Accent bias and fair access in Britain 2017-2020

The accent bias project examines attitudes to major accents in England, changing attitudes across age groups, attitudes to new urban dialects, and explores how accent interferes with assessments of professional ability. Using a combination of insights from sociolinguistics, social psychology, and labour market economics, we explore accent bias in relation to a number of social and linguistic factors. The first component of our study examines current attitudes to accents in the UK amongst the British public. The second component of our study explores the effects of accent bias in professional contexts. We explore a number of different social and linguistic factors to assess whether accent bias plays a role in objective assessments of professional competence and ability.