Bias against ethnolinguistic accents in evaluations of interview responses

Guest talk (online)

Dr. Samantha Jackson (University of Toronto, Canada)

<p>Canada’s immigration strategy of late has focused on recruiting highly skilled, highly educated economic immigrants with the expectation that such candidates will be successful on the job market. However, despite policy changes, a wage gap between immigrants and their Canadian-born counterparts persists. While language proficiency is associated with higher income among immigrants, it cannot predict the incidence of securing employment (Xu & Hou, 2023). <br /> In this talk, I will discuss a verbal guise experiment which investigated towards scripted interview responses recorded by women from Canada, China, England, Germany, India, Jamaica, and Nigeria, and evaluated by 96 human resources students from 9 post-secondary institutions in southern Ontario, Canada. Significant bias for the Canadian English accent was evident in the evaluations, even when listeners were asked to rate the content of the response. A thematic analysis of evaluators’ comments revealed that they saw the Canadian English accent as aesthetically pleasing, while they associated four of the non-Canadian accents with reduced comprehensibility. Positioning the job interview as a gatekeeping encounter (Erickson, 1976; Roberts &Campbell, 2006), I discuss how these potential future recruiters demonstrate a desire for linguistic assimilation which stands in opposition to the multicultural identity of Canada. </p><p> Join Zoom Meeting: <br />https://uni-ms.zoom-x.de/j/65446589067?pwd=DNpoAousbfmNbnapMn5Cv8agFo0LNu.1<br /> Meeting ID: 654 4658 9067<br /> Passcode: 644541