Gay men and lesbian women less likely to be employed in a leadership position | Hacker News Reader

Gay men and lesbian women less likely to be employed in a leadership position

exactlyscience.com

23 pointsupen18 comments

Help me understand this test that they did.

So, they have taken a group of homosexuals, without any history of leadership, and asked a group to rate how they would do as CEO based on voice only. The group answered based on sound alone that those individuals were not CEO material.

Well, I wouldn't pass as a CEO either and I don't have a, I quote, "‘gay- sounding’ voice".

The leaders I have know -- both male and female -- had huge charismatic voices. They had presence. They spoke in a room full of people and their voice would pick up. They would get attention right away.

How is the lack of this voice linked to discrimination against the gay community?

For this study to have any values in my eyes they would need to test actual CEOs. Actual people in leadership positions.

They took men and women who were both gay and straight and demonstrated a bias in expected leadership ability based on perceived sexual orientation. They are not comparing charisma, the voice selected where selected specifically to have a high likelyhood of being attributed as gay or straight.

Arguing that a difference in outcome from this is because CEOs all sound charismatic and that they are able to pick up attention of a crowd better when there is a demonstrated bias between the two when the difference involved is specifically whether a voice is perceived as gay or straight implies that gay speakers are less likely to have those characteristics. Which is exactly what the paper's conclusion is, a bias against people who are perceived as gay for leadership positions based on their voice.

    We investigated this issue in four studies (overall N = 276), conducted in Italian language, 
    in which heterosexual listeners were exposed to single-sentence voice samples of gay/lesbian 
    and heterosexual speakers. In all four studies, listeners were found to make gender-typical 
    inferences about traits and preferences of heterosexual speakers, but gender-atypical inferences 
    about those of gay or lesbian speakers. Behavioral intention measures showed that listeners 
    considered lesbian and gay speakers as less suitable for a leadership position, and male 
    (but not female) listeners took distance from gay speakers. Together, this research demonstrates 
    that having a gay/lesbian rather than heterosexual-sounding voice has tangible consequences for 
    stereotyping and discrimination.

I think the sexuality bit is getting shoehorned in here, though. I'd want to see evidence that the study used charismatic, "big" voices that were judged as both straight and gay and still show that there is a bias against those perceived as gay.

Not only that but especially for CEO, hiring decisions are not made in a vacuum like this. Were the participants given mock resumes and career history? In an actual hiring process, again especially for CEO, the folks on Board responsible almost certainly would be familiar with the candidates' previous work, and probably know them already.

Being familiar with the client introduces another area of potential bias, removing that allows us to compare the specific variable being tested for.

I'm not entirely sure why the big voices thing is important. It's not like they were saying all the voices had low favourability or that what were perceived as gay voices had low favourability, they were demonstrating a difference between the two groups based on that one variable. Whether they were all high up the rankings or all low down the rankings is irrelevant, you just need them to be all within the same band. It's the difference that is what is being tested for.

> So, they have taken a group of homosexuals, without any history of leadership, and asked a group to rate how they would do as CEO based on voice only. The group answered based on sound alone that those individuals were not CEO material.

Forgive me for asking this, but the article is currently unavailable due to 503.

Did they describe at all the group who did the rating and choosing?

I would think that if the goal was to identify whether or not homosexuals are barred from senior corporate leadership positions, they'd want to test groups of people who actually evaluate people for suitability in senior corporate leadership positions. As opposed to average people who only know CEOs from television, and thus could only evaluate whether someone fits the Hollywood stereotype of what a CEO is.

"Participants were recruited online through students’ contacts at a large Italian university. In Study 1a, the final sample consisted of 81 participants (37 males, Mage = 21.89 years, SD = 3.73). This sample was obtained after excluding participants who self-identified as non-heterosexuals (n = 9) or who had reported technical problems (n = 5) from the 95 participants who had completed the survey.

In Study 2a, participants were recruited through students’ contacts using a snowball procedure and provided with the link to an online survey. The final sample consisted of 63 participants (35 males and 28 females; Mage = 26.57 years, SD = 5.59). From the initial sample of 117 participants who had access to the survey, we excluded those who identified as non-heterosexual (n = 9), reported technical problems (n = 13), failed to complete the survey (n = 15), or did not correctly recall the job vacancy (n = 17).

In Study 2b, groups of students were tested simultaneously in the same room. Each participant individually completed an online survey using headphones. The final sample consisted of 92 participants (3 males and 89 females, Mage = 19.45 years, SD = 1.39). From the initial sample of 152 participants, we excluded those who identified as non-heterosexual (n = 8), reported technical problems (n = 15), or failed to correctly recall the job vacancy (n = 23)."

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-017-0962-0

Ok, so the study actually tells us nothing about whether actual gay people are being discriminated against in employment as corporate executives. Instead, it tells us whether millenial Italians who have never had to think about employing a corporate executive, think that random gay people off the street fit their perception of who would make a good CEO.

I guess if you were going to do a first-pass to even see if people could be discriminated against for "sounding gay" it wouldn't be so bad but extrapolating any further than that seems like a big stretch.

This was my problem with the article. The study is alright, it doesn't draw any extreme conclusion.

The article's title is horrible. "Gay men and lesbian women less likely to be employed in a leadership position" ... really?

> So, they have taken a group of homosexuals, without any history of leadership

I believe the study made up backgrounds of the "candidates" to suggest they were qualified for the job, it wasn't like they just brought in someone off the street and asked a bunch of people "would you hire them as CEO"

I would like to see this study replicated in different areas throughout the United States and the world. I suspect that different regions will produce different results based purely upon cultural norms of a given society in an area. To make the blanket statement that this is true is not acceptable to me.

"Studies show eggs are good for you"

Gay men are more likely to be shorter: http://blog.timesunion.com/kristi/2010/03/03/shorter-men-mor... Lesbians are more likely to be obese: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/federal-eye/wp/2014/09/0...

Whether you like it or not, both of those will be factors in influencing who gets put into leadership positions.

I wonder if there is study into biases around cultural interests too, e.g. if a male applies for a leadership position and lists "dance" as his primary hobby or interest, whether implicit cultural biases or assumptions play a role as well.

> Participants were not informed of the sexual orientation of the person but allowed to freely guess from the voice or face of the individual.

> ‘gay- sounding’ voice

Jesus, it's batshit-insane to me that people still think like this.

It's awful. I know plenty of straight guys who have a "gay-sounding" voice, and I'm gay but people tell me I sound "straight", which at least in my experience means this is all complete nonsense.

What they really mean is that if someone thinks you're gay or lesbian then you're likely to suffer from homophobic discrimination.

While a reminder of that is probably useful for the world at large, it's not new to anybody who identifies outside the straight cisgender categories. Or actually, anybody who is straight and cis who somebody has decided "looks gay".

> What they really mean is that if someone thinks you're gay or lesbian then you're likely to suffer from homophobic discrimination.

Discrimination is always based on characteristics as percieved by the one doing the discrimination.

I know right? People look for things that confirm their own biases ("X Y and Z are gay and they sound like this"). Oh, and I wasn't having a go at the study, even if it is a little ropey, just bewildered that people still think in that way. Like people thinking that if you're black you probably talk a certain way, or like certain music.

People are pretty accurate at judging 'gay faces': https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/bering-in-mind/somethin...

I'm sure voices are similar. I expect an AI would be able to distinguish without too many problems.

"For example, when shown only the eye region ("without brows and cropped to the outer canthi so that not even "crow's-feet" were visible"), perceivers were amazingly still able to accurately identify a man as being gay"

That's pretty mental.

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