Accent Bias and Perceptions of Professional Competence in England
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Unequal outcomes in professional hiring for individuals from less privileged backgrounds have been widely reported in England. Although accent is one of the most salient signals of such a background, its role in unequal professional outcomes remains underexamined. This paper reports on a large-scale study of contemporary attitudes to accents in England. A large representative sample ( N = 848) of the population in England judged the interview performance and perceived hirability of “candidates” for a trainee solicitor position at a corporate law firm. Candidates were native speakers of one of five English accents stratified by region, ethnicity, and class. The results suggest persistent patterns of bias against certain accents in England, particularly Southern working-class varieties, though moderated by factors such as listener age, content of speech, and listeners’ psychological predispositions. We discuss the role that the observed bias may play in perpetuating social inequality in England and encourage further research on the relationship between accent and social mobility.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.146 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it