Voice matters: Social categorization and stereotyping of speakers based on sexual orientation and nationality categories

Can agentic messages help? Linguistic strategies to counteract voice‐based sexual orientation discrimination

“…When examining voice‐based discrimination, we considered both the minority and majority's perspectives. Our findings replicated previous work (Fasoli et al., 2021; Fasoli, Dragojevic, & Rakić, 2023) showing that gay men who believe to sound gay also expect to be discriminated against but, for the first time, we showed this in the context of hiring decisions. We also replicated previous work (Fasoli & Hegarty, 2020) by showing that heterosexual individuals are likely to discriminate against gay‐sounding men applying for leadership positions as they perceive them as lacking agency.…”

“…Second, we only considered male speakers, but lesbian-sounding and trans speakers are also at risk of being discriminated against when applying for managerial roles (Fasoli, Frost, & Serdet, 2024;Fasoli & Hegarty, 2020). Future research should extend this work by considering other groups of speakers whose voices convey information concerning multiple stigmatized identities (Fasoli, Dragojevic, Rakić, & Johnson, 2023). Third, we only focused on male-dominated roles, which are usually advertised with more agentic words (Pietraszkiewicz et al, 2019).…”

“…This strategy can be used to avoid others' stereotyping and be perceived as more professional at work (McCluney et al., 2021), but it comes with costs (Dickens & Chavez, 2018). Indeed, for gay men, modulating their voices to sound straight can be associated with stress (Fasoli, Dragojevic, & Rakić, 2023; Fasoli, Hegarty, et al., 2024) as it involves ‘passing’ and concealing their identities, and therefore is something that should not be encouraged. However, in a job interview, it is not only how a person sounds but also what they say that would convince the employers to hire them.…”