The regional accentism that secretly affects job prospects

Judgements around regional accents can impact candidates’ hireability and pay. Is there a way to end this discrimination?

At age 22, Gav Murphy was fairly green. He was living outside Wales for the first time, working in his first job in media production in London. His South Wales Valleys accent was very thick, he recalls. He’d say ‘tha’ rather than ‘that’, for instance. But he was perfectly intelligible.

Yet a senior colleague overseeing his work insisted Murphy change his accent so all the broadcasters sounded uniform on air. “You can’t sound like this,” Murphy says the older Englishman told him. “You’ll find it easier to do this if you just change your accent in real life.”

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