Assessing language-based discrimination in Australia: The effect of speaker accent in employability judgements

Though less often reported on than discrimination based on race or religion, linguistic discrimination has been robustly demonstrated in perception work showing that second language speakers are perceived to be less employable than standard-accented speakers. To better understand this in the Australian context, we ran a perception experiment in which 153 listeners rated speakers’ employability on three 5-point Likert scales. The audio stimuli were extracted from sociolinguistic interviews with speakers of Australian English from five groups: first language speakers of English from Anglo, Cantonese, and Lebanese backgrounds, and first language speakers of Mandarin and Russian. We found that, first, while linguistic background had no effect for male speakers, it did for female speakers, with Anglo women rated the most employable and Russian-speaking women the least employable. Second, listener gender had no effect for first language speakers, but both Mandarin and Russian speakers were rated comparatively higher by women than men. And third, an interaction between speaker gender and listener gender showed that only female listeners rated female speakers comparatively higher than male speakers. Listeners are thus attuned not only to accent, but also to demographic factors, highlighting the need for consideration of social characteristics in potential accent bias, in particular, gender.