Research indicates that organizations are not meritocratic. Senior executives of large firms weight ambiguous factors like “culture fit” as equally important as critical job skills when making promotion decisions. Criteria beyond the scope of knowledge, abilities, and performance are used in hiring decisions across firms, industries, and management teams. And, as a wealth of studies show, the result is better career outcomes for those already at the top of society’s social ladder.
Research: How Speech Patterns Lead to Hiring Bias
We infer people’s social class within seconds of hearing them speak.
March 13, 2020
Summary.
New research shows that not only are people able to quickly infer the social class of other people by listening to them speak, but also that seasoned interviewers’ opinions of job candidates can be affected by those assumptions; they judged those with “lower class” speech to be less competent. This is a sobering reminder of how our default organizational practices reproduce social inequality. The researchers suggest that instead of using AI to overcome this bias or encouraging people from poor backgrounds to change their accents, companies incentivize the hiring of people from diverse socioeconomic categories.