Accent bias at work and why your accent isn't the problem

I trained as a voice and accent coach at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, and I still get told on a fairly regular basis that the way I talk is wrong. So I can only imagine what it's like for the people who knock on my door every week, convinced their accent is holding their career back.

Accent bias at work is real (and it's not small)

People still love telling me this is all in our heads. It isn't.

The Sutton Trust found a quarter of UK professionals have been mocked or singled out for their accent at work, and for senior managers from working class backgrounds it's 29%.

This summer More in Common polled over 3,300 people across Britain. One in 10 said they feel anxious about their accent at work, and 13% said they'd changed the way they speak to sound more professional.

Isobel Lorna told the Telegraph that after moving to London she felt she had to "talk properly" to be taken seriously as a young woman in business. When I posted about her interview, it reached over 64,000 people.

The comments were full of the same story told a hundred different ways. One woman said she puts on her telephone voice in certain rooms. Someone else was turned down for a job because the company already had "enough" local accents.

"Speaking properly" is a listener bias

There's no such thing as a "proper" accent. There are accents a room is used to hearing, and accents it isn't. If someone decides you sound less clever because of your vowels, that's their bias, and it says nothing about how well you speak.

Take the glottal stop. That's when your vocal folds close to stop the sound and the air, so "butter" becomes "bu'er". It's everywhere in British speech, and people still love to "correct" it. Nothing about it makes you harder to understand. It just doesn't match some people's idea of what professional sounds like.

That's why I don't do accent reduction. I do accent confidence.

What's usually going on instead

A few weeks ago I had a call with a woman whose colleagues had told her they struggled to understand her. One of them called her accent "exotic". She'd come to me convinced she needed to change how she pronounced things.

Within about five minutes, I could hear that her pronunciation was fine.

What I could hear was her holding her breath. She was tensing before she'd even opened her mouth, so her voice came out muffled and slipped into vocal fry at the end of her sentences. That's what people were struggling to follow, and it had nothing to do with her vowels.

Once she could feel herself doing it, everything changed, and her accent stayed exactly as it was.

I see this all the time. When people feel judged for how they sound, their breath gets high and tight and they speed up to get it over with. Then they're harder to understand, which feels like proof that their accent was the problem all along. That tension is what I'm listening for in a Voice Audit, and it's usually what we work on first.

What accent confidence looks like

This isn't about sounding like you're in My Fair Lady. The work I do with clients is much more physical than that.

• Breathing low. A breath that drops into the belly instead of the chest gives the voice something to sit on.
• Releasing tension. The jaw and shoulders especially. A lot of what people call "unclear" speech is really held tension.
• Lengthening vowels. For a lot of people, especially those speaking English as a second language, the musicality matters far more than the pronunciation. Longer vowels slow you down and carry further.
• Speaking with intention. Knowing what you want the other person to understand, so you're speaking to them rather than at them.

None of that involves changing your accent.

The bit that's on the rest of us

I'll always help people feel more confident in how they sound. But I don't want anyone reading this to think the fix sits only with them.

If you manage people, notice when you're judging the accent rather than the idea. If someone "isn't coming across well", ask yourself whether you've listened properly, or whether you decided in the first ten seconds.

And if you've spent years softening your accent to get through the door, it's worth asking what it's costing you.

I'm Molly Parker, a voice and accent coach with an MA from the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama and a background coaching actors at RADA and LAMDA. I coach accent confidence, not accent reduction, for professionals in The Practice Rooms.

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