even Tim Cook suppresses it.
- oblio 3y agoThe other obvious missing part is African Americans, especially for tech roles. I'd be shocked if more than 1% of SDEs at FAANG are African Americans. The biggest social elevator of the past few decades and they're completely cut off from it.
- nunez 3y agoDefinitely not "completely"
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- cat_plus_plus 3y agoNot surprising, Americans from outside coastal states are being walked over all the time and when they inevitably rebel are called despicable human beings. If there was genuine economic opportunity and cultural pluralism, there would be less immature culture wars from the other side as well. Has to start with making sure someone from or even in Alabama can also get a software job and drive a Tesla without having to change how they were brought up (in non pathological cases, there are always outliers that prove the rule)
- asveikau 3y agoA lot of coastal states speak with Southern accents.
- JumpCrisscross 3y agoLink to the study? Southern culture is more delineated at its class lines. I totally agree this costs folks at the lower rungs. But once you are stable, a Southern accent wins hearts and minds across the country and abroad. (Being able to preserve your idiosyncrasies through the ladder is a signal itself.)
- libraryatnight 3y agoSeems like it's this 2020 study https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w26719/w26719.pdf https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w26719/w267... (also found this blog https://news.uchicago.edu/story/how-your-speech-could-impact-your-salary https://news.uchicago.edu/story/how-your-speech-could-impact...) It seems odd they've kicked this up years later, but the recency is apparently due to some survey data https://www.wsbtv.com/news/local/study-claims-having-an-accent-can-cost-you-20-your-potential-salary/HB3EKJBWPRCEPMPYSHNX5TWDBY/ https://www.wsbtv.com/news/local/study-claims-having-an-acce...
- dmbche 3y agoIt's a somewhat common trope in TV and Cinema (Independance Day comes to mind, as well as any horror movie taking place near the south, The Hills Have Eyes and Texas Chainsaw Massacre for example) to give characters that are shown as stupid/misadapted a Southern accent.
- refurb 3y agoI'm sure that's probably true of Boston accents as well?
- opportune 3y agoWhere I’m from in the South, having a notably Southern accent is a tell that you grew up in a lower class family and area, and all that goes with it (like having less education). Obviously it doesn’t mean you’re stupid, but regarding education and workforce readiness (a lot of Southern communities have very low workforce participation rates, and almost no white collar jobs outside government) it’s a Bayes rule thing. So I would dispute the causation here - it’s not the accent itself that reduces wages, but being from a poorer family without much exposure to the corporate world that does. Though of course, even aspects of the mild accent I do have invite unwanted attention sometimes, so it’s no surprise people with much stronger accents would code switch and conceal it.
- viscanti 3y agoIt can be a Bayes rule thing where they're statistically less likely to participate in white collar work, but it could also be biases in companies who believe a candidate is less educated if they have a strong regional accent. The article suggests that some candidates attempt to hide their accents and have better luck with that.
- opportune 3y agoIt’s not just likelihood to participate in white collar work, at least IME having a stronger accent correlates with all sorts of behavior which makes you less able to navigate a typical US corporate environment. I’m thinking things like growing up in a family with no white collar workers (and thus not being exposed to the distinct social etiquette of the white collar workforce), having strong political and religious views that are at odds with the white collar norm, how you prioritize work vs family. And certainly education - you may get a degree but typically standards at <southern flagship university where people come from a typically more educated background> are different from <regional southern university>. Class distinctions in the South run deep
- akiselev 3y agoThat sounds more likely, especially given the stats later in the article: > Another recent study found that 38% of job seekers admitted to "softening" their regional accents during interviews because of negative stereotypes. > This study by the Writing Tips Institute found that applicants with a Southern accent were the fourth most likely to change their voice. People from Western New England, South Midland and New Jersey were the most likely to alter their accents. It just sounds like people with Southern accents and their guidance counselors haven't figured it out yet.
- austin-cheney 3y agoConsider the demographic differences. In the northeast it appears private education, wealth, family pedigree, and family connections are major deal makers in life generally. An aristocracy. That is not a cultural norm outside the northeast even when family wealth is present. This cultural distinction creates identifiable exclusion.
- stonogo 3y ago"Old money" is absolutely a thing in the south, as is "the good ol' boys" network. There are places in the south where not having the right surname constitutes an achievement ceiling all by itself.
- runsWphotons 3y agoMuch of the "old money" in the south is northerners. People who came after Civil War to open factories and textile mills.
- stonogo 3y agoI've never met an example of this. More common in my experience is plantations that either turned into country clubs or subdivisions.
- TrevorAustin 3y agoThe article says that the wage penalty applies to people with "strong regional accents," and that Southern is the fourth most likely accent for job seekers to try to suppress, with New Jersey being #1. Framing this as specifically Southern inverts the actual finding, and is just culture war chum.
- mbgerring 3y agoAnd of course this is what they led with, because it’s Fox News. Why is this on HN’s front page?
- edgyquant 3y agoBecause the title is accurate? It isn’t that New Jersey accents are the applicants who lose out the most it’s that those are the people who suppress it the most. That’s irrelevant to the title and is just an interesting fact pointed out by the article.
- 082349872349872 3y agoThe odd thing to me (as someone born [if not bred] in the south) is that I grew up with a bright distinction between "poor whites" and "white trash", but as far as I can tell now (safely on the other side of the Atlantic) the "culture war" —even on Fox' side— seems to be doing its best to conflate the two notions.
- hgdfhgfdhgdf 3y ago[flagged]
- Wolfenstein98k 3y agoThe study which found New Jersey at number 1 was a different study - one about self-censoring. The first study mentioned is the one that found the South most discriminated against.
- hgdfhgfdhgdf 3y agoNo it's not. The study compared accents from Southerners and standard accents and found Southerners made 20% less. This has nothing to do with New Jersey residents suppressing their accent.
- mellosouls 3y agoGerman, not US accents! Terrible article. I was suspicious about the lack of references. Note that the original research [1] (a working paper from three years ago) that these news items don't link to appears to be about German accents and dialects, at least wrt the headline 20% figure here. The recent study [2] also referred to is about American accents. It quotes the earlier paper (without reference or clarification it's a different country, which doesn't bode well for the quality of the research in the second paper), and the erroneous implication is presumably used without fact checking by the "journalists" involved in writing the OP here. [1] Summary https://www.nber.org/papers/w26719 https://www.nber.org/papers/w26719 Paper https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w26719/w26719.pdf https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w26719/w267... [2] https://writingtips.org/dialect-discrimination/ https://writingtips.org/dialect-discrimination/ ps. h/t @libraryatnight who posted the links earlier; I only just saw the comment. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36101672 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36101672
- roschdal 3y agoAmerica is accentist, ageist, sexist, racist, imperialist. God bless Amerika.
- joker_minmax 3y agoI'm southern, and regardless of what we're seeing in this article from the studies, and how people want to argue about it, I have anecdotally seen bias against the southern accent with my own eyes, as well as southerners generally. Especially from people who move to the south for the robust job market but then fail to understand that our culture is just as valid as where they came from. The effects of that go far beyond just wage bias.
- ThePowerOfFuet 3y agoCan we not post trash like Fox here on HN?
- fmajid 3y agoOn the flip side, the former Chief Privacy Officer at data broker Acxiom, a formidable lady who often had to testify under oath to Congress, would ham up her Arkansas accent and Southern belle demeanor because it would have a certain class of senators eating out of her hand.
- uptime 3y agoI should RTFNews but I bet they didn’t test for class. And did they test vernacular vs accent? Many times in a work situation it is alternate grammar and vocabulary rather than accent that is taken to be unprofessional. Did they track the difference in geo background of the employee and the wage-setter? Since this seems clickbaity I’ll guess the news piece wants to drum up an inter-regional anger when the offenders are probably intra-. Personally I love all regional accents. I am drawn to Chris Arnade’s lessons in Dignity, where he remarks that class can be tracked partially by willingness and opportunity to leave one’s hometown to pursue wealth. To my ear, having a regional accent tells me that a person managed to mitigate that and I think it is cool. I code-switched my very sharp Boston accent down when I got to college in the midwest. Two reasons. There are many accents and vernaculars from any single region including Appalachia that denote class. Mine let people know I came from a line of laborers, teamsters, mechanics. So, first reason: My accent infuriated a professor I had who came from New England but had a plummier more “Boston Brahmin” line. I know that cost me by the way he openly mocked me in class. I did not use vernacular in class - I did not use “wicked” as a positive adjective or anything like that. That was pure distain for my home - like he got mugged on the subway once by my cohort. The second reason was that a lot of my new friends were from Nebraska and Wisconsin and they actually could not understand what I was saying at times. It became something I would have to actively cultivate to keep as I repeated myself with more Rs and -ing suffixes to make myself understood. They loved the vernacular bit and actually had fondness for the accent but the force was strong. In the end I came out a little more like Arnade’s truth. I would go home and people could tell that something changed. Anyway I hope that bias. am be removed from wage-setting. Unions are good for that. Salary setting is different and I hope that bias can be overcome, and no matter the quality of TFA maybe the salary setters here can take it as a reminder.