 Welcome again everyone and thanks for joining us. My name is Joey Loftrand. I'm a British Academy postdoctoral fellow at SOAS University of London and currently hosting this series of webinars on behalf of the linguistics department. Our speaker today is Eris Levin and he is a professor of social linguistics at the University of Bern whose work focuses on how people produce and perceive socially meaningful patterns of variation in language. Eris was also previously professor of social linguistics at Queen Mary University of London so he's familiar with the London University scene and a neighbor of SOAS for many years. My first came across Eris's work when I was reading about the new laws in France regarding to linguistic discrimination and began wondering if any such laws existed in the UK and searching through these questions about dialects and discrimination. I came across the Accent, Bias and Burton project website and was quite curious about what was going on so I was really happy that Eris accepted to join us to present his work so I didn't have to do the reading. He could present it for us. Eris will present for about 30 to 40 minutes and then we'll use the remaining time in our hour together to take questions from participants. You can ask questions by writing them in the chat anytime during the presentation or if you'd like to ask the question yourself you can signal that by saying so in the chat or by using the hand raising function in Zoom. So with that introduction Eris thank you so much for joining us today, putting this presentation together and we look forward to hearing what you have to share with us. Thank you, thank you so much. Thank you for the invitation. It's really nice to be able to sort of be in London in a sense and be able to talk about this work. Yeah so as as Joey said I'm going to be talking about a project that I and some colleagues have been working on looking at accent bias and sort of attitudes to accent variation in in the UK and and I would very much like to to be able to link this to to what has recently happened in terms of legislation in France or what may be happening in other countries later and hopefully we can bring that up in the discussion so during what I'll be presenting to you it'll be focusing mainly on the project that we've been doing. So in in a very famous quote by by George Bernard Shaw that some of you will already know he says that the moment an Englishman opens his mouth another Englishman despises him and this quote we we think is a good testament of the extent to which British society is and has historically been incredibly socially stratified along a number of different dimensions but particularly in relation to to issues of social class and social positioning and we know that this stratification in terms of ideologies and systems of attitudes and beliefs has led also to longstanding patterns of inequality and professional hiring throughout the UK and even very recent research has attested to this these persistent patterns of inequality and professional hiring. We also know as as linguists and sociolinguists that accent itself is a key signal of social background and so it could itself be one of these things that's linked to these patterns of inequality that we find socially and specifically within employment context but the specific role of accent in perpetuating these kinds of unequal outcomes in in the UK today has been underexplored. So there have today been no large scale surveys of accent attitudes in the UK that are using odd that have used audio stimuli and certainly no recent ones there are a couple examples for example that you see here on the slide from from Howard Giles and Pollock's work but this was sort of around 50 years ago more recently a smaller scale studied by Haraga but nothing more recent looking at what are the attitudes that people have in the UK today and we also have very little understanding of how these attitudes vary by the different contexts in which we encounter language and speech so employment context versus more informal context and so on and so on and so it's precisely these kinds of gaps and these kinds of questions that we set out to investigate in the accent bias in Britain project. So this is a project that is still ongoing and it officially ends the funding at least ends later on this year in August of 2021. I was a collaboration between Queen Mary University of London where it's my former institution as well as the University of York and it involved colleagues in linguistics as well as in social psychology and in the law school because we decided to focus on on the sector of law as the professional context that we would be that we would be looking at and what we were trying to do in this project overall is to try and get a fairly deep understanding of what are contemporary attitudes to different dimensions of accent and accent bias throughout the UK and to do this among a variety of different publics sort of listener publics and as well as test different kinds of interventions and ways in which we can try and combat any bias that we find. What I'm going to be talking about today is really going to be focusing on the first three studies that are listed here so attitudes to accent labels so just concepts for accents if I give you an accent name such as Birmingham English what are the attitudes that that members of the UK general public have to that then attitudes to audio examples of these different accents once again amongst amongst the general public and then finally a similar study of reactions to audio stimuli but this time among a target listener population of recruiters in in the legal profession and the reason that we're interested in these three studies in particular is because of the ways in which we find and it's sort of a preview of what I'm going to be talking about is we find that patterns of bias become attenuated as we become progressively more contextualized and progressively more situated in particular uh interactional contexts and so I'll both be sort of presenting the overall results of what we found in in these three studies and then also trying to situate those within a broader theoretical understanding of what accents are how people or how they become generated in specific interactional moments and use that as a way to to start the discussion then about how we might want to go about combating the kinds of bias that that we are okay so let me start off by by jumping into the first study and again this is a study of attitudes to accent labels so just a particular concept related to an accent and here we're very much relying on and replicating work that was done by Bishop Koopland and other colleagues in in 2000 published in 2005 as well as earlier work that was done by Giles and colleagues and published in 1970 what we did is we recruited a nationally representative sample of the UK public so we worked with a market research firm to create a sample that would be representative in terms of regional distribution gender distribution ethnic distribution and age distribution throughout the UK so 187 respondents and what all 827 respondents and what all of these respondents were presented with were 38 labels for different accents of English and for each label they were simply asked to indicate how prestigious they thought this accent sounds and how pleasant they think this accent sounds and this is precisely the methodology that was used by Bishop and colleagues in the 2005 study and if we look at and compare our results to those of Bishop and colleagues so I'm listing it here as 2004 because that's actually when the data was collected and published in 2005 we find that at the top of the ranking so if we produce a ranking from 1 to 38 of all the accents at the top of the ranking we see a huge amount of stability between the findings from 2004 to the findings of 2019 and I should say here that I'm showing you the rankings for prestige I'm just going to be focusing on prestige because that's most directly linked to to the employment context that we're interested in so in 2019 as in 2004 when asked respondents essentially said that Queen's English was the most prestigious followed by a standard accent of English further down we have my own accent of English and then a variety of different national and or inner circle varieties of English so New Zealand English Edinburgh English Australian English and so on and so on and what's interesting here is how stable we think is interesting how stable this is between the two time points so this is what's happening at the top of the prestige hierarchy when we look at the bottom of the prestige hierarchy we find a very similar pattern of stability now it looks like there are a lot of downward trend lines here but actually that's because we were looking at 38 accents and Bishop and colleagues only looked at 34 so for example we split up when they had as one category of London we inserted Cockney and Essex and things like that so we mean that's slightly more articulated so again actually what we're finding is a great deal of stability and that when sitting at the bottom of this hierarchy is for example Birmingham coming in last place in our survey as it did in 2004 as well as a variety of other industrial accents in the UK so Newcastle, Glasgow, Liverpool and a variety of ethnic accents or accents that arise from migration patterns in the UK so African Caribbean and Indian for example so the overriding theme then that what we're finding in this first study again and this is just a study of people's overall ideologies about these accent concepts is that there is this very strong enduring hierarchy of prestige that I've shown you before from 2019 to 2004 but when we actually go even further back to the Giles study in 1969 we see a similar kind of stability across essentially a half century time span so in the original Giles study in 69 there were just 14 accents that were investigated and if we plot the results just for those 14 accents at these three different time points we can see that the ranking hasn't really changed at all so the 1969 ranking is in in gold the 2004 ranking in green and then our replication in 2019 is in blue and we see that once again highest ranked top ranked are these various national and inner circle varieties of of English and then we have industrial and ethnic varieties of English at the bottom the one change that we do identify is that the the sort of relative contrast between the accents in 2019 seem to be narrower than they were in earlier time points so the blue the slope of the blue line is somewhat flatter than it was in 1969 or 2004 so people aren't differentiating the accents quite as much but nevertheless we still see this overall hierarchy that is the same hierarchy that has been around for the past 50 years now just one additional thing that I wanted to signal about the results from the label study is that we found a very significant effect of age and this is similar also to what bishop and colleagues found in their 2004 study so a third of the accents that we tested showed a significant age difference with essentially listeners under the age of 45 rating all of the accents were highly than listeners over the age of 45 and cuckolded bishop in a discussion of their earlier findings from their 2004 study also found a similar pattern and indicated that this seems to indicate that young people are somewhat less embedded in the conservative ideology of positively evaluating standard accents and cuckolded bishop questioned that whether though they wondered if if the age effects that they were finding were indicative of some kind of attitudinal change could it be that you know the reason that we're seeing that younger people are rating these accents these these non-standard accents more highly is because attitudes are changing there was some skeptical of that and we are even more skeptical of that given that we've essentially replicated this pattern 15 years later so nearly a generation year later and we're finding the same kind of pattern and when we really dig into that pattern what we see is that there are differences in terms of which accents it is that that young people versus older people are ranking more highly than others and realize that there's a lot of information on this plot so let me just walk you through the bullet points essentially younger respondents are giving higher ratings to foreign and ethnic accents so those are the lines in green and working class and industrial accents those are the lines in blue then older respondents are whereas in contrast older respondents give higher ratings to UK national and traditional rural accents so things like Edinburgh Scottish and West Country and again this parallels what what Bishop and colleagues found in their 2004 data and this is what really makes us think that what's happening here is not actually real-time attitudinal change instead it appears to be more like age grading and we really see this as a pattern of emerging normativity in midlife it seems that indeed like Brooklyn and Bishop say young people are somewhat less invested or less embedded or less integrated into these sort of conservative linguistic standards and linguistic norms but as we age perhaps as we become socialized in professional work spaces and other kinds of things we seem to become more normative and and begin rating non-standard varieties particularly foreign and working foreign ethnic and working class varieties more more negatively so those are the major findings of the label study and give us a basic idea of what is the sort of ideological landscape of language attitudes in the UK today just a few further observations about this I'm not going to go through these additional factors in detail but some other things that Bishop and colleagues also looked at and that we considered in our data set we have some evidence of loyalty effects so we see some in-group loyalty again in relation to these accent concepts so respondents in Scotland and in the west country and in Wales showed some evidence of preferring their accent over others so an in-group kind of loyalty we also found an out-group bias effect particularly among Scottish respondents who tended to dislike English accents in particularly much more than than various Scottish accents but then we also found some self-directed bias so respondents in Inswansi and Belfast and in the Black country all downgraded accents even though those were their own accents as well or reported to be their own accents as well we found an effect of stance towards diversity so people who had a more positive stance towards diversity generally and linguistic diversity in particular based rated all of the accent concepts more highly interestingly we found no real gender effect in our data and this was a very strong effect in the Bishop et al study from 2004 where previously women were shown to be rating all of the accent concepts more highly than men we didn't have any significant gender effects so it's interesting to think about what that might mean if anything and we didn't examine ethnicity because we were really focused on just replicating the Bishop et al study and they hadn't looked at ethnicity but we do know that Black listeners gave the highest ratings to the various accent concepts whereas white listeners gave or I should say respondents as opposed to listeners white respondents gave the lowest ratings overall okay so that's the overview of what's happening in terms of the label study and the name moral there is that we're seeing this this very stable long-standing hierarchy of prestige that puts sort of standard and inner circle varieties of English at the top of the hierarchy an industrial ethnic and working class varieties at the bottom of the hierarchy but as Bishop et al say we know that conceptual accent evaluations so just being asked what do you think of burping in English for example potentially taxing doing deeply conservative ideologies of language and may obscure more subtle social psychological shifts over time as well as specific contextual effects so in the next study that I'm going to be talking about we wanted to investigate whether such accent preferences are equally evident when we're looking at audio stimuli and in relation to an actual person so when your respondents are hearing an actual voice and within a specific situated content so in order to investigate this in the second study which I'll be calling the attitudes to voices study we conducted a verbal guys experiment once again with a representative sample of the population in the UK I'm only going to be showing you results from the representative population of England today so it's just under 850 respondents and what all of these respondents were doing was they were evaluating the performance of mock interview candidates and they were told that these what they were going to be hearing were candidates for a trainee solicitor position at a major corporate law firm in the UK so a trainee solicitor position is sort of entry level in a law firm they've all qualified to be solicitors and now they're moving in for their first job the candidates were all young men who were native speakers of five accents of English and there were two speakers per accent so we were testing speakers of received pronunciation the national standard estuary English sort of contemporary non-standard variety that's associated with the home counties and the southeast of England multicultural London English also a contemporary non-standard variety but much more associated with inner London and in particularly with non-white and or multi-ethnic speakers general northern English as the middle class variety spoken in the north of England and then urban west Yorkshire English as a working class a white working class variety also spoken in the north of England and we chose these five different accents precisely to look at these kinds of contrasts in terms of region north south social class middle class working class and then within the southern working class between white and multi-ethnic current now the stimuli themselves that that listeners were hearing were audio responses to interview questions and we developed these interview questions with lawyers who were part of the advisory board of the project and so there were questions that would normally be asked in an interview for this kind of training solicitor position and some of the questions required the candidate to have legal expertise and we're going to be calling those expert questions and others were just more focused on general professional skills and I didn't test this I should have but let me see if I can play a very brief extract of this so this is RP I worked as a part-time shop manager this is estuary English I worked as a part-time shop manager this is multicultural London English I worked as a part-time shop manager this is general northern English I worked as a part-time shop manager and then this is urban west Yorkshire English I worked as a part-time shop manager okay I'm assuming you can hear that I can't see you or anything so I'm assuming that you can hear there's something in chat there's a lag in the replay could you please replay it sure I worked as a part-time shop manager yeah that's RP estuary I was a part-time shop manager okay Emily I worked as a part-time shop manager general northern English I worked as a part-time shop manager and urban west Yorkshire English I worked as a part-time shop manager okay what the listeners did so they heard these these stimuli that were these interview responses or responses to interview questions and they rated all of the 10 speakers each speaker responding to a different question oh it's my commentary overlaps with audio god sorry okay and then for each of them they were rated they were they were asked these these various questions about each response basically trying to get a sense of both the quality of the response itself a candidate's likelihood to succeed as a lawyer and whether this is somebody that you would personally like to work with in in testing initial testing of the responses we saw that they were all very highly correlated and loaded on to on to the same factor so the results that I'll show you will just be of a global sort of suitability for employment that is an average of these five different dimensions after rating the listeners after rating each of the speakers the listeners then provided information about their own social and linguistic backgrounds including the region that they grew up in their gender their age their class and information about their social networks as well as information about their beliefs about social mobility in the uk in particular whether they believe there is there are obstacles to social mobility for people from different class and regional backgrounds as well as their general motivation to control prejudicial reactions and I'll talk about what that means in a moment when I show you the results for that okay so just to start things off the first thing to note is that there we did not find in the voices study any overall effective accent so there is no main effective accent difference you see there's obviously it seems like there are slight differences in ratings here between for example rp and estuarine mission and e but those differences are not significant and the reason why these the simple main effective accent is not significant is because we have a very strong interaction between accent and age and essentially what we find is that for younger respondents and again the cutoff age here is right around 45 for respondents or listeners under the age of 45 there's no significant difference in how they rate the accents and how they judge candidates with these speaking with these different accents as the candidates become older above the age of 45 significant differences begin to emerge and what that difference is specifically is that candidates with who speak with an estuarine English or multicultural London English accent are significantly downgraded with respect to the other three so again with identical content that they're providing right so this was all very controlled in a very controlled experimental setup the content was identical the only thing different was the accents if a candidate is speaking with an estuarine English or multicultural London English accent they're being seen as less suitable judges less suitable for employment in a law firm by these older listeners by listeners over the age of 40 there are actually even more complicated effects and I realize that there's a lot going on in this slide so let me just walk you through this very briefly you'll remember that some of the responses required expert legal knowledge or expert knowledge about the legal profession while others were just more about general professional skills and what we've plotted here are the expert responses to expert questions are in gray and responses to the non-expert questions are in gold and you can see that there's a boost in ratings for all listeners when they're listening to a candidate giving an expert response so we do see an expertise boost which is good it seems that people are recognizing that that this person has the relevant kind of training and so that makes them seem more qualified for a particular job but this expertise boost interacts both with the age and the region of the listener and what we actually find is that for older listeners who are from the south and midlands even though there's an expertise boost overall we still see the significant downgrading of estuarine English and multicultural London English so estuarine both of them EE and MLE for older listeners in the south and just MLE for older listeners in the midlands so even though everybody's helped to a certain extent by by expertise expert content that doesn't fully overcome the bias effects for listeners older listeners in the south and midlands and the final the last pattern that I want to show you in this study is in relation to this this factor motivation to control the prejudice response now this is a psychological construct and it refers to the extent to which people don't want to seem prejudiced in their interactions with others so it's not a measure of the extent to which somebody actually holds prejudicial beliefs it's about how important it is for them to seem like they're not prejudice when interacting with others and a great deal of research in social psychology has argued that this is actually a better predictor of discriminatory behavior so here respondents with high MCPR scores are in gray those with low MCPR scores are in gold and what we see as as expected is that if you have a high MCPR it's important for you not to seem prejudiced then you're rating all of the speakers more highly and if you have a lower one you're rating all of the speakers more lowly or rating them lower but nevertheless once again among these older respondents in the south and the midlands we see that this is interacting with MCPR so for those of them for those listeners who have low MCPR so a low motivation to control the prejudicial response we see this downgrading of estuary English and to a lesser degree multicultural London English so MCPR here does seem to be able to overcome accident bias effects but those bias effects reappear for people who are not very committed to controlling their prejudicial responses so just to summarize the data from this story we see that there is once again a hierarchy of accent prestige as we saw in the in the label study but that that hierarchy of prestige is mitigated it seems when it's in the context of audio stimuli in a mock interview setting right so we see milder effects fewer differences among the accents than we did for the accent labels and less variability in the ratings we also see that accent evaluations are moderated by respondent age which once again we take to be indicative of age grading rather than societal change over time given the results that we had in the labels study and finally we see that the accent bias effects themselves are mitigated by expert content as well as by a listener's motivation to control the prejudice response so we are still finding bias but it's more nuanced and it is sort of amenable to greater mitigation than what we found in the labels so overall then we see the hearing real voices in a situation with real content consequences like an interview shows bias but to a reduced extent as compared to the accent label study and then our final question is are these milder biases found equally among professional recruiters and when we ask recruiters to focus on response quality and within a real workplace setting so to investigate this in the third workplace study we repeated the verbal guys experiment but this time with lawyers and legal recruiters and we did this by a fieldwork in commercial law firms in London Leeds and York so we actually went into the law firms and and ran the experiment with people whose job it is to to recruit candidates for training solicitor positions so what they were hearing once again was these these mock interview performances it was the same candidates with the same five accents but unlike in the voices study here all 10 questions required technical expertise so we didn't include any of the questions that were just about general professional skills and we did this because we also wanted to to see whether the quality of the response the actual quality of the content had an effect so we varied the quality of response we developed again with the lawyers on our advisory board we developed better and worse responses to to the interview questions these were all pretested and really showed that that this is a sort of an objectively better answer to this question than this one and we did this to avoid the possibility that that these you know people who have experience doing precisely this kind of work were not simply upvote non-standard accents for example and that they really had to focus on judging the quality of the answer that was given okay so what do we find well interestingly here you have the the good answers are in gray and the poor answers are in gold and we find no effect of accent so there's no statistically significant difference in overall ratings across the five accents instead the lawyers that we tested were very very good at simply identifying whether this was an objectively good response or a bad response and this is interesting because it seems to indicate that that within this context in the workplace these lawyer raiders are able to ignore irrelevant information and really just focus on the task at hand and we don't take this to indicate that lawyers are unbiased we don't think that's the case and actually if we look at lawyers within the nationwide voices survey so the survey I showed you before because we did have lawyers within that panel as well if I just go in and focus on the lawyers and other professionals in that first study or the other study that I was showing you they show precisely the same pattern as the rest of the nationwide sample population but when they're in a workplace and when they're asked to focus specifically on this quality manipulation any effects of accent bias disappeared and that's what we think is interesting in this final about workplace study so we see no evidence of bias among lawyers in the workplace instead we see the quality of responsibility as to be the only factor that determines the value of outcomes and we don't therefore conclude that lawyers have no bias but rather that these biases can be controlled and we think that they're controlled because these lawyers were presented with the task in a very situated context and while they were engaged in a particular kind of goal directed thing okay so if we try and summarize these three studies and put them all together we see that we started with the accent label study where we see the most differentiation across the different accents and the sort of strictest hierarchy the most rigid hierarchy of the accents when we move into the voices study we still have distinctions but they're fewer and milder but we're still finding bias against southern working class accents and then finally the workplace study no distinctions and it really seems that the respondents here are able to simply focus on objective quality differences and when we think of what's happening across these studies what is different and why wouldn't we be getting these different results really the move from the label study to the voices study is a process of contextualization so we've moved from these very decontextualized ideological constructs of birmingham english receive pronunciation and so on to hearing a voice in a particular kind of social context and that seems to have an attenuating effect on the overall structure of the of the bias patterns that we're finding and then when we move from voices to the workplace we're getting a sort of further contextualization we also have expert graders here so people bringing their expertise to to bear on the task and they have a very specific task that they need to be focusing on so in terms of putting this all together and thinking how can we make sense of this progression across the different studies we found it useful to think about this in relation to the theory of planned behavior which is a very well known social psychological model for thinking through how people make different kinds of behavioral decisions and the centerpiece of the theory of planned behavior is that the primary determinant of any behavioral outcome is first a behavioral intention so an intention to behave in a particular way and the behavioral intentions themselves are determined by three things attitudes toward a behavior the subjective norms that that exist in relation to that behavior and then an individual's own perceived ability to control that behavior and when we think about the label study to begin with there actually isn't a behavior here this is just what what what a social psychologist would call a general attitude it's decontextualized from any specific behavioral outcome and so it's not as sensitive to norms or control and really just reflects the ideological landscape of of accents in the UK but when we move to voices here we are linking to a specific behavior it's an action of hiring in the context of an interview and there's a target of the person the candidate speaking and so we've been anticipate that these these ideas of subjective norms and perceived behavioral control would play a larger role and hence we would find this more attenuated patterns of bias as we do and then finally when we move to the workplace workplace we have an even more direct link to behavior sharper norms for conduct among respondents who are actually very much in meshed within in that particular environment and also who have enhanced perceived control over their ability to to control any bias or discriminatory and so we think that the theory of plant behavior doesn't necessarily radically change the way that we're thinking of the relationship of the three studies but it's nice because it provides a sort of unified framework for us to think of this progression across different contexts and it also allows us to think of how can we go about designing and testing different kinds of anti-bias interventions I mean really both what the theory of plant behavior would predict and what we seem to be finding is that when you heighten someone's perceived behavioral control or when you make people aware of subjective norms of behavior they are then able to suppress their their biased beliefs and so hopefully lead to a less discriminatory outcome and sort of the moral then that we want to promote with this is that it's not necessarily about getting people to change their attitudes which lots of research has shown is a very difficult thing to do but rather getting them to change the behaviors that result from those attitudes or the behaviors that result that can be done by targeting subjective norms and perceived behavioral control and it's precisely in relation to this just to wrap up that I think the the law that was that is currently making its way through through the French parliamentary system so I believe it's now in the Senate having gone through the first reading in the Assembly and it's now in the Senate which essentially makes accent discrimination a crime I think that that has a benefit in that it it makes people aware of this as an issue it changes the subjective norms that that sit around the idea of accent discrimination and actually indicates to people that they can control this that they don't need to do it and so both in terms of our research and in terms of what the theory of plan behavior would predict it seems like this is a positive thing to do for for these reasons and I'd be very happy to talk about that in more detail but oh right I do was going to tell you briefly about I have no idea how long I've been talking I'll just wrap up quickly let me tell you briefly about the the interventions that we did actually test as well so we we tested a variety of different interventions these interventions were all based on proposals that have been made in the social psychology literature over the years about ways in which we can control or try to control discrimination in different sectors so one was simply raising awareness about the existence of a particular pattern of bias making people aware that this can happen another one was identifying irrelevant information so this is specifically written in the context of employment where before say an employment panel you have all the panelists sit down and decide what is relevant for the post what is not relevant to the post and make these very explicit statements you know I will not consider this list of irrelevant things a third intervention was getting people to commit explicitly again before before an employment task to being fair and objective and defining what fair and objective means another was increasing accountability so telling people that they would have to justify their their hiring decisions to say a superior and they would have to list the reasons for for all the decisions that they made and then finally a more general appeal to multiculturalism and diversity and again these are all things that have been proposed in the psychology literature as its potential anti-bias interventions so we tested all of these using a similar kind of tasks so people also listening to and rating the different candidates that that we use in our in our voices and workplace studies just some of them proceeded by this kind of intervention versus a control condition and what we found was that really the only intervention that had any kind of effect was raising awareness but it did have a very significant effect so we saw that simply mentioning that accent bias exists and that accent bias can lead to discriminatory outcomes resulted in many fewer differences across the different accents that were being rated so even the more nuanced differences that we identified in the in the voices study disappeared when when candidates were told about accent biases a potential problem beforehand and so again it does seem that this kind of raising awareness which again I would I believe that the French law is trying to target would be an effective potentially effective strategy thank you very much that's great thank you it's very clear very informative and interesting research please do feel free to put your questions in the chat now if you have something you'd like to ask yourself you can also use the raise hand function or just note in the chat that you'd like to unmute and ask a question while we wait for those questions to come in can I just ask if you know about what's happening in the legal context now and whether there is evidence of an accent bias in the hiring so are you know the lawyers you show do have this ability to turn that off but are they actually doing that currently or is there bias in hiring yeah no that's an excellent question so so yeah we were able to show sorry in these very in the sort of very controlled experimental context they can they can turn it off and they can just sort of focus on the task but all evidence both sort of within their own internal reporting and anecdotal evidence seems to show that no they're not necessarily turning that off in actual hiring processes so this hasn't really translated into the real world there are there is what I would assume I mean it's difficult to know whether it's specifically accent because nobody's actually tested this in in sort of real world situations but there are and there remain huge disparities in terms of who is is accessing employment in the legal profession and then there are also questions you know we talked to a lot of lawyers is as part of this project both informally and then we've also presented our results in a number of different law firms and we've had you know sort of testimonials from a lot of people who said too that you know you might be able to get your foot in the door so get hired as a trainee solicitor but then would you get promoted would you be able to also move up in in the sort of seniority within the firm that also then becomes a different question so I do think that accent bias is a very real issue even if you know we've shown that the lawyers can turn it off I don't think that necessarily means that they do do that in their everyday life yeah I guess that speaks also to this idea of raising awareness has a very temporary effect right it doesn't it doesn't actually change the attitudes long term well yeah that's another question I think that's something that's really open to to investigation so how long do these kinds of interventions last is this something that needs to happen say before every hiring panel do you need to remind people of these things I think there's some evidence that I mean so there have been studies that have shown that raising awareness of things like racial and ethnic discrimination or gender discrimination are no longer that effective and we wonder whether that's just because there's there's been a sort of saturation kind of effect where people are like yeah I know about this I'm not going to pay attention to it anymore we do wonder whether accent is sort of a novel thing that a lot of people don't think about and so might have might for that reason be be more effective at the moment but absolutely that the sort of persistent of persistence of that effect is is a very good question and an open question right let me turn to a question from Haroun Haroun asks about the French accent in English do you know why French accent in English has become one of the most positively evaluated varieties in the UK yeah no idea I have no idea where that came from and it was always positively evaluated before so even in the 2004 study I believe it was in ninth place and it's now moved up to third but yeah I don't really have a good response for why that why that might be I mean it is a strange exception because yeah it's largely anti foreign accent anti sort of non-seen as you know local British accent or usually has a negative bias so it's yeah yeah it's true I don't know maybe it's linked to even though I mean these these were nationwide I mean there has been a huge sort of wave of migration from France to to the UK I don't know if maybe since since 2004 but certainly I know that London is I mean would people say that London is that the third or fourth French city in terms of populations something like 400,000 French people living in London so it could potentially be linked to that but I'm really just speaking off the top of my head I don't have a good answer to that but it is okay I have a question in the chat from Marie I'll read it out for you the question is you showed an age effect in the responses for evaluating the pleasantness of the accents before 45 people favoring foreign accents versus above 45 favoring national accents you said that it could be the result of a change at midlife where people feel more connected to their national roots do you think it could also be the result of a stronger exposure to a wider range of foreign accents in the younger generations through social media or else that contributed to shape differently their acceptance of language variety would it be possible to test that maybe comparing age-related attitudes towards accents with earlier studies yeah no it's a really good question so I yeah I don't necessarily think that it's people feeling more connected to their national roots post 45 I think that the argument that that we're making is that it's more people becoming more normative so in a sense becoming more I guess this is linked to feeling connected to your national roots but being more invested and or socialized into what is the overall hierarchy of prestige that that exists in a particular place or in the UK and interestingly I mean it's a very interesting question is this sort of a change is this linked to exposure to things via social media and and other kinds of exposure and we don't think so because Koopland and Bishop and colleagues in their 2004 study found a very similar pattern so they also found that younger people were more open and favoring of both foreign and non-standard accents in 2004 whereas older people were more favoring of these sort of national standard varieties and then we're finding exactly the same thing 15 years later so really the people who were the young people in in Koopland and Bishop's study are now sitting on couldn't potentially be sitting on the in the older people group in our study and they seem to have changed so that's why we really think that this is an age grading as opposed to a pattern of change and there's actually a second question from who was asking a bit about the the social background of the listeners that you're looking at and I wonder if if you were say including listeners who are first-generation immigrants would you expect similar results that when they reach a certain age their attitudes start to shift and they have negative evaluations of certain ways of speaking? Yeah no that's a very interesting question so all of the listeners that we are testing here are people who listed themselves as I'm trying to remember how we phrase this in the question but they were all I think we said spoke a British variety of English as a native language was how we put it so that predominantly we do have all of this information about well where people were born where they lived in other languages that they speak but they all spoke a variety of British English as a native language and the majority of them were born in the UK and the majority of them were were monolingual in terms of other aspects of their social background we don't have well we do actually have all of their yeah we have their their sort of social class information we have information about race and ethnic distribution and things like that we didn't run all these and none of that ended up showing any significant effects so so people's own social class which we we were classifying in terms of parents occupation and income and and as well as ethnic differences we didn't find any differences in the listener population. I'll read a comment and a question from Nancy. Firstly I think your area is so interesting especially in the context of undergraduate student recruitment in Oxbridge I think that could be explored then a question was how many legal listeners did you have for the workplace exercise and how did you select them did any of them refuse to participate after you approached them yeah so in relation to the Oxbridge comment and just higher education in general absolutely and this is definitely an area that we would be interested in looking at we sort of we had to pick a sector to focus on and and we chose law for a variety of reasons but we had also considered finance we had thought about medicine and we had thought about higher education but I absolutely agree particularly when one sees the statistics about sort of school levers with with equal qualifications then you know and then you look at the proportions of who is actually getting into Oxbridge or not and when you know that one of the last stages when you know even if you have these these wonderful A level results and things like that then you have to go for interview so it seems to me that there might be a lot happening in that interview that that is then resulting in in these disparities that we see in in sort of the elite higher education institution so I absolutely think that that would be a very interesting place to work in terms of the legal listeners so that the lawyers in the and the professional the legal recruiters it was difficult to access them so in the end we only got 61 we'd originally been been aiming for about double that for 120 we worked with 12 different law firms and the firms were very open to the idea the way that we sort of got in was going via the recruitment departments within firms who were very invested in questions of diversity and inclusion and so there were lots of firms that wanted to work with us but then actually getting lawyers within firms to to participate in the study was much more difficult partially I think that's because they're they're they're very busy lawyers and so it's it's not easy for them and that's why we tried to make it as easy as possible so essentially our our research assistants would just sort of be sitting in the firm all day long and people could drop by and do the experiment whenever they had a chance but we only ended up having on 61 we never had anyone who refused to participate it was it was very voluntary they were sent messages by the the sort of administrators in the firm saying that we are here doing the study if people want to to participate they can do so but but it was difficult to to and then Julia made a comment that it would be interesting to include Polish accents as you consider that or other European accents or are there others that you considered but just couldn't include yeah so we decided for the voices in the workplace study to just focus on regional varieties sort of regional and social varieties of of British accents but it would definitely be very interesting to to also be then looking at various kinds of non-native varieties of English as well because there certainly are other patterns there you know we've been talking for example now we've been talking with colleagues in the medical school at Queen Mary about potentially also extending this kind of work into medical education and yeah sort of medical education and medical employment and they're including non-British varieties. If there's any more questions feel free to put that in the chat or raise your hand I will pass on one question I received from a master's student at SOAS who had a previous career as a lawyer and so I was curious about this aspect of the study and he was wondering if there was any effect of say like the like a marketing effect where lawyers are also aware that their clients will have these biases and they may want to hire people who you know put forward a certain image that looks good to client so even if you know you reduce the bias in the lawyers themselves they become aware of it might they still want to hire a certain kind of person to get a certain kind of client. Yeah absolutely and this is something that we talk to lawyers and law firms a lot about because it's something that a lot of lawyers brought up that they're you know they would be worried about client expectations but what's interesting there is that we actually think that there's a disconnect between what lawyers think clients want and what clients actually want because then when you look on the client side there are more and more sort of large companies that are now resigning firms that they don't feel are diverse enough or putting various kinds of diversity criteria on the firms that they contract so if we're going you know these are large firms like Unilever large companies if we're going to give you our business then you need to show that you meet these various diversity benchmarks so it's actually unclear to us whether this is an actual demand for clients or whether this is a sort of imagined demand that lawyers have but it certainly plays into the equation and we also had you know some some lawyers that we spoke would say things like yes I would hire a person with this accent no problem but I would never put them in front of a client so I would hire them and they could do back office work interesting I have a hand raised I do you want to go ahead and unmute yourself and ask your question yeah I think you're still muted yeah you're still muted hello yes I'm my apologies for that I remember reading some years ago about some research done by commercial companies who wanted to to establish what would be the most trustworthy voices for people to do radio or television commercials particularly radio commercials and finding sort of results are very different from some of the ones that you found in your studies I wondered if you'd done any sort of comparative work on that I remember that some irish accents were considered to be extremely trustworthy for certain types of commercial advertising or radio yeah no absolutely absolutely so yeah you just I think the general pattern is it's irish it's northern sort of the north of england accents that are that are considered very likable and trustworthy is these things and we did see those patterns in the label study when we were looking at the the pleasantness results that I didn't I didn't show here at all but we basically replicated that these kinds of patterns that have been reported thank you thank you great well I think all our questions have been answered there's also many people writing thank you in the chat for sharing thank you from me as well on behalf of so as for being willing to come and show your research we hope this will have some positive impact in the society as well and that's my recommendations will we get to make a difference and raise awareness where that's possible so thank you for joining us thank you thank you very much thank you everybody for coming all right thank you everyone