You’re far less likely to get hired if you ‘sound gay,’ claims study
A new study in the Archives of Sexual Behaviour has found that employers are discriminating against men who “sound gay”.
Researchers discovered that males who had a voice that was considered to be feminine were at a notable disadvantage when it came to being hired or being promoted.
Interestingly, they found that this bias was only present in heterosexual men.
“The participants had minimal information about the candidates,” Dr Fabio Fasoli of the University of Surrey told Broadly. “Just a short audio file saying, ’Hello, I’m Mark, I’m 32 years old’. Then we’d manipulate the voice electronically, so that half sounded [stereotypically] straight, and half sounded gay.
“The participant didn’t know anything about the actual sexual orientation of the person, they were only exposed to a voice commonly perceived as gay or straight-sounding.
“We found that heterosexual men were less likely to choose the gay-sounding speaker over the straight one. It could be that they preferred to interact with the straight-sounding person, or that they wanted to avoid the gay-sounding one — the results can be interpreted both ways,” he added.
But why is this the case? According to the study, listeners found gay speakers “less suitable for a leadership position, and male (but not female) listeners took distance from gay speakers.”
Basically, the study confirmed suspicions that many heterosexual men still hold negative connotations of effeminate men. But there’s a glimmer of hope at least, with Fasoli adding: “Women didn’t show any preference for one or the other speaker.”
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