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Study shows class bias in hiring based on few seconds of speech

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Re: Study shows class bias in hiring based on few seconds of speech

#11

Post by fighterpilot »

vmception wrote: post #3

I think US-bias is more so class bias than race bias and this comes with a 99% correlation to racial discrimination due to the half millenium of directly ensuring certain races could not access the economy or capital or literacy. Racial discrimination also occurs. A lot of support for racial equality is lost because it is too reductive and invalidates the experience of potential allies in the majority power who exper…

99 percent correlation is too high and contradicts the spirit of the statement that it's more class bias than race bias. If the correlation is 99 percent then they're nearly completely identical

Re: Study shows class bias in hiring based on few seconds of speech

#12

Post by vmception »

fighterpilot wrote: post #11
vmception wrote: post #3

I think US-bias is more so class bias than race bias and this comes with a 99% correlation to racial discrimination due to the half millenium of directly ensuring certain races could not access the economy or capital or literacy. Racial discrimination also occurs. A lot of support for racial equality is lost because it is too reductive and invalidates the experience of potential allies in the majority power who exper…

99 percent correlation is too high and contradicts the spirit of the statement that it's more class bias than race bias. If the correlation is 99 percent then they're nearly completely identical

the point is how to address it and gain support from people that don't experience it but have the power to change it

if we tell everyone they have problems with skin tones and phenotypes when really their primary unconscious bias is being pretentious, then we need to adjust the messaging and address it more accurately

Re: Study shows class bias in hiring based on few seconds of speech

#13

Post by heterodoxxed »

vmception wrote: post #3

I think US-bias is more so class bias than race bias and this comes with a 99% correlation to racial discrimination due to the half millenium of directly ensuring certain races could not access the economy or capital or literacy. Racial discrimination also occurs. A lot of support for racial equality is lost because it is too reductive and invalidates the experience of potential allies in the majority power who exper…

The two are so incredibly intertwined given our history that it's hard to separate them. While I think talking about race without talking about class is a huge mistake, it's also a mistake to think that class in a way that doesn't take race into consideration.

For instance, AAVE is seen as "low class" despite there being plenty of speakers of it who are not lower class at all.

The kind of racial reductionism we've seen come from (often well-to-do) liberal circles that presents being white (or not Black) no matter the class background as a walk in the park is a dead end of course, but we have to be careful to recognize that there are a number of structural racial problems that don't always have a targeted class character (unless you get to the very upper echelons of wealth).

That said, the popular discourse in America is woefully under-prepared to understand class divisions between and within racial groups. That lack of nuanced discussion is why we end up favoring an understanding that is fully rooted in upper-middle-class experiences and study.

A Black writer who grew up poor, went to a city college and still lives in their neighborhood will never get an op-ed position at the New York Times no matter how good of a writer they are, so their experience gets completely lost in the mainstream, despite being so important to understanding class and race in America.

Re: Study shows class bias in hiring based on few seconds of speech

#14

Post by fallingfrog »

Clubber wrote: post #4

It would be nice to get a transcript so we could identify what speech was declared to be lower socioeconomic speech. It's important to be able to speak and write proper English for a job interview, even though most speak in an informal English most of the time.

Erasing your regional accent probably goes a long way. I have a pretty strong Maine accent and it’s hard to suppress.

I don’t think I could fake a true bourgeoisie affect though, partly because I find it so repulsive. But also I think you have to have had grown adults as your personal servants as I a child to really nail that sort of bored/unconcerned affect. Where you truly consider certain people to be beneath you. They see you as an NPC. I’ve seen it, a handful of times.

I guess there’s a professional class in between too where the attitude is in between, you treat people with a friendliness that doesn’t seem superior, but also is guiltless and free of guile, lacking in any suspiciousness which speaks of a person who has never truly been hungry and not had food, or has considered breaking the law as their best option, or lived in an area where there was a lot of crime.

I don’t know why all that comes out in your speech but it does. Truly lower class people are reserved- they don’t volunteer information, because they don’t trust you. Upper class people don’t either, because they don’t have to care what you think, and they don’t consider you an equal. In between, people tend to be more talkative.

Re: Study shows class bias in hiring based on few seconds of speech

#15

Post by twic »

vmception wrote: post #3

I think US-bias is more so class bias than race bias and this comes with a 99% correlation to racial discrimination due to the half millenium of directly ensuring certain races could not access the economy or capital or literacy. Racial discrimination also occurs. A lot of support for racial equality is lost because it is too reductive and invalidates the experience of potential allies in the majority power who exper…

> A lot of support for racial equality is lost because it is too reductive and invalidates the experience of potential allies in the majority

There was a study on that recently:

https://osf.io/tdkf3/

Re: Study shows class bias in hiring based on few seconds of speech

#16

Post by jpxw »

> the hiring managers judged the candidates from higher social classes as more likely to be competent for the job, and a better fit for it than the applicants from lower social classes.

What if applicants from higher social classes actually are better fits for the job?

Re: Study shows class bias in hiring based on few seconds of speech

#17

Post by devonkim »

bitwize wrote: post #9
Clubber wrote: post #4

It would be nice to get a transcript so we could identify what speech was declared to be lower socioeconomic speech. It's important to be able to speak and write proper English for a job interview, even though most speak in an informal English most of the time.

This doesn't take into account things like accent, which does count. Many people native to the Boston area looking to get high-paying jobs (esp. in tech) work on breaking their Boston accents to sound higher class.

This is probably also true in the UK that has class lines often built around geography and therefore accents. In the US people with southern accents are viewed by many others as having a lower socioeconomic status. Things get more interesting when the history of the modern Boston accent comes from popular British speech trends hundreds of years ago and co-opted by the aristocrats of Boston, so what is an oftentimes low-caste Boston accent today was meant to be a high-caste accent around 1800.

The ridiculousness of it all is staggering

Re: Study shows class bias in hiring based on few seconds of speech

#18

Post by fighterpilot »

howeyc wrote: post #7

I've always wondered with things like this, could it be possible to make all interaction "text-based" until final stage? Specifically for hiring: What if applicants submitted resumes, but the name and school they attended are replaced with numbers. Then throughout the interview process all interactions were text-based and they were addressed by this number. Then offer/acceptance is based on merit (hopefully) and not…

I like that but race and gender blind admissions will lead to a huge number of East Asian males which won't be tolerated.

Re: Study shows class bias in hiring based on few seconds of speech

#19

Post by cauliflower2718 »

howeyc wrote: post #7

I've always wondered with things like this, could it be possible to make all interaction "text-based" until final stage? Specifically for hiring: What if applicants submitted resumes, but the name and school they attended are replaced with numbers. Then throughout the interview process all interactions were text-based and they were addressed by this number. Then offer/acceptance is based on merit (hopefully) and not…

I wonder if there are socioeconomic indicators in writing style, too. I wouldn't be surprised if there were, even if we consider only text in which grammar and spelling are correct. (As a small example, there are ways to sound more or less like a mathematician, even when writing about topics unrelated to math.)

Re: Study shows class bias in hiring based on few seconds of speech

#20

Post by intergalplan »

bitwize wrote: post #9
Clubber wrote: post #4

It would be nice to get a transcript so we could identify what speech was declared to be lower socioeconomic speech. It's important to be able to speak and write proper English for a job interview, even though most speak in an informal English most of the time.

This doesn't take into account things like accent, which does count. Many people native to the Boston area looking to get high-paying jobs (esp. in tech) work on breaking their Boston accents to sound higher class.

Practically all US regional accents, especially if thick, register as "lower" than Standard American English spoken with a generic or newscaster accent.
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