Fascinating new research by my University of Chicago colleague, Jeffrey Grogger, compares the wages of people who “sound black” when they talk to those who do not.
His main finding: blacks who “sound black” earn salaries that are 10 percent lower than blacks who do not “sound black,” even after controlling for measures of intelligence, experience in the work force, and other factors that influence how much people earn. (For what it is worth, whites who “sound black” earn 6 percent lower than other whites.)
How does Grogger know who “sounds black?” As part of a large longitudinal study called the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, follow-up validation interviews were conducted over the phone and recorded.
Grogger was able to take these phone interviews, purge them of any identifying information, and then ask people to try to identify the voices as to whether the speaker was black or white. The listeners were pretty good at distinguishing race through voices: 98 percent of the time they got the gender of the speaker right, 84 percent of white speakers were correctly identified as white, and 77 percent of black speakers were correctly identified as black.
Grogger asked multiple listeners to rate each voice and assigned the voice either to a distinctly white or black category (if the listeners all tended to agree on the race), or an indistinct category if there was disagreement.
Then he put this measure of whether a voice sounded black into a regression (the standard statistical tool that economists use for estimating things), and came up with the finding that blacks who “sound black” earn almost 10 percent less, even after taking into account other factors that could influence earnings. One piece of interesting good news is that blacks who do not “sound black” earn essentially the same as whites.
(It turns out you don’t want to sound southern, either. Although pretty imprecisely estimated, it is almost as bad for your wages to sound southern as it is to sound black, even controlling for whether you live in the south.)
So what does this all mean?
The first question to ask is whether the impact of speech on wages is a causal one. It is possible that there are many other characteristics that differ between blacks who do or do not “sound black” that Grogger cannot control for in his regressions. It does seem likely that the biases at work would make his estimate an upper bound. (Although it should also be noted that his estimates are for young people, and the importance of speech may become important with age, in which case his results might underestimate the long-run effects.)
If one believes Grogger’s effects are causal, then investing in the ability to not “sound black” looks to have a huge return — roughly of the same magnitude as getting one more year of schooling.
Of course, there is the issue of one’s identity. There may be personal costs associated with being black and not sounding black. But these costs would have to be pretty large. (When I have Asian Ph.D. students go on the job market in the United States, I tell them that I think there is rampant discrimination against non-English speakers and encourage them to adopt Americanized first names for the job market. Very few of my students choose to do so — either a testimony to the identity cost of pretending to be someone you aren’t, or possibly their lack of faith in my assessment of the amount of discrimination.)
I was talking with one of my colleagues about this study. He thinks it will be a very important and influential one.
My response, “Tru dat.”
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I can say from my experience that there are indeed benefits to not sounding “black.” As generalist as the notion sounds, I think it’s more based on classism than stereotyping or racism.
Obviously, people will connote a certain pattern of speech with a certain level of education, sophistication, and class. While the study focused primarily on sounding “black,” and Southern accents, I’m sure similar results would be achieved using only New York accents or heavy Midwestern drawls.
Those who think the issue might be schooling, that the sound of a voice reflects the amount of schooling, should read page 10 – 12 of the paper. They appear to be correct, at least with respect to sounding black.
Interesting discussion…I was reminded of the discomfort I had when I did a semester in Italy. I was less uncomfortable about not understanding Italian than I was at not being able to perceive anything about how Italians spoke Italian. I didn’t realize how much I relied on these cues to pick up information about people’s education, humor, etc… We can argue all day about whether or not you should rely on that, but I guess I do.
It was not made clear if the “black sound” was a measurement of accent, grammar or vocabulary. I suspect one using good grammar and vocabulary would make more salary regardless of accent. It’s just a reflection of educational attainment.
Doesn’t sound new to me. Sounds like the Communication Studies research from the 70s based on Urban Black Vernacular (the precursor name of ebonics). Researchers then found the same; people judge you on your communication skills and accent is one of several “communication flaws” that inhibit personal and professional development.
I’d suggest your colleague send a grad student through the pages of The Journal of Communication, Western Journal of Communication, Communication Monographs and a few others from that period. Might dig up some more references from previous research on the subject.
I think what a lot of people may be misinterpreting in this (and I would love to see evidence of this one way or another) is that sounding black, or southern for that matter, automatically means poor grammar. It is just as much about cadence, pitch and inflection as it is about the choice of words. Assuming there is a certain level of adequate grammar (and let’s be honest, MANY Americans have questionable grammar these days), I would be interested to see the impact of some of these less intellectually-driven qualities on the results.
As a Southerner transplanted up north–my name gives it away, I’m sure–I relish discussing thought-provoking philosophy, neuroscience, and astrophysics with the thickest Southern accent I can muster, just to watch well-heeled blue-blood elites grate their teeth at the contradiction.
I wonder if anyone involved in the study took a look at Great Britain as another example. They did a few studies in the past about how regional accents (where some accent differences are much more pronounced than contrasting accents in the US) affected people’s perception of class, earnings, etc. There’s a belief that certain regional accents are much more “wealthy” sounding than others, and they’re so obsessed with it, there is actually a lot out there to read on it. There are even accents for the especially wealthy or royal classes which have little to do with geography!
This might speak more to the class vs. race argument being waged above since racial composition is much more monolithic in GB (92% white)